Whenever I hear through the mother’s grapevine that some woman has gone ahead and had a 4-hour labor and a blissful, natural childbirth, I get a pang of envy and regret.

What I would have given for a Butter Birth— a short, smooth labor where everything slides!  It’s not that I consciously want anyone else to suffer through an unplanned cesarean, but hearing other people’s imperfect birth stories seems to validate my own.

There’s an element of Schadenfreude here, and I’m not proud of it: finding satisfaction in the misfortune of others. Someday I may be enlightened enough to hear the details of a hundred Butter Births in Zen calm, but I’m not there yet.

Five months after my first baby was born, I was at yoga class on a much-needed Mommy break. There I ran into another mother, an acquaintance I hadn’t seen since we were both hugely pregnant. We exchanged our babies’ genders, names, and birthdays as we unrolled our mats.

“How was your birth!?” she said brightly, in the middle of the yoga studio.

“Oh, fine,” I lied.

My throat seized up as the memories rushed in. I would never ask another woman this question in public, whether she was a casual pal or a close friend. In fact, I’d endured five days and six nights of stop-start labor, my baby stuck in the posterior position, her head wedged into the diamond of my pelvis. Exhausted and confused, my husband and I grew desperate. After a morphine shot, a Cervidil induction, and a little Nubain to help the excruciating back labor, we’d veered off our planned course of natural birth onto a frightening, medical highway. I was weak from barely sleeping or eating in five days. This wasn’t what I’d read in my books, what we’d rehearsed in Hypnobirthing class.

Then, at six centimeters dilated, I went blind. I literally could not see. In a delirium of darkness, I was diagnosed with severe preeclampsia (pregnancy-induced high blood pressure). There was no choice but one: my husband bore witness to the emergency surgery that delivered our healthy baby girl. I couldn’t see her, but I could smell her. They placed her by my cheek for a moment before they took her away, and I breathed in the warm, sweet, animal smell, both wondrous and familiar.

The flashbacks come as a series of images, small shocks to the brain and heart. Some trauma is so intimate it remains in shadow, unspoken. How could I explain it in passing, three minutes before yoga class? Particularly when I knew that this woman had had two midwife-assisted homebirths? She only meant well, but not everyone can be so lucky.

Since then I’ve learned that some women suffer from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder) after their experiences in labor. The good news is that effective treatments are available, from psychotherapy to craniosacral healing. I’ve worked with a therapist trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a powerful tool for processing trauma. Communal healing is also possible at Birth Circles, where mothers can tell their stories and be heard and validated by other women. These groups now happen near me at Brattleboro Circles of Care at 167 Main Street.

I’ve never been to such a Birth Circle. By the time they began locally, I already had a toddler and a four-year-old, and my window of opportunity for sharing my birth experiences seemed to have closed. I did attend a Blessing Way, a women’s gathering to celebrate a pregnant friend before her transition into motherhood. I drove up to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom to an old farmhouse on a sheep farm, five miles down a dirt road. In the black November night, twenty women shared a potluck feast, forming a circle around my friend Kaitlin.

One by one, they told stories of transformative childbirth, the rite of passage she was about to experience. A doe-eyed brunette described how it felt to push out her baby— how she knew that if she could do that one thing, she could do anything. Was the converse true? I wondered privately. If I could not do that one thing, then could I do nothing? This woman had imagined winged horses with silken reins pulling her son out of her body, those cords circling the earth as she gave birth, connected to all creation.

I sat there on the floor and opened the big book of What If’s I’d written about my own labor. What if I hadn’t been nearly two weeks overdue? What if I hadn’t gotten preeclampsia? Would I then have had the strength and courage to birth my baby naturally, in a rush of transcendent joy and pain?

“What was the feminist movement for, if not to debunk the myth that the ultimate experience of womanhood is pushing babies out of our vaginas?!” demanded one New York friend after I returned, angst-filled, from the Blessing Way. I’d been so consumed in the Cult of Birth that I’d lost all perspective. I felt like a failure, but I hadn’t failed. My baby and I had survived our trauma, and a cesarean had saved our lives. A century ago, preeclampsia would probably have been fatal for both of us.

Two weeks ago, the unthinkable happened when a young local woman and her baby died in childbirth. My heart goes out to her grieving husband, her family. How easily we forget that the stakes are real, and they are devastatingly high.

Midwife Pam Englund suggests that women stop using the word “c-section” and instead say “cesarean birth.” This way we are participants in the act, not cross-sections of a torso.

“In the moment before a cesarean birth happens, no one can know all the forces which converged to create that event,” she writes in Birthing From Within. “Our challenge is to live with ambiguity, embrace the birth that happened, and move on with our family into its future.”

Tags:   Birthing From Within · c-section · cesarean · childbirth · PTSDNo Comments