The Day I Gave Birth Wasn't The Best Day Of My Life

Maybe you and I have different ideas of what qualifies as a “good” day. For you, perhaps a good day includes unbearable pain, bloodletting, strangers in surgical gloves poking and prodding you, and visits from your relatives while your boobs hang out as you attempt breastfeeding for the very first time. For me, well, I’m a simple gal. If someone tells me my hair looks nice, it has been a good day.But please, nothing involving blood. This is why I don’t understand why so many women carry on this notion of the day that they gave birth as having been one of the best of their lives.

The day I gave birth to my son was definitely not the best day of my life. Not even close. It happened on a Monday morning, when my wonderful and gifted OBGYN expertly pulled my son out of me via cesarean section. My baby was placed on my chest for a quick family photo, before being wheeled away along with my proud but dazed husband. My doctor then proceeded to put my guts back into my body and sew me back into a whole human again. I still swear to this day that I could feel everything she was doing, down to the burning sensation of when she was cauterizing my insides. My body shook for a full hour after the surgery, from all the adrenaline and the drugs running through my system. I passed out and was wheeled to a recovery area where after an hour or so I woke up groggy and confused to see my father in law standing uncertainly at the foot of my bed. Does this sound like the best day ever yet to you? Me neither.

By late morning, I had hosted about 20 members of my extended family in the small partitioned area of the hospital room that I shared with another mom who had just given birth to her second baby and who was already packing to go home (I’m sure she appreciated all the extra company).My mom visited and, as usual, complained of the traffic. She was hungry and wondered what kind of snacks I might have on hand for her to nibble on, as if we were home and in my own kitchen and she had been expecting me to have prepared a nice spread. I had to explain multiple times, to multiple family members, the importance of hand washing before holding my newborn child who, just hours before, had been protected in my womb by mucus membranes. And no, a squirt of Purell did not count.

Bringing a new baby into the family is as much about other people’s egos as it is about a major life change of your own. Did you know that? I didn’t. You will find that some family members will ponder, often aloud, “How does your new baby affect ME?” In the hospital room, I found some family members openly wondering not only, “How does this baby resemble me?” but also, “What does the baby’s name have to do with me?”

and even better, “How can I somehow impart some wisdom onto you and also tell you a funny baby story about me?”It is all very exhausting when you’ve just gone through major surgery and haven’t slept since your water broke, 24 hours before.

My family, though generally decent when it comes to reading social cues, looked puzzled when the nurses came to check on “the surgery site.” This sounded very proper and hygienic when a medical professional was saying it to a roomful of cousins and grandparents, but the nurse was essentially trying to say: “We need to look at this here lady’s vagina and also at the gaping wound above it. So could y’all step out a sec please, thanks?”

And when it came time to breastfeed, I had to endure the very uncomfortable looks on my mother’s face – as if I had just jumped onto my hospital bed to perform a sexy burlesque routine instead of struggling to feed my hungry newborn.

By the afternoon, a Facebook photo that my aunt had posted of me sitting topless in the hospital bed while awkwardly trying to nurse the baby for the first time had nearly gone viral. After my sister alerted me, my husband had to catch my aunt before she left for San Francisco to ask her to kindly take the photo (which I know she only posted with love and pride) down from the Interwebs.

So all this time, a new mother is supposed to rest and get some sleep, but that is fucking impossible with visitors coming round the clock to see the baby; plus all the nurses checking on the wounds and the catheter; plus my topless photo situation (FML!). Then, I attended a breastfeeding class, where I sat in a cold hospital chair in some kind of meeting room with other weary postpartum women.

I was wearing my husband’s oversize sweatshirt over my hospital gown, bleeding buckets of post-surgery slash post-labor blood into what was basically an adult diaper.This day was still not going down as one of my best.

After the last visitor said goodbye, my husband spent some time with the baby and me before going home. This was the deal we made: he would go home and recharge so that he had the energy to help me and the baby during the days at the hospital (and with a c-section, there were many). So after he left, it was just me and this little new guy.

This part of the day – or evening rather – was actually good. Great, even. I stared at my baby’s face, amazed that he was here, that I had something to do with shaping him. The day of his actual birth had been so busy, I hadn’t had a moment to process his arrival, to even look at his face, or to take it in.

“Oh, hey you,” I whispered to him. “When did you get here?” I nursed him in the quiet hospital room, alone for the first time, and closed my eyes, focusing on the feeling of this little life in my arms tugging on my breast and on the little whimper sounds he was making. It was all so new and wonderful, and I had almost let it all pass me by without a moment of being present. I felt like a bride who had been so swept up in all the things that had been going wrong or right on her wedding day that she had forgotten to look at her husband and listen to the music and just feel the good and the love of being there together.

That little newborn boy just turned five years old, and we have had so many awesome days since that first day together.And though the day he was born was special and one I will never forget, there have been far better ones, full of wonderful memories where I was much more present (and much more clothed!)and more engaged.A lot of our best days happen in the quieter moments and on much smaller scales than one might expect: sitting on the curb eating a snack from a vending machine talking about a weird dream he had the night before, watching him enjoy the thrill of jumping over the waves at the beach for the first time this past summer, or seeing him smile with satisfaction at the end of a particularly good bedtime story that I’ve just told him on the fly.Best days don’t always have to be epic ones.

And, call me weird, but my best days most often do not include trips to the hospital or peeing through a catheter. Maybe yours do. And if that’s the case, that’s cool. I won’t judge. You do you.

Originally published here.

Why I Don’t Want to Call My C-Section a “Belly Birth”

The latest chapter in the birthing wars.

Just when I think the “birthing wars” have gone too far, I recently learned  the term “C-section” is becoming passé. We now need a whole new way of describing a surgery that’s been happening since the time of Caesar himself. Behold, the new term, “belly birth” – the alternative way of talking about what many view as an otherwise cold, and/or invasive medical procedure. 

The “belly birth” is an attempt at giving women a more empowering way to reframe undesired birth experiences – i.e. those who feel they have been robbed of the joy of delivering an entire human through their vaginal canal. According to online trends, more women are renaming their C-sections as belly births, in an effort to take back their agency in birth experiences that felt largely out of their control, as well as to normalize C-sections. The idea being: A belly birth is something that you participate in, whereas a C-section is simply done to you. 

According to the Mayo Clinic, a cesarean section (C-section) is defined as: “the surgical procedure used to deliver a baby through incisions to the abdomen and uterus.” There are many reasons why physicians opt to go this route, including; the baby being in distress, the baby being in an abnormal position, or labor not progressing, to name a few. 

Despite these very legitimate reasons for surgery, the stigma around C-sections still persists. People sometimes point to the moms who have undergone them as having gotten away with an “easier way out” (remember the phrase “too posh to push”?); and some women who have had them feel ashamed of their own birth experiences.  

But wouldn’t naming C-sections something else – particularly something like “belly birth”, which almost sounds like a mystical event – be further reinforcing that stigma? Barriers are seldom broken when we dance around the thing people are afraid of, or when we make them more palatable to the people who don’t understand them. 

Renaming a C-section birth a “belly birth” disassociates the surgery from the birth experience. The term itself evokes an  image of a woman magically bringing forth her baby from the depths of her uterus, and out of her stomach, by sheer will. Is everyone supposed to pretend that a surgery never happened in order to get that baby out of the woman’s belly? 

Admittedly, for the people behind this movement, removing the surgery aspect of the C-section is probably the point of calling it something like “belly birth” in the first place. In their view, they would like the emphasis to be on the birth of the baby, rather than the surgery itself. But why erase any reference to the surgery that made that baby’s birth possible? There’s something about that act that reeks of shame, too. It doesn’t feel inclusive, but more like a rewriting of history.

I have had two C-sections. One was an emergency C-section: after I had labored for over 24 hours, my body wouldn’t fully dilate, and my son’s heart rate plummeted. The other was a planned section, for the same reasons I had to have my first C-section, under the advice of the doctor I trust with my life (and those of my babies). I love telling people about my C-sections, and, if they’re willing to hear them, I enjoy regaling them with the gory details of each one. I didn’t choose my first C-section, but there’s a lot about motherhood that I don’t get control over. My C-sections are my birth stories, and I am proud of them.

When you think about it, what isn’t empowering about lying AWAKE on a table, as a doctor slices into your abdomen? How can you not feel like a badass after you have lived through having your stomach opened, then rummaged around in, and then having a baby pulled out of it? And then, while your guts are still open to the heavens, you most likely have a moment with your brand new baby to pose and take a photo, because that is just how #momboss you are. You’re so amazingly tough, in fact, you get to witness your doctor sewing you back up, possibly feeling just a few tugs around on your insides, and maybe the ol’ burn of a cauterizer. That’s some superhuman sh*t. And then someone has the nerve to tell you that it wasn’t a real birth worth being proud of? That you had a “belly” birth? Ha! That’s cute.

Mamas of C-sections, I think the issue isn’t what we call the damn procedure. I think it’s the fact that we feel we need to rename it in the first place. The idea of the C-section being “less than” the vaginal birth feeds into that same comparing and competing that’s so rampant in the mom world. You know; things like how a vaginal birth with epidural is “less than” one without. Or how a birth in the hospital might as well be a back alley birth when compared to a beautiful home birth in a birthing tub surrounded by dancing doulas. You get the idea.

That’s not to say that I’d wish a C-section upon someone who didn’t want one. It is not an easy surgery to recover from. It requires support from friends or family members (or hired help) to help with the baby in order to allow your body to heal properly. It can take up to a year (or more) for your body to fully recover internally from the trauma. But a C-section is not a death. It is, in most cases, (nefarious doctors aside) a medically necessary means to a birth. 

So what if we cheered each other for having undergone successful C-section births instead of grieving over them, or worse, not speaking their name? Calling a C-section by any other name puts us at further distance from overcoming our fear, hate, or distrust of this surgery; and our ability to accept – and even embrace it.  

Photography by @tash.things.

Originally published here.