Six months ago today I was in a lot of pain. I was walking circles around our bedroom, stopping every few minutes to get through another contraction. I labored and birthed at home. After 17 intense hours, our beautiful boy, Andrias entered our arms.
We're halfway through our first year, and so much of his personality has been coming through. I can't believe in just a few short months he'll be entering his toddler years, and making his way toward independence. For now I'm trying to enjoy every day of his babyhood, and today I find myself reminiscing about his birth. So I thought it only fitting to finally go back and finish writing his birth story.
It's super long... no big surprise there, when have I ever written anything short? So I decided to put it up here in installments over the next few days. Here's part one. Enjoy!
Andrias's Birth, Part 1 -- The scary back story (i.e. Regin's birth)
To understand my experience this time around, I think you have to understand a little bit about my last experience, which is the one I was hoping not to repeat. (If you want the original account, I wrote my full birth story here on the blog and a retrospective on it three months later.)
With Regin I was completely unprepared. I was naive and didn't think I needed any preparation. I was completely, 100% unafraid of our planned home birth, or at least I thought I was and I thought that being unafraid would help make the pain less severe so that was really all the preparation I needed. When it came down to it, the pain did scare me. Not the idea of it. I thought I was going to be so ready for it because of the years of dysmenorrhea I'd had. But when each wave of pain hit me, my body tensed up and fought it. I said "no no no no no," as it hit and I begged and cried. I was weak and powerless against it all. And I hated being told I was doing great because I was doing nothing; it was being done to me. This unbelievable force was acting on my body, and the force was torturing me every couple of minutes and would keep me in excruciating pain for up to three minutes at a time. Do you have any idea how long three minutes is? I can say with certainty that I do. And the pain towards the end was so severe I actually asked George to knock me out so that I could be taken to the hospital.
So much for my beautiful and empowering home birth. So much for not needing preparation.
To add to it, George's father was fighting a losing battle with cancer when labor started which he ultimately lost during the middle of it all. That devastating news, as well as other things like an ill-timed, though wonderfully soothing bath slowed my labor down greatly. By the end of it, it was nearly 48 hours long, I'd missed two full nights of sleep, and I was well into the third night when Regin was born. Further, we weren't really aware of all of my issues with food (hypoglycemia & allergies) or how to handle them. When Regin finally arrived, I was blinded by pain, completely fatigued, totally sleep deprived, and in the middle of what was probably a major hypoglycemic crash. I was so weak I had to be fed and my brain snapped. I didn't know what was going on anymore. I didn't have the rush of joy and love that women get when the hormones are doing all the right things. I didn't even know what this hot lump of flesh was that was handed to me, and whatever it was, it certainly didn't come from me. I was for a long time unable to look at the first photo of Regin and me together because I could see my fear and confusion reflected back at me in the photo.
Love and bonding was slow in coming. It took weeks if not months. I was fond of my boy from the beginning, but not bonded. By the time the affection had finally grown to the point where I was mad with love for him, I cried and cried with the grief I began to feel for the moment he and I didn't share when we first met.
The physical pain lived on in me too. My body took a while to recover, breastfeeding proved to rival birth in its level of pain, and I willed myself to hold on to the memory of my labor pains. The memory was so strong and clear that I could literally feel them when I thought about them. I wanted that. I wouldn't let go of them. I wanted to remind myself of how intense and, sadly, how horrible my experience had been.
When you sum it all up into one word, my first birth experience was one of trauma. Home-birthing women don't like to use that word. We birth at home in part because of the trauma stories we hear about in the medicalized environment. Truth is, birth trauma isn't necessarily iatrogenic; of course it isn't. Even having the exact birth you want, regardless of environment, can still result in trauma. Not all births are happy -- even when you have all ten fingers and ten toes accounted for and functioning fully. Although I must say, I'm still glad I birthed at home. I still believe in the reasons that compelled me to choose home birth and if I had gone through the same thing in the hospital, I don't imagine it would have gone any better. Plus I would have been in a colder environment and if I'm going to go through something that hard, I want to have the comforts and familiarity of home around me.
Regin's birth also had permanent effects on my health. I have never been the same. My hypoglycemia rose to a new level of sensitivity (and worsened still after a half marathon I did later that same year), and I've yet to get it under control. Although we'd never planned to have an only child, the trauma I (we) went through, plus the effect it had on my health made us think I might not be able to handle more. When I found myself pregnant again last year I was terrified. It took me some time to come to accept it, and when I finally did, I knew I would do everything in my power to make sure my experience this time would be different. And it was.
To be continued.
Part 2 -- Preparations, coming tomorrow...
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