"Normal Birth"

I've totally slacked on blog posts recently but you know...4 kids, full-time working mom, non-profit leader...blah, blah, blah.

I wanted to get down on "paper" some thoughts I've had about a recent Birth Story Telling experience.  It was surprisingly healing.

For context of this blog, it's important to know that my vba2c birth was much more traumatizing to me than it was healing.  It's hard for me to even write that because it makes me feel like a birth junkie scam artist.  I struggle with feelings of inadequacy and weakness and it makes me feel unqualified to offer birth support to others.  More importantly, it's left me with feelings of panic and dread leading up to this birth.  Also for context, I am the Chapter Leader of ICAN of Phoenix; an international non-profit organization that supports the emotional recovery of cesarean, advocates for evidence based birth practices, supports women planning vbacs and helps educate women on how to avoid unnecessary cesareans.  I help women trust their bodies and believe in their body's ability to birth.

I know that confidence is the first and best pain management option a woman can have going into birth.  I know this.  I tell other women this all the time.  I teach them and preach to them, "Have faith in your body!  You were made for this!"  I believe so strongly that women are powerful and meant to push babies out, but what I believe about everyone else and what I tell myself are different in this respect.

In the Birth Story telling session, the facilitator asks you to pick a piece of your birth story that you replay over and over in your mind and then you basically work to deconstruct the feelings behind that moment and put together a plan to splice that moment's negativity out of your "birth story" and replace it with something positive.

I was so reluctant and nervous to go this session.  I'm inherently not great at talking about feelings of vulnerability and I am not easily swayed by others trying to convince me something, especially about myself.  This is both a strength and a weakness.  Going into it I knew she was going to try and convince me that I was strong, but that she would be wrong.  I didn't want to be impolite so I literally practiced how I would appease her with things like, "Oh I feel so much better!" to let her off the hook when she couldn't penetrate that cement like barrier of my feelings.  Before we got started she asked me to close my eyes and do a "body scan".  I've done this before in yoga and pilates, it means just taking a moment to reflect on what your body feels like in that moment.  What hurts, what your breathing is like, etc.  All I felt was my heart pounding in nervousness. 

The moment that came to mind as one that repeats itself over and over in my mind, is the moment I got out of the tub and had my mega contraction.  It was 3 minutes and 42 seconds of terror.  It felt like every cell and muscle fiber in my body had tensed up and it was excruciating.  I couldn't call out for my husband, and I couldn't breathe.  It was that specific moment, just a second's decision where I decided I was afraid, not strong.  It set the tone for the rest of my birth.  I forgot everything that I studied and practiced for my birth experience.  I went into the mode of: "I am in physical danger, I am very scared and where is the path of least resistance to get me out of this."  I am so ashamed of that decision.

Some insightful moments from the birth session:
- She kept asking me what I "tell myself", and it's strange because I'm strangely positive and supportive in how I consciously speak to myself.  I work hard to undo the negative beliefs I have about the birth, but what I tell myself and what I believe about myself are different.  I am too strong even to get through to myself.

- She kept asking me to drill down to what I was feeling in that moment and it all came down to fear.  I was experiencing something out of my control, and totally unknown.  "Fear is a normal response in that situation." she told me.  I was honest and said, "I appreciate what you are trying to say to me, but I can't let myself off the hook.  I feel weak."

- She asked me to summarize my story into one thought/feeling and it was "I suck at labor."

- She asked how it impacted how I view myself, and I told her I felt unqualified to give birth/labor advice.  That when I have this next baby I've asked my husband to call on all of my strong natural birth friends to support me, and that I know I wouldn't be someone I would call in that situation.  I told her that I felt like I wasn't qualified enough in birth to be a support person in my own daughter's birth and how sad that was to me.

- She asked me what I was proud of and I said that I stopped them from making me push when I didn't feel "pushy" yet.  She said how impressive that was, especially for someone that says they felt "out of control" and "weak" in their labor.  She tried to convince me that it's really impressive for a laboring woman to put her foot down like that and refuse to push when she's not ready, and I told her for a second time "Thank you, but I can't believe that it's impressive because I still felt so weak afterwards."

- She told me to close my eyes and pretend that overnight, all of the negative thoughts and feelings I had about my birth were gone.  She asked me to say what my new thoughts/feelings would be about my labor and the first thing that came to my mind was to say, "That my labor was normal."

- I realized in the conversation after that, that I didn't want to be the best laborer ever, I was just frustrated/disappointed that I felt worse than everyone else.  If I can make myself believe that my labor experience was normal, I think it can start to shift my entire perception about the experience.  It was normal to feel afraid when I was in pain and things weren't going as expected.  It was normal for me to try and work through it in the capacity that I knew how to deal with stress: to shut down, trust only myself and try and get through it as easily as possible.  I am starting to feel just the slightest amount of acceptance and understanding.  It WAS normal.  Maybe not normal for what I knew at the time, but normal for the labor experience - especially for a first time pusher.

After the session, my "takeaways" are really to re-train my thought pattern to consider my birth experience as "normal" and to change how I planned for this birth knowing what I do now.  I'm also supposed to practice being vulnerable.  She said to practice telling a close friend when I feel a feeling that I would consider "weak" and to allow that friend to give their support and to truly accept it.  She says that will help me practice for during labor when I need to trust that someone else can protect me and keep me safe.

For this birth, I know better than to think my mind can ignore what's happening to my body.  I can't turn off the pain, I can't turn off the exhaustion or fear at the great task facing me during the moment.  I have to learn how to work with it and work through it.  Learning about optimal labor positions is great, but if I have already shut down mentally I won't be remembering things like that.  I have to go into this knowing that my mind isn't strong enough to protect me from the experience of birth, but it's strong enough to get me through it.

I'm feeling just the slightest movement towards confidence in my body.  I'm looking forward to the lesson that this birth will teach me, and I'm grateful for the lessons of my past birth.