Birthing Guilt

Every once in awhile Partner will look at me and say with wonder and love, “You birthed this baby!”

What might an ideal reaction to such a statement be? I imagine more wonder and love, like “Why, yes, I did!” or perhaps pride and joy? Neither reaction is mine: instead I often grunt and look away. When she presses the point I usually grumble “Well, okay, if you say so.” This annoys her, and I wish she would have never said anything.

Because, you know, I don’t feel I really birthed anything.

I think back to those Bradley classes we were doing—I really enjoyed them. We had a great little group—only four couples total. Even though we took the classes deep within Republican territory, everyone was so welcoming. One man, who I pegged as the most conservative, ended up bringing me a website address dedicated to gay and lesbian families. I loved practicing my meditation techniques. I was sure I was going to get through the birth in the most natural of ways: laboring at home until my contractions were two minutes apart, getting in the bath when we reached the hospital, playing my mix cd (which I made for everyone in my class) of relaxing labor music... We both had a vision of what the birth was going to be. We had a birth plan that never even made it to the hospital. And I just re-read that birth plan. How naïve. How blithely unaware. It’s my one beef with Bradley now: there’s all those classes on how to do it right and then a small little blip about what might happen if things go awry. Retrospectively I could have used more advice in that arena, specifically about how robbed I’d feel if things didn’t go the way I had planned.

In some ways I felt like a fraud—I was a post-op patient on the mother-baby recovery wing. I didn’t even have the baby with me. After I left recovery and was wheeled to my new home for the next four days, I remember apologizing to the nurse on duty when she came in and found me crying. (Partner was still in the NICU.) “It’s hard to be here without a baby,” I said to her. But that was the tip of the iceberg.

In reality I felt very betrayed by my body, and still do. I don’t feel like I gave birth, but that someone instead plucked my baby out. I never really went into labor. When the pit drip was stopped, all my contractions stopped too. Birthing the baby vaginally and naturally was representing something to me about my own womanhood, and then it never happened. I had a scary scar with staples that Partner wouldn’t even let me look at. I could barely walk and my child was in the intensive care.

The day that Cricket had to get into the isolette because of his jaundice was the first day I was in the NICU without Partner. She had to go to class and I was there alone. The minute I saw the isolette round the corner and come into Cricket’s little area, I lost it. Tears, tears, tears. Every NICU nurse there was fantastic, but thank God my midwife was also present. She held me while I just cried and then looked at me and said, “You have to stop blaming yourself for all of this. None of it is your fault.”

She hit the nail on the head. I did blame myself. Intensively. Every moment I saw our Cricket in the NICU, heard an alarm ding, saw him paw at his NG tube. It must have been my fault. When we came to the hospital, I asked what might cause the water to break, and someone honestly told me that often it’s infection that causes the water to break early. Infection. See? Something I caused—talk about Catholic guilt (think sex) rearing its ugly head. To top it off, I did indeed have an infection around Thanksgiving. I took the requisite dose of metronidizole and it cleared up. And then it didn’t help that my mom, well meaning of course, kept asking me if they had figured out if I had an infection, if that’s what made the water break.

(Later the midwife told me she didn’t think that was it at all since the only time I ran a temperature in the whole thing was right after surgery, which is fairly common. Of course I have written off these assurances as a mere salve to try and make me feel better.)

At a brunch this past Sunday with eight fantasticly smart women, I remarked that motherhood seemed like a vast conspiracy to foster guilt, and for me it started with birth. Not only do I feel like I didn’t really give birth, but I feel that somehow it was my fault.

Don’t tell me it’s crazy, or that yes, I really did give birth. On some intellectual level I know that, but emotionally this was very hard on me. I know I’m not alone either. Recently Suz blogged about this very eloquently.

I do think the c-section rates in this country are ridiculously high and that many sections don’t need to be performed. I don’t think that my birth was one of them, but I wish I had read or talked to more people who were less dogmatic about it before I went into the hospital. I want to be a natural mother, but somehow felt like a fraud for wanting that after having a baby via surgery. I still feel that way to some degree, as if my scar marks me as weaker in someway.

Reading over my birth plan just makes me depressed. I talk about wanting the baby immediately placed on my stomach, waiting for the cord to stop pulsing, breastfeeding immediately, not wanting to send the child to the nursery at all-- *Sigh*

I want to try and put the guilt to rest—I think it will be a lifelong battle, but today I’m going to start by deleting that birth plan. We got a beautiful kid—who cares how? He’s tucked in on my chest now (in the sling!) and perhaps instead of focusing on the birth plan gone awry, I could look down at his beautifully shaped head, thanks to the c-section...