Birth Story

Tomorrow is EJ's birthday, and despite my excitement to celebrate with her, and the distraction created by planning a party for her, I always feel a malaise leading up to this day. It isn't something that I think about, it is something that I feel, that bubbles up from my insides seemingly spontaneously and feels like a dense, soupy heaviness in my chest. It isn't new. On July 28th, 2005, I wrote this entry on my blog, a blog that (at the time) was dedicated to my experience as an expectant mother, about the birth of my daughter one week before:

I had anticipated writing a detailed description of Babylu's birth on this site before I moved over, but I have reconsidered. I am still getting over the birth, physically and emotionally. I'm not going to lie---it was really hard. My relaxation and hypnosis worked really well, but unfortunately, we had mitigating factors (baby's size and position) which made it impossible for me to deliver without a c-section. I am grieving right now, and need a little time to get over the experience. Obviously, having our daughter is thrilling. It will just take time for the physical and emotional vestiges of the birth to be integrated into my memory in a healing way. To that end, I am not going to write out the full story. I want to make the choice to handle the experience now, move on, and remember it in a positive way. While I know that I could certainly win or place in the "wait until you hear my birth story" competitions that take place at baby showers all around the country, I am making the choice not to enter that sport. That is not the legacy I want to foster about the most miraculous day to take place in the lives of myself and my husband. Someday, Babylu will know that yes, it was hard, and yes, it was long, and yes, it was painful, but oh, yes yes yes, her arrival was the most wonderful moment I could possibly imagine, and everything else has faded away.

What I know now, and I didn't know then, is that while I could choose not to dwell in the pain, simply focusing on the positive would not be enough to stop the freight train that was about to really hit me. That it would take me until January of 2010 to get an adequate diagnosis of what I was experiencing. That when I finally had that diagnosis, there would be a wave of immediate relief, but then the hard work of healing, not just surviving, would start. That when that hard work began, it would be in a physical body that I barely recognized anymore, much less acknowledged. That when I looked to the future, I couldn't imagine having a daughter as amazing as I do now, and a family I love as much, and along with that love, a grief so palpable at times about the start of our time together as a family of three that it can literally take my breath away.

It was this winter, during the gray doldrums, that I would reach my breaking point. The holidays passed, and once things settled down, I found myself awake until all hours of night, and almost unable to get out of bed in the morning. My husband would wake up, find me asleep like the dead, and get our daughter ready for school, only waking me when it was absolutely necessary for him to get going and me to take over. I would put on clothes, brush my hair and teeth, brush her hair and teeth, bundle up and walk in the cold the one block to her school, hoping to muster enough energy to be awake and alive once we arrived. I don't think that my sunny disposition failed me in these moments, as no one seemed to notice that I was barely there. I'd smile and talk and give my kid kisses, then come home, do the bare minimum necessary to keep us afloat, and go back to bed until I had to pick Ellerie up again. In the afternoon, I found myself fighting off sleep again by two or three o'clock, and feeling horrible that my kid was getting the short end of the stick in the deal, as I drank cups of coffee and tried to rouse myself.

This went on for roughly 2 weeks, at which point I called the counseling center on campus and begged to come in as soon as I could. They understood. I thought it was depression. The psychiatrist thought it might be something else:

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from my daughter's 2005 (yes, you read that right, 2005) birth, with a side of seasonal affective disorder triggering the mood swing. Her recommendation: a light therapy light and some PTSD counseling. Within a week of getting the light, I was close to myself again, but it was the counseling with the monitrice/counselor who had attended our birth that cracked me right open. The therapy, which involves tapping points on the body, moving your eyes in circles and from side-to-side, deep breathing, counting, and humming, affirmations, and all sorts of non-traditional things while telling your traumatic story piece-by-piece, was a revelation to me.

For example, soon after the birth, I told some friends about how, in the worst of my experience, I had a moment when I really thought that I could get up and leave the room, and in turn, leave my laboring body. Leave the pain and the anxiety and the anesthesiologist who was shaming me for my epidural failing and the nurse who kept telling me to not push even though I had to bear down and constantly rotating group of the chattering interns/residents who were making bets on when, not if, I would be getting my c-section. Mostly, I wanted to leave that constant pain---the pain that never let up, even between contractions, because of the position of my daughter pressing against my spine. The pain I had experienced for over 18 straight hours, only increasing in intensity, with no time to relax, right up to and past transition. When I thought I could leave, I really believed it---it was a desperate hope my mind concocted to give my body a chance to believe it would be okay. When I told the story, my friends laughed, and there was a comment to the effect of, "yeah, wouldn't we all like to leave, that's hilarious, birth is hard." Now, I'm a funny girl, I wanted to fit in, and so I adopted that line as my hilarious birth story. My, "Birth is so crazy, I thought I could leave the delivery room in the middle to get out of it! HA HA HA!" story.

It wasn't funny, though. It wasn't funny at all. It was, in fact, the moment that I first disassociated with my body, that my mind and body broke away from each other, and the blame and shame that I would carry for my body began. It was the epicenter of the trauma, and I had turned it into a funny tag line.

When this came out during counseling, I started to weep so hard my head began to pound and my shirt became wet. All I could choke out to say was, "This actually happened to me. This is real. I really felt this." Then the relief. The immediate sense that I wasn't a victim, that I was someone who could survive this.

There were other moments like this during the counseling, like when I talked about the extended triage (hours instead of minutes, because the new residents couldn't get 20 straight minutes of baby monitoring in a row), the extended separation from my baby after a brief "nice to meet you, little one" after surgery (six hours, because the people on the maternity floor couldn't send someone down to get me from recovery, with the recovery techs pitying me and bringing me up there themselves in the middle of the night to find my room completely ready and no one taking responsibility for why I wasn't picked up hours before), and of course, the torture that kept giving, breastfeeding (the milk that didn't come in for over 9 days, the baby who didn't latch, the lactation consultant at the hospital who told me it was "like the baby is rejecting you," the feelings of guilt and shame because of how strongly I believe in breastfeeding every time I had to pull out a bottle of formula in front of other breastfeeding mothers...this one goes on and on.)

People have asked me why breastfeeding was such a really painful thing for me, why I couldn't just put it into perspective. The counseling helped me to see that, by the time that struggle hit me, I was so out-of-myself and so hurt and scared and guilt-ridden, everything I couldn't do well as a mom became just one more stake to the heart, and every problem with nursing became one more way I couldn't trust my broken, messed-up body. How could that not be so horrible?

I've talked to friends about PTSD, and what I've experienced, and have gotten all kinds of reactions. Some say, "Yes, this makes perfect sense, thank goodness you can get some help." Others say, "I don't believe you can have PTSD from childbirth." No matter what, I point to this insightful article that I found right in the thick of my counseling, and to the quote within it from a doctor right here at University of Chicago that will likely stick with me for the rest of my life:

"Fifty years ago, women were anesthetized for childbirth," says Dr. Benjamin Van Voohrees, a pediatrician, internist, and medical researcher at the University of Chicago. But now we have a whole new awareness of what is going on in the delivery room. And while advanced medicine has made the experience safer than ever, it has also shifted expectations. "Now, if there's a misadventure in the delivery room, it's traumatic. Our culture is not accustomed to those outcomes anymore, whether it's the mother's life at risk or the baby's. These events are very rare. When you have an unanticipated event, and against the social expectations, you are going to intensify the risk of PTSD."

"Ninety-eight percent of births are uncomplicated," he continues. "When you're in the other 2 percent, you have very few people to turn to and share the experience. When you have a baby, you're opting into an experience that is normative. When you find it's totally different from what you were told it would be, it's traumatic."

Yes, it is. It's very traumatic, and very hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it. Counseling allowed me to open up about it in a whole new way, and to begin to reconnect my body and mind again in a healing way. Case in point, after my second session, as I was getting into my car to leave, I said, out loud, from mind to body, "Thank you for taking care of me when I couldn't. Thank you for keeping me alive and able to care for my husband and daughter, even when I wasn't taking care of you. I did the best that I could, and now I can do even better." Then I smiled, and started to cry, and started to laugh all at once. I literally made a spontaneous declaration of gratitude to my body, a body that I have cursed while expanding it beyond its limits since my kid's birth.

When I crawled into bed last night, I started to cry a bit. The heaviness had begun to descend as the busy day had gotten quieter, and I said to my sweet husband, the one who has stuck through all of this with me, "Birthday weeks are hard for me. It's hard to remember." Tomorrow, there will presents placed on the table for EJ to find when she wakes up, then popsicles at camp, an afternoon with my folks, and a dinner with all four grandparents, an uncle, and our little family. There will be fun and cake and fanfare, and probably some sugar-induced naughtiness. It will be enough to break the hold of the heaviness. For now, though, I'm taking the time to feel all of this, and to recognize it for what it is, without shame or worry or apology. I'm getting better, and although it is slow, it is steady, and I know that a little sadness every once in awhile is nothing to fight.

All of the blog entries I created when expecting are housed at a different blog address, and while I thought it might be silly at the time to migrate to a new URL when I became a mom, I'm glad that I did. Reading them now is not something I relish, since they are all "before" experiences. "Before the birth." "Before the shift." "Before the trauma." They leave me feeling wistful for the version of me that wrote them, a person who didn't know that she could be part of the 2%. Maybe with a few more birthdays behind me, I will weave her back into the story, too.