Shame will keep us in all kinds of prisons if we let it. It will keep us from those we love, and who love us. Your little girl just wants YOU.” -Phyllis, Call the Midwife
Irene’s birth story feels like the story of how I became myself, as I can hardly remember who I was before I was a mother. But unlike some mama’s stories I hear, for me the process of growing into motherhood took many months… versus instant love and belonging when you first hold your baby. I was 20 and only married (and sexually active for the first time in my life) for 10 days when Irene was conceived. To be a mother to lots of happy homeschooled children had been my lifelong dream, but when I felt the first buzzing of a new energy inside and knew she had “happened” even a week before I could pee on the stick and know for sure, I felt my stomach dropping in fear like there was no way I could be ready YET. It was such a shock to the system. For the first few months of pregnancy I felt in shock. Shock at my new life, marriage, home, role, and identity. I felt excitement but also it felt like God had made a mistake, shouldn’t He have given a baby to someone a little more ready, and looking back I think I felt a little angry. Shouldn’t I have had a role in choosing when to become pregnant? I had foolishly thought that conception couldn’t be as easy as all that, and that though my husband was ready for babies as soon as we left the altar, I wanted a few years for “myself.” Life went on at breakneck speeds and emotions went flying crazily. I didn’t give a lot of thought to my baby because there was so much else to do as a business owner and new wife, and I was still growing into my new life. I bought only 2 little onesies, and saved the baby’s room as the absolute last thing to set right in my homemaking efforts. The only mental preparation I made was to read Ina May’s guide to Childbirth and I was really touched and inspired by the birth stories. I read some to my husband and I thought, wow birth sounds really amazing if it’s intervention free. But I still had my plans for a hospital delivery at my little country hospital with the doctor who I had known my whole life. Pretty soon I was in third trimester and nothing had been done to prepare for baby. I started to worry and I spent all of one day painting her (we did not yet know who she was, boy or girl) bedroom yellow. The next morning my husband and I had lazy morning sex before he went to work. He kissed me goodbye and left me on the bed snuggled up. When I got up to go to the bathroom I felt like there was more liquid than there should be coming from my vagina. As I moved around more fluid leaked out and I knew something was wrong. We rushed to hospital and a swab tested positive for amniotic fluid. They told me “your baby is coming early. Maybe today” and called a hospital with a NICU “32 weeks gestation, ambulance transport.” I was terrified but sat silently as they internally examined me for dilation. Had I known what I know now I would’ve screamed at them “what the hell are you doing” but I hadn’t spent my pregnancy researching birth and best birthing practices like I should have so I was quiet. They put me in an ambulance and I tried to keep my body still and relaxed as it jolted me on the metal gurney. Every time I braced myself against a bump my stomach tightened and more water spilled out. When we got there I was installed in a comfy hospital room and internally examined again. No dilation. And an ultrasound showed enough fluid for baby to still be ok in there. Which meant that I should remain on bed rest for as much more time as my body would allow to keep her gestating as long as possible. My husband showed up with a bag of my things, but he could only stay an hour before he had to go back to open up our coffee shop. I was left alone for 9 days. I read a lot of the Bible. Listened to music that made me cry. My family couldn’t even come visit they had emergencies of their own. I had no idea of what was expected of me when this baby was going to come, any vague picture of how I was going to birth and how I was going to become a mother had totally disappeared in my unfamiliar surroundings. I felt like a lost child, not a confident mother. Even though none of them made me feel bad, I felt like I had to justify to each new nurse on each shift change how it was perfectly acceptable to have a new husband who was too busy to be with me, how I was old enough to do this, and would always drop the words “honeymoon baby” as if them knowing that this baby was conceived in marriage and love would somehow be a band-aid on my injured dignity. On the 9th night of hospital stay, I felt sore in my uterus. I told my nurse and she ordered blood tests, which indicated that the internal examinations had given me a raging uterine infection and both I and baby were probably sick. Baby needs to be born tonight they said, and hooked me up to Pitocin. I was texting my husband as this was happening, and he began to prep for the hour drive to where I was. But before he even could leave, the baby’s heart rate on the monitor took a plunge down to the 70’s and all hell broke loose. More staff ran into the room. They had me flip onto my hands and knees and stick my bottom in the air to try and give baby more room. Her heart rate was So….slow…. and it was so scary. Then it stabilized again and everyone looked at each other. I managed one more text from my upside down position to Andy to come now. Then her heart rate dived again, and again. I was put on oxygen. Emergency cesarean they said. They stripped me, while still in my belly dangling position, shaved me, splashed antiseptic, and catheterized me. I was horrified at my pregnancy hemorrhoids exposed to all in the room. Listening to her slow beat. I was completely not in control, and I knew no-one in the room. No-one was talking to me except for one nurse out of the maybe 15 people (felt like it, maybe there were less) who kept saying “I’m so sorry Laurel I’m so sorry.” I was covered with a sheet and wheeled down the hall, and right before the operating room door opened my mom rushed up and grabbed my hand and said something I don’t remember. I don’t know how she got there before my husband but she had apparently started out as soon as I told her they were running blood tests. Then she was gone and I was in the bright white operating room. Everyone speaking over me and none of them to me. They were so fast. And they had to be because her little heartbeat hadn’t picked up speed in so long. I remember telling my baby please live I hope I see you when I wake up. I hope I am alive when I wake up. They laid me flat on my back. The anesthesiologist said something to me and then I felt the slice of the knife across my abdomen. I yelled “ow shouldn’t I be asleep!?” and then I was. When I woke up an hour later I knew she was a girl and I told them her name from my recovery bed, but both my husband and I had missed the moment of her birth. He arrived when she was 20 minutes old and I wasn’t conscious enough to see her until she was 1.75 hours old. When they took me to her I didn’t feel anything. I barely remember anything. I remember being able to see only one tiny strip of her face which was all of her that was not tightly bundled or covered by her hat and CPAP mask. She was 4 lbs and had a cry like a weak baby lamb. When they put her in my arms I wondered if they gave me the right baby. My husband was over the moon but I just wanted to go to bed and have my husband hold me. I left her in the charge of NICU nurses in her little isolette and went to my recovery room. All that night I sweated and raged at the nurse and tossed and turned. I had zero desire to go see my baby. They wanted me to pump and to take out my catheter and to pee but I wanted to be left alone. It wasn’t until 12 hours later that I asked to be wheeled back to visit my child. Looking back, I know I was in a heavy fog of painkillers and that the Pitocin I was given and the fact that I didn’t even have one contraction of labor meant that I had zero oxytocin in my system. After a traumatic experience like that and having had none of the last months of pregnancy to bond with my child and none of the journey through birth and the subsequent hormone high to cement us together…it was no wonder I did not know or love my baby immediately. That first night I don’t think I had even registered deep in myself that I wasn’t pregnant anymore! But I sob and grieve, even now, when I watch videos of those first moments that I missed when Andy found out she was a girl, watching medical staff swarm her and brandish needles. If I went through a trauma, she went through a worse one. She was born into a room of bright lights and loud noises where no one knew her, without her mother’s hands and voice to welcome her. She cried until her tiny voice gave out with lungs that barely operated but she had no relief from the lights and the noises and the pain of multiple tubes and needles in her body. She did not receive any human skin to skin touch until she was half a day old. It breaks my heart into pieces to know this and to regret that I was not more present and able to be a mother, to be her mother, when she needed me. But I look back and I know, I was not a mother yet. I had not birthed, I had had a baby surgically forcefully removed. I had not witnessed her passage into earth and had not experienced the first hours of her experience here with us. I felt only guilt when I looked at her. Motherhood grew so so slowly. I thank God for the caring nurses who filled in the gaps for what I could not do for her during those first days of coming awake from my daze and realizing fully what had happened. My healthy little babe needed 3 weeks in the NICU to learn to eat and to hold her own temperature without a warmer. She nursed like a champ and I held her skin to skin as often as I could, but inside (and sometimes outside) I was weeping all day long. When we took her home she weighed 4lb 15oz. She has physically and mentally thrived since then, never gets sick and surpassed every milestone for the age she would’ve been had she been born term. But I limped through that first year, outwardly holding it together but inwardly bound by shame and fear that I was not mother enough for this rapidly growing little woman. Every time she cried I thought it was my fault. Every time she didn’t want a snuggle or wanted to do something herself I feared she didn’t really love me and that we had never established a “bond.” Even though in every circumstance throughout her short life I have shown up and done my best for her, “not enough, never enough” was my inner voice. But time went on and we learned and grew. Irene turns 3 in 3 months, and now I can say 2 things for certain. I love that girl with all my being. Being her mama is the best thing I am and best thing I get to do. She is bold and confident and doesn’t need me much, I am just doing my best to catch up to her speed of growth and guide her heart with gentleness. Also I know that she loves me. Who knows when it happened, but somewhere throughout the collection of moments that we shared…sleepless nights holding her, hard choices for her well-being, learning from her how weak I am and also how strong I am, eye contact and hand holding…I became her mother. Sometime, somewhere along the path we fell in love and I realized we are enough for each other. I parent more confidently now, trusting my decisions and even welcomed her sister into our family with a lot less fear than I thought possible. Through Irene’s birth and my slow journey into motherhood I gained 2 insights that I never would’ve had if she had been born easily and bonding was blissful. One is, birth MATTERS. Many comments I received during the first year went “well your healthy baby is all that matters.” But no. Your journey from maid to mother matters, because if you think the hard part is the labor it’s not true. The hard part is what comes afterwards, and you have to make your transition into your new role and responsibilities feeling respected, powerful, and able. Coming out of your birth feeling defeated, confused, violated, broken, and like an utter failure, then handed a newborn and told to suck it up and parent, is a recipe for postpartum and familial disaster. I have discovered a burning passion for birth and want to give my life’s energies to protecting women’s rights to their own birthing choices and wisdom. The second is… Love is not just about fireworks and instant love. Some love relationships start like that. But some grow slowly and burn steadily. Motherhood is not about the strength of your feelings but about the strength of your choices, and what you do when everything in you wants to run away. Grateful beyond belief to have been taught these things. I am a better mother for the lot I was given, and Irene is beautifully who she is because of it all.
Laurel from Mount Shasta, Ca
Sister to Sister Birth 