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.
Showing posts with label vbac. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vbac. Show all posts
Monday, June 23, 2014
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Finding my Fight for a VBAC
I don't regret my c-sections. I never mourned a lost birth experience or felt like less of a woman because my babies were cut out instead of being pushed out. I also never felt like having a vaginal birth was going to be the key to my womanhood or motherhood. I went to vbac support groups throughout the pregnancy and heard story after story of women who were depressed and broken after their c-section and it made their vbac journey that much more powerful. I feel like my desire for a natural birth was based on something much more simple: I wanted to know I could do it and I wanted my baby to come out in the most healthy way possible, in the way God designed for it to happen. It had very little to do with what I wanted for my body as I'd had two rather uneventful cesareans before. My preference was to avoid surgery, but it wouldn't have been the worst part for me if Milo's birth had turned out differently. I feel so sad for women that had expectations that weren't met in their previous births, and I'm lucky that I was so young and naive that I had no preconceived notions on how my birth would go, other than that my baby would come out healthy.
Looking back and it's no surprise that I had no desires for a natural normal birth. I was a cesarean baby and my Mom was born in a hospital as my Grandma was strapped down, drugged and labored by herself. I had no reference to what was considered a "normal delivery". In my preparation for this birth, my doula asked me to consider what birth philosophies I was bringing into this delivery. I had six very specific birth experiences to draw from:
1. My mom having two cesareans. I grew up thinking this is the normal way babies come out. I never remember being curious about natural birth because I was never really exposed to it. I assumed cesareans were normal. I never questioned it.
2. When my aunt had my cousin, my mom was there. I remembered my mom talking about how horrifying it was to watch the baby "go in and out" and how the baby looked like an alien when it came out. (Oh hey Tori!) I had never heard anything about what cesarean babies looked like, so in my young mind I pictured beautiful pink little babies being cut out and purple cone-headed aliens being pushed out.
3. My other aunt talking to my mom about how she was so swollen down there that she couldn't even sit down. I'd asked my mom growing up if it hurt when I was cut out and she'd explain that she was numb and didn't feeling anything. Thus with little understanding of post-surgery reality, I associated natural birth with pain.
4. I had pre-eclampsia with Elyse and my blood pressure was too high so I had to be induced at around 38 weeks. Being induced with Elyse, I never experienced the spontaneous onset of labor and after three failed days of induction, she had to be cut out after showing signs of distress. I believe that she was truly in distress and that it was a legitimate emergency cesarean.
5. I was there when my friend Gracie had her baby. She had an epidural and her labor and delivery seemed effortless. Her baby came out pink and beautiful. My mind was blown.
6. The doctor telling me that if I tried to have a vaginal birth with Andy, I was risking the safety of my baby so I scheduled a repeat cesarean. It felt a lot different going to the hospital when there wasn't an emergency. It was a lot scarier. Andy was born and had to be in the NICU for a week because he wasn't ready to be born yet. I felt responsible and angry.
When I became pregnant with baby number 3, I automatically assumed it'd be a repeat c-section. It wasn't until about 16 weeks that I found a video about natural cesareans that I started to change positions. I was moved by the idea that I could control the environment and conditions of my child's birth. I'm at the age where I'm coming into my own independence and it aligned with that sense of "I'm the master of my ship" mentality. I wanted my baby to come on it's own time. I didn't want him to be pulled from me, but eased out (called delayed transition). I wanted my cord to be cut after it stopped pulsing. I wanted my baby to lay on my chest after being born so we could bond and I could experience that rush of oxytocin. Seeing that natural cesarean video made me realize that I never tried to make my birth experiences "special" before. My delivery had previously been means to an end in which I show up at the hospital and the doctor helps me take the baby out and then we start our new special life together. I was energized by the idea that I could take this event and make it my own. I went to the doctor primed with new ideas about how I wanted my cesarean to go. After shooting down all of my ideas, telling me they weren't "possible" or "safe", they ended the appointment by laughing at me when I asked to hold him on my chest after he was born while I was still on the operating table. I left discouraged and sad.
Shortly after that conversation, I realized that I was trying to shape my cesarean into a natural vaginal birth. Why not just push him out? How dangerous is it? Will I be selfishly putting my life on the line when I already have a husband and kids that need me? Could my baby die? Will my girly parts be wrecked? Will my husband still want to have sex with me? These are all things that I had to find out, and I did. I took on this challenge for vbac like I would anything else - full force and with reckless abandon. Every doctor or person in my life that told me I couldn't do it, strengthened my resolve that I could and would. I had doctor's tell me throughout the whole pregnancy that he was too "big" or that if xyz happened, I would have to have another cesarean. I had one doctor tell me, "We don't even know if you can have a vaginal delivery...". It seems like such a harmless statement but it devastated me. It was the most insulting insinuation that my body would somehow not work like it was supposed to. He was attacking my the very essence of my womanhood. I cried the whole day over it, then got angry and more resolved. I went through four doctors and several doctor interviews until I found one that didn't make me feel like my birth preferences were second to their priorities. I was so frustrated that I stopped all vbac planning around 6 weeks. I was tired of fighting and just wanted to enjoy my pregnancy for awhile. I found Dr. Plimpton after that and he ended up being the keeper.
The whole VBAC experience changed me in a very intricate and complex way. I realized a lot about my philosophy of birth and I gained the confidence to be in charge of my body. I made sure that doctors acted like they were performing a service, not like they were doing me a favor by being my doctor. I learned to educate myself on all birth scenarios so that there was nothing I would be ignorantly talked into. I grew into a stronger woman when I realized that this was my birth and that I wanted to experience with my husband alone. It was a lesson in wisdom and patience. I had to train my brain and my thoughts to prepare for plan B. What if I do have a cesarean? What do I have to do to ensure I don't feel disappointed in myself if that happens?
Achieving my VBAC was my greatest accomplishment. I'd never spent so much time planning for something so important to me, making sure every detail was in place and that I had done everything I could. I can honestly say I put 110% into my success. Even when things didn't go as planned (tons of pain, worthless epidural, slow progress), I still made it. When I wanted to quit, I didn't. I pushed that baby out of me! He came exactly when he was supposed to without a single medical intervention. Sometimes it seems to good to be real. I get overcome with pride in my baby, in my body and I am grateful that for that experience.
So even though I didn't have any traumatizing cesarean experiences, I still found the fight inside of me. With odds stacked against me and against negative doctors, I kept going.
I chose my birth and what I wanted for my body and I did it, goddammit.
And it was amazing.
Looking back and it's no surprise that I had no desires for a natural normal birth. I was a cesarean baby and my Mom was born in a hospital as my Grandma was strapped down, drugged and labored by herself. I had no reference to what was considered a "normal delivery". In my preparation for this birth, my doula asked me to consider what birth philosophies I was bringing into this delivery. I had six very specific birth experiences to draw from:
1. My mom having two cesareans. I grew up thinking this is the normal way babies come out. I never remember being curious about natural birth because I was never really exposed to it. I assumed cesareans were normal. I never questioned it.
2. When my aunt had my cousin, my mom was there. I remembered my mom talking about how horrifying it was to watch the baby "go in and out" and how the baby looked like an alien when it came out. (Oh hey Tori!) I had never heard anything about what cesarean babies looked like, so in my young mind I pictured beautiful pink little babies being cut out and purple cone-headed aliens being pushed out.
3. My other aunt talking to my mom about how she was so swollen down there that she couldn't even sit down. I'd asked my mom growing up if it hurt when I was cut out and she'd explain that she was numb and didn't feeling anything. Thus with little understanding of post-surgery reality, I associated natural birth with pain.
4. I had pre-eclampsia with Elyse and my blood pressure was too high so I had to be induced at around 38 weeks. Being induced with Elyse, I never experienced the spontaneous onset of labor and after three failed days of induction, she had to be cut out after showing signs of distress. I believe that she was truly in distress and that it was a legitimate emergency cesarean.
5. I was there when my friend Gracie had her baby. She had an epidural and her labor and delivery seemed effortless. Her baby came out pink and beautiful. My mind was blown.
6. The doctor telling me that if I tried to have a vaginal birth with Andy, I was risking the safety of my baby so I scheduled a repeat cesarean. It felt a lot different going to the hospital when there wasn't an emergency. It was a lot scarier. Andy was born and had to be in the NICU for a week because he wasn't ready to be born yet. I felt responsible and angry.
When I became pregnant with baby number 3, I automatically assumed it'd be a repeat c-section. It wasn't until about 16 weeks that I found a video about natural cesareans that I started to change positions. I was moved by the idea that I could control the environment and conditions of my child's birth. I'm at the age where I'm coming into my own independence and it aligned with that sense of "I'm the master of my ship" mentality. I wanted my baby to come on it's own time. I didn't want him to be pulled from me, but eased out (called delayed transition). I wanted my cord to be cut after it stopped pulsing. I wanted my baby to lay on my chest after being born so we could bond and I could experience that rush of oxytocin. Seeing that natural cesarean video made me realize that I never tried to make my birth experiences "special" before. My delivery had previously been means to an end in which I show up at the hospital and the doctor helps me take the baby out and then we start our new special life together. I was energized by the idea that I could take this event and make it my own. I went to the doctor primed with new ideas about how I wanted my cesarean to go. After shooting down all of my ideas, telling me they weren't "possible" or "safe", they ended the appointment by laughing at me when I asked to hold him on my chest after he was born while I was still on the operating table. I left discouraged and sad.
Shortly after that conversation, I realized that I was trying to shape my cesarean into a natural vaginal birth. Why not just push him out? How dangerous is it? Will I be selfishly putting my life on the line when I already have a husband and kids that need me? Could my baby die? Will my girly parts be wrecked? Will my husband still want to have sex with me? These are all things that I had to find out, and I did. I took on this challenge for vbac like I would anything else - full force and with reckless abandon. Every doctor or person in my life that told me I couldn't do it, strengthened my resolve that I could and would. I had doctor's tell me throughout the whole pregnancy that he was too "big" or that if xyz happened, I would have to have another cesarean. I had one doctor tell me, "We don't even know if you can have a vaginal delivery...". It seems like such a harmless statement but it devastated me. It was the most insulting insinuation that my body would somehow not work like it was supposed to. He was attacking my the very essence of my womanhood. I cried the whole day over it, then got angry and more resolved. I went through four doctors and several doctor interviews until I found one that didn't make me feel like my birth preferences were second to their priorities. I was so frustrated that I stopped all vbac planning around 6 weeks. I was tired of fighting and just wanted to enjoy my pregnancy for awhile. I found Dr. Plimpton after that and he ended up being the keeper.
The whole VBAC experience changed me in a very intricate and complex way. I realized a lot about my philosophy of birth and I gained the confidence to be in charge of my body. I made sure that doctors acted like they were performing a service, not like they were doing me a favor by being my doctor. I learned to educate myself on all birth scenarios so that there was nothing I would be ignorantly talked into. I grew into a stronger woman when I realized that this was my birth and that I wanted to experience with my husband alone. It was a lesson in wisdom and patience. I had to train my brain and my thoughts to prepare for plan B. What if I do have a cesarean? What do I have to do to ensure I don't feel disappointed in myself if that happens?
Achieving my VBAC was my greatest accomplishment. I'd never spent so much time planning for something so important to me, making sure every detail was in place and that I had done everything I could. I can honestly say I put 110% into my success. Even when things didn't go as planned (tons of pain, worthless epidural, slow progress), I still made it. When I wanted to quit, I didn't. I pushed that baby out of me! He came exactly when he was supposed to without a single medical intervention. Sometimes it seems to good to be real. I get overcome with pride in my baby, in my body and I am grateful that for that experience.
So even though I didn't have any traumatizing cesarean experiences, I still found the fight inside of me. With odds stacked against me and against negative doctors, I kept going.
I chose my birth and what I wanted for my body and I did it, goddammit.
And it was amazing.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
A Lesson in Tolerance for the Ignorant
Today on the world wide web, I ran across this picture of US currency folded up to depict 9/11 events.
The caption to this picture read:
"Although it's difficult to accept, 9/11 was almost certainly an inside job. There is a ton of evidence available to support this being true. This includes the blatant placement of symbolism/ signs right in front of our eyes! Years ago I was shown that you could see the twin towers on fire if you folded a $20 bill right.. thought that was crazy, but this right here takes that to a whole different level! Starting with the lowest denomination and going up in numerical AND also sequence order....the $5 bill shows the twin towers, the $10 is after the planes hit them, the $20 shows the towers collapsing, the $50 is the dust and smoke from the rubble & the $100 is after the smoke has just about died down. I'm not trying to spread fear.. but rather awareness, we need to wake up! This is the time of the apocalypse... which is not doom and gloom, but in greek means a revelation of something hidden (revelations)"
I have started and restarted this sentence four times. I'm speechless. What are they insinuating? That in the 1800s the US Treasury started laying plans for an ultimate government conspiracy? And that to lay those plans they hired people to draw out designs for the dollar that could be folded in such a way that future government officials would stumble upon and understand their purpose? Or maybe it was an ancient scroll of folding how-to directions that was passed on president to president until the right moment. Then I found this:
You can even fold the $20 to say OSAMA!
Need even more proof?
9+11 = 20!
With just 2 more folds your $20 bill turns into a airplane!
COINCIDENCE? YOU DECIDE!
What the whaaaaaat? So now our ancient US Treasury department was in cahoots with Osama's great great great great grandparents and they agreed to name their future great great great great grandson Osama so that their folding dollar bill prophecies could come true.
I AM SHAKING MY HEAD. The people that come up with this stuff need a smack in the face and a new life. I can just imagine the nerd that was hunched over his money, feverishly folding and refolding his dollars until he found the signs he was looking for. It just is so ridiculous that I can't spend another minute talking about it.
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