The birth story I never thought I'd tell

My reflections on becoming the mother and human I was all along.

I thought when I sat down to write about being two years into motherhood, I would write something different. I did not expect to pour out my birth story. I will say it was not an easy birth and if the same is true for your experience, I ask you to tend to yourself gently if you choose to read or listen to this piece.

I did not expect to tell you, dear reader, about the most painful truth of my existence…

I have been taught and trained to abandon myself over listening to my deeper knowing.

Two years ago, I am sitting on the couch and I get up to go pee, then I feel it…the first gush. My water breaks. Everything I read told me big gushes were for the movies and TV shows, in real life this doesn’t happen, but to me it did.

It is 8 PM. I call the midwife because that is what I am supposed to do. She tells me to go to sleep, see what happens, and call around 8 in the morning. I do what I am told, nothing changes overnight. I call at 8 the next morning and I am told to come in for the drink I knew with every fiber of my being I did not want.

My partner and I make the long drive to the birth center, I take the drink, I do not remember what it tasted like but I do not think it was pleasant. Maybe they check on my son’s movements but I do not remember. We go home, and I promptly start pooping with fervor and all the while my water is gushing.

I fall into a cycle…lay down, try to relax, get up to poop AGAIN and feel my water gush AGAIN.

I am completely drained and exhausted by 1 PM when the contractions start. My partner calls the midwife to tell her what is happening and how far apart they are. The midwives wants us to come back in by 4 PM, they want to move things along because the plan was to have my baby at the birth center, right?

We grab our things, we make the long drive again. I believe we listen to Taylor Swift to take my mind of the discomfort. Fortunately at this point, I cannot poop anymore but I am gushing liquids with every bump in the road.

At the birth center, they give me more of the oil. I poop more, I walk the stairs, I walk outside, I gush and gush and gush. I remember walking around the bath tub in the beautiful room I was trying to give birth in, thinking I was not equipped to handle this. I started to feel sick. They kept checking how dilated I was.

It was never enough.

I move into the shower, so I am under hot water because I am freezing. The only thought getting me through the discomfort is that soon it will be over and I can lay on the nice, comfy bed. All I wanted was to go to sleep.

When I leave the shower, it is getting dark outside, the midwives tell me it is time to go to the hospital because it has been 24 hours since my water broke. I can tell my body is running a fever and I am no longer driving this ship, as if I ever was.

I say okay to the hospital, because what choice did I have. My partner and I drive over there, and we waited FOREVER for anyone to help us after we got a room quickly. At this point I decided I wanted all the drugs, whatever it took so I could sleep.

Finally, the anesthesiologist came for the epidural. My husband snaps a picture, I hate him for doing this because I know he is capturing my defeat, even though he thinks it is just a memory. All the while, I am still gushing and I never stop gushing water until it is all over.

I finally lay down and the nurse could not seem to figure out the monitor that needed to stay on my stomach to watch my son’s heart beat. She came in every 20 minutes to fix it and check it, I barely slept.

I started seeing things. My father at the foot of my bed, my father in law standing by my husband. We were not alone in that cold, dark hospital room.

Finally, morning comes and after Pitocin all night, I am ready to push. That is a lie, I am not ready to push. I do not feel anything, I am angry at the midwife as she tries to correct my pushing and I kept looking at her like…

Have you ever tried to push a baby out of you when you cannot feel anything from the waist down?

There is a group of doctors by the door waiting, they are holding the papers, they are waiting for me to fail and whisk me away to emergency surgery. Pushing is not going well, I maintained a fever all night long, at this point I have an infection and they are trying to tend to that as well.

After 10 minutes or an hour of pushing (who knows how long it was), they tell me the baby is in distress, his heart rating is dropping and they need to get him out NOW. I am handed the paper work, I sign, and I have never seen hospital workers move so quickly.

I am literally whisked into emergency surgery, I leave my partner in the dust, and I lay flat on the most sterile table. It is so bright, there are a million people in the room, they are talking and laughing like this is a normal morning at work and not the most important day of my life.

No one talks to me, no one acknowledges me, except the anesthesiologist, who’s job is literally to make sure I feel nothing. He is the only one who tells me what is going on, the doctors don’t tell me (I don’t think) when they are beginning. I am so tired on the operating table, I cannot keep my eyes open.

Somehow, my son emerges, I hear him cry, soon my husband is next to me holding him, I still cannot keep my eyes open. I do not feel anything. Not relief, not excitement, nothing. They leave me, only then do I start to feel immense fear.

There is a huge clock on the operating wall which I can see from where I am lying…my son was born at 7:28 AM and I watch the minutes tick by as we are apart. The doctors are in no rush, the take their sweet time, I am tired and I cannot speak, but I need them to hurry up, my son needs me.

I keep telling myself if I make it to him in 30 minutes, everything will be okay. I worry about my milk supply, I worry about him coming into this strange world and the person he spent 10 months in is no where to be seen, I start to struggle to breathe, WHY is this taking so long?

The doctors finally move me from the table to gurney to leave the room. It was terrifying to have to be lifted by so many people because I had no control over my body. I seemed to have no control over anything at this point.

I am not sure how long it takes me to see my son. I am not sure what I felt when I saw him. I am not sure of what happens after this. It is all a blur, but he is here and the gushing finally stopped.

This was almost two years ago and all I see in this story now is a woman who did not trust herself. I knew what I did not want, I knew I did not want the drink, I knew it would not lead my down a path I wanted.

And there is nothing wrong with birthing in a hospital, but it is entirely different thing when it is your choice and you are not under the pressure of the clock.

I knew very quickly after my son’s birth where it all went wrong. Days before I went into labor, I said to myself, to my journal, and I think to my husband, I did not want the drink. And then the day came, I didn’t know how to trust my knowing or my body, not just in this one moment but at all at this point in time.

My son’s entrance into this world was a lot like who I see him becoming. He moves at his own pace, he does things his own way, sometimes he changes things around so smoothly you do not know things have changed. My birth was like that…every pivot sort of happened, Robbie (my son) moves like that.

He is also loud, brave, and unafraid to take the harder path if it means adventure or fun in the process. I am not saying his birth was fun for him but I also know he had a say in how he emerged into this world. It was my job to listen, and since I struggled to, he came out with a statement.

It is almost as if his presence was coming to show and tell me I must not abandon myself again, because when I do, I lose all emotions and connection to my body. This is his scared work for me. I have been listening as best as I can to this call for the past two years.

It took me about a year into his life to really start listening, and it has taken me to this moment of writing to really see how clearly it was laid out from the beginning what he was here to show me. He was 10 days “late” and doing things at his pace, he trusted his little body and timing.

I wanted to become a mother gently, smoothly, quietly, tucked in my beautiful birth room, in a tub, surrounded by the trees outside. I wanted to be this sort of mother, I wanted to have the sort of child who would initiate me with love and kindness.

Instead, I received exactly what I needed, a chaotic birth, unplanned, yet smooth in its own weird way, terrifying, to shake me from my consistent pattern of self-abandonment. It has been a life long pattern and I am not sure there has been a greater betrayal of myself than in giving birth to my son at a pace I did not want.

Because I was not just abandoning myself, I was abandoning him, I was not listening to his timing and his knowing. I did not have the tools to do any of that at the time, all I knew was survival and listening to the people in charge usually kept me alive.

I no longer want to be a woman who abandons herself, not in big ways or small ways. I no longer want to pretend to not know what I know. And while I have grown more confident in trusting myself, I find there are still areas of my life where self abandonment is my coping mechanism.

My child has taught me not to leave myself.

His presence in this world has been a constant invitation to come back home to myself and to not leave. I have made the choices and steps in my healing, but he showed me the portal to walk through. Without him, without becoming his mother, I would still be a girl who did not trust herself.

Becoming a mother to my son has turned me into a woman who trusts and knows herself.

I write this like it happened as some sort of beautiful and easeful transition, when in reality it was the hardest two years of my life. Learning how to mother my son when I did not experience the love I was trying to give tried me. Poor sleep for two years (and counting) is trying me. My son being what I can only describe as a firecracker is trying me.

All the ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys, of the past two years have asked me to come back to myself. There have been a lot of dark moments, there was a lot of trauma to move through, there was a lot of let go of, there were truths about myself I had to remember.

It is hard to track growth, because once things have changed, it feels like this is the way things always were. But there were a lot of prices to pay for not being able to trust myself as a mother. I looked outside of myself for answers, and since I didn’t have a ton of human support, I turned to the internet.

My anxiety was higher than it had ever been because motherhood was such a call to listen deeper, to figure out how to trust myself. And for a long time I resisted, and I struggled. I raged, I cried, I lashed out at my family because I was afraid.

I was afraid to do the work of healing where I came from, I was afraid and uncertain I could leave my trauma in the past and be the mother I envisioned to my son.

I talk about motherhood being an excavator in this piece. It tore me to shreds and not to rebuild me into something better, but to make space for my whole self to emerge which had long ago been buried in the trauma of my childhood.

I wonder if my ever present desire to become a mother was my soul knowing it was the way I would save and find myself. Because without my son, without this portal back to who I am at my center, I am not sure where trauma would have taken me.

But here, I am. And here is what matters. Ready to celebrate this beautiful, wild, wise, funny, kind, loving, little boy this weekend. Ready to begin this next chapter with him. Ready to walk deeper into myself. Ready to face whatever is ahead.

A note to my son - I never want you to feel the pressure of having saved my life, because you only opened the door, I saved myself, I found myself, I reclaimed myself. But I need you to know how much your presence in this world matters to me, and to all the other people you are going to touch and change by being yourself. I love you more than I ever knew I was capable of loving anyone. Your presence is a gift, happy birthday.

Love,

Mama (Emma)

Thank you for reading and if you are new here, welcome!

I invite you to read this to learn more about this space and how to contribute. Here, I explore mothering, healing, shifting patterns, and learning what it means to be ourselves in motherhood.

If you know someone who is on the journey of motherhood and healing, I invite you to share this with them. It means so much to me when you share my words with someone you love.

Recent writings you might have missed…

• Motherhood Musings: Collection 1, Volume 1 - our expectations of motherhood

• Unspoken Words: Volume 14 & Volume 15 - sharing mothers experiences of what is hard for them in this season of motherhood.

• Tending to our younger parts - how parts work can help us become the loving parents we may of never had.

• Let’s build a bigger basket, together - how tending to ourselves, understanding our window of tolerance, and breathing can shift how we be in motherhood.