I feel like after you’ve survived childbirth, you automatically become included in this secret mom club where you get to share every happy, gory detail of the entire ordeal. It’s been over seven years since I last gave birth and I still love to talk about my two amazing births. Everyone has a wonderfully unique or down-right frightening experience with labor and delivery. Your story should be celebrated and treated like the miracle it is.
I’ve even been in groups of people where the dads have started in. There is nothing more awkward and more reassuring than having another dad talk to you about postpartum care and breastfeeding. I have to give men so much credit for their efforts and appreciation of their wives during and after childbirth. I feel like there is hope for the human race after all.
There truly is an amnesiac effect after delivery because my first one was traumatic. If I had a clearer memory of what had actually happened, I probably would have had my tubes tied immediately. I never would have had my second child and I never would have experienced the type of perfect, easy delivery that I thought only Kate Middleton could manage.
My first child went a week overdue. The process was slow and agonizing. I grew heavier and heavier. Every pre-labor symptom took forever until finally in the middle of night I felt what I thought was my water breaking. We sped up to the hospital and ran inside the building.
“Don’t worry about security!” My husband calls out to me. “Get to triage, I’ll check us in!”
I rush past the security guard who starts yelling at me to stop.
“My water is breaking!” I yell back. “The pamphlet says…”
“I don’t care what the pamphlet says, you have to check in first!” He tells us.
I stand there, bleeding and gushing in the lobby while he checks us in. The big jerk! We make it up to triage and they quickly check me out.
“Your water isn’t broken.” They tell me. “That was just your bloody show.”
“I’m pretty sure that was my water. I read in the book that…”
The nurse just stares at me so I back down. They start me on oxytocin which I didn’t want but somehow they manage to talk me into. The nurse can’t get the IV in. My arms and veins are too tiny. She attempts to use a child’s IV sized catheter and another nurse stops her.
“Doctor so and so, doesn’t like us to use those. She needs an adult size.”
What on earth? If I need a child size IV catheter than give me a child sized IV catheter. I don’t care what the doctor wants! I need something that’s going to work! She tries again and fails.
Now, this is where my amazing superman of a husband comes in. I had asked him to advocate for me in case I was unable to. I’m lying there in pain, with fluids gushing out of me and a nurse who keeps shoving what feels like a blunt object into the crook of my elbow. My husband has brief flashbacks of boot camp, having medical personnel in training working on him and blowing out his veins.
His eyes grow wide and bulging as he watches the fluid backing up into my arm.
“Stop right now! The fluid is backing up into her arm!”
“It’s fine!” She snaps back.
“No, it isn’t! You’ve blown out every vein in her arm! Get someone else!”
She walks out and gets another nurse, who manages to insert the IV into my other arm. My injured arm is already turning yellow and I’m still fighting back tears. They wheel me to my room and I’m ready to get this show on the road. I’m tired of being pregnant and I’m so excited to meet our first born daughter, I’m practically busting at the seams.
Eighteen hours later, sweating, exhausted, vomiting, attempting to push out something that doesn’t seem humanly possible and I’m not even close to delivering. I’m developing tunnel vision while silently loathing every person in the room. To make matters complicated, the heavenly epidural that was supposed to wipe away my pain wasn’t done properly. I can feel everything on one half of my pelvis. One leg is completely dead. I can’t move it. It’s literally a dead floppy fish and I’m preparing for my battle in court because I know I’m paralyzed!
They start having me push and push and push. I push for over two hours and nothing is happening! My mom who is from the Lamaze era where woman need to be screaming at the top of their lungs while giving birth, has a pep talk with my husband. They both get on either side of me and start counting. My mom tells me to let it all out and makes this loud creepy grunting noise right in my face. My husband is calling out numbers to me. The room is full of tons of nurses and one very bored, smug looking doctor.
I hear counting, strange noises from my mom, a threat from the doctor that we may be looking at a c-section and then the numbers meld into a cadence of sorts. My husband’s counting and my mom’s grunting is starting to form a rhythm. I realize that he’s counting down to me like a drill sergeant.
“Would everyone shut-up!” I hiss! “Stop counting down to me like a drill sergeant and stop grunting in my face! I need quiet!”
“She needs quiet!” A nurse repeats to the entire room. An eerie silence settles over the room.
I take a deep breathe, trying to concentrate. “I’m not having a c-section! I’ll push the baby out!”
This is where my birthing experience gets primal. I feel deep within me from some unknown source that I have to get my baby out now. I bear down, I start pushing as hard as I possibly can. I stop caring whether I live or die. I feel my baby ripping me in two, splitting apart my vagina, tearing everything and I no longer care. She enters the world at last, perfect, beautiful, blinking and with strawberry blonde hair. I survived the delivery, but just barely. I had a healthy daughter which was all that mattered. My recovery process was extremely difficult and it took months before I felt even a fraction of how I felt before my pregnancy.
My second pregnancy started out easy and ended with a few complications. After the trauma of my first delivery and the difficult recovery process, I wasn’t excited about returning to the hospital. My husband and I even talked about skipping the hospital all together. We could probably just as easily deliver our baby at home. However, my complication left me unable to do that. We returned to the hospital with our heads hung down low, frightened and a little hostile towards the staff.
I ended up having a dream delivery. It was so easy, so complication and drama free. My second daughter popped right out with minimal pain. No tearing and no extreme exhaustion. Every good hormone that could possibly be released from my body was. I always thought it was absolutely insane, watching Kate Middleton stand before the cameras looking gorgeous hours after giving birth to the royal heir and here I was walking out of the hospital in less than twenty-four hours feeling like royalty.
I’m thankful for each of my deliveries. I can commiserate with those who have had difficult deliveries and painful recoveries. I can also laugh and marvel at the miracle of an easy delivery with those of us lucky enough to have experienced one. I hope everyone takes the time to write down their own birth story. Every story is special and horrifying and beautiful! Embrace them!
