We were lying on the living room rug, wrestling and talking about belly buttons. My daughter has long been fascinated and confused by her navel, which she calls “the hole in my body.” Our conversation meandered to umbilical cords, how babies grow inside their mommies’ tummies, and inevitably, to how babies come out. We’d made it 4 1/2 years without broaching this topic, and naively, I hadn’t prepared an answer.

“Babies come out through their mommies’ yonis. It’s a natural process,” I told her, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

“Did I come out through your yoni, Mommy?”

I met my husband’s eyes and waited a beat. Silently, a door opened into the past.

“Well, actually, you came out through my belly,” I said. “The doctor made a cut and pulled you out.”

Ava’s face crumpled, and she broke into hysterical tears. “Then I will just kill myself!” she yelled.

She’s fond of high drama and is experimenting with the word “kill”, which she doesn’t actually understand. But her violent reaction shocked me—the force of her emotion, how it reflected my own experience of her birth.

Quickly I tried to back up and repair the damage. “Lots of babies are born that way. Baby Eric was, and Cousin Lucy… It’s something doctors need to do sometimes to help babies come out safely.”

But my child was inconsolable, crying until we distracted her with a princess movie. I decided to drop the subject until some later, peaceful time— after I’d figured out how to frame the story more gently. Was it possible to be honest without causing her distress?

I don’t often talk about my two cesareans anymore. But they are a part of me, a visible scar below the bikini line, hard and thick and half-numb. I don’t look if I can help it, the lumpy skin like an old rope burn. They mark me physically and emotionally, despite the work I’ve done with different therapists to process and resolve the trauma.

These days, one in three births in the United States is a c-section. The cesarean rate was 32 percent in 2007, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. But not every c-section is traumatic— some can be profound birthing experiences, as miraculous as a vaginal delivery. Many women have no issues with their surgeries, even choosing to schedule them instead of going through labor. “Hey, everyone in my apartment building had a c-section and felt fine about it,” remarked one New York friend.

More power to these mothers. But there are others of us who live with a sense of loss. Both of my c-sections were emergencies—terrifying for me and my husband, and perhaps (although I don’t want to face it) for my babies. My deepest grief arises from the gap between my rosy expectations of birth and the harsh, surgical reality.

My romantic vision of childbirth began when I was ten. My sister was born at home in a cabin in the Maine woods, by candlelight as a Nor’easter raged. The power went out, we ate lobsters for dinner, and my mother went into labor and took a bath. I was taken upstairs with my brothers, where someone reassured us that my mother’s animal sounds were normal.

Just after midnight, we were roused from sleep and led to the newborn infant. My parents sat bathed in candle-glow like Mary and Joseph in the stable, holding the swaddled baby with her shock of black hair. The image is etched in my memory: the three of them backlit in my grandparents’ bed, a flickering halo of joy.

Twenty years later, I prepared for my first labor with yoga, Conscious Pregnancy classes, Hypnobirthing, and voracious reading of natural childbirth books. I read Frederick Leboyer’s Birth Without Violence, Sheila Kitzinger’s A Celebration of Birth, and Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin. An internationally renowned midwife who lives on a commune in rural Tennessee, Ina May was my prime source of information. At “The Farm,” hundreds of babies are born peacefully at home and the women don’t feel pain, they feel pleasure, becoming ecstatic—often orgasmic— during the act of birthing. They have oceanic “surges” and not contractions. What a beautiful dream.

With hindsight, I wonder why no one steered me toward a more balanced literary selection. But I didn’t want to read anything negative or hear any stories about abnormal labors or medical intervention. I thought because I was a yoga teacher and an athlete, because I exercised daily and practiced my breathing exercises, visualizing my cervix opening like the petals of a dark-pink rose to make way for my baby— I would have the natural birth I wanted.

“Birth is not something that you do,” said my doula, years later. “Birth is something that happens to you.”

But during pregnancy I believed I was the author of my destiny. I didn’t understand that childbirth involves luck, not just diligent preparation or some innate ability to open. My athlete’s experience of being in control of my body hindered me, rather than helped, when I needed to surrender to labor.

Years later, I’m still working on letting go, finding acceptance. The more I can make peace with my c-sections, the easier it will be to tell my daughters their birth stories. (To be continued, next column.)

Tags:   birth trauma · c-section · cesarean birth · Ina May Gaskin · Sheila Kitzinger1 Comment