Delivering Again after Trauma: A Birth Story

corasnuggles

The day I delivered my firstborn was, hands-down, one of the greatest days of my life.

It was also a little traumatic.

I don’t use that word lightly. In fact, I didn’t use the word “trauma” to describe my first birth experience — and the weeks that followed — for a very long time.

Because for one, it seems to me that all childbirth involves some trauma, even if it goes perfectly. (I mean, does squeezing a bowling ball out of a tube of toothpaste ever really go “perfectly”?)

But more than that, I used to think it unfair to describe an experience that ended with me holding a beautiful, healthy baby as anything but wonderful.

I absolutely would not trade that day for anything — not the dreaded but necessary Pitocin, not the faulty IV attempt, not the epidural that didn’t work until the third try, not the concerned face of my doctor calling in extra help for “rare tears in hard to reach places,” not spending three hours post-delivery in stirrups (yes, three hours), not handing my fresh newborn off to my husband as I was wheeled to the Operating Room where two doctors worked together to try to repair the damage and stop the bleeding, not the weeks of restrictions while I tried to adjust to being a mom for the first time, and not the anxiety that layered like a cloud over the joy of caring for my son during those early months (anxiety I would not recognize as partly linked to my hard delivery until years later).

The sweet boy I met that day is one of the best gifts I’ve ever received, as was the care of many doctors, nurses, family, and friends who helped me heal. But I can say now with more confidence that the process of getting him here was hard on me.

***

When I found out I was pregnant with our second child, I wasn’t necessarily scared of labor (unlike my mom, who cried when we told her we were expecting again, and not the happy sort of tears), but I approached the process with more reverence than before, the way a person does after they have lost their “birth innocence,” as my doctor calls it. I was simply thankful I had healed; glad I made it out with my uterus still in tact and a cervix that could carry another baby.

Still, I hoped this time things would be different.

So when my due date showed up, I felt discouraged — and not just because I was 40 weeks pregnant and the size of a woolly mammoth. My first labor had started with an induction (for good reason), and I was desperately hoping to avoid it this time. Yet I simply could not picture things happening any other way.

The night of my due date, my husband and I were able to get away on a quick date, and as we drank shakes at Winstead’s and then walked around the Plaza, I lamented what I assumed was inevitable: I’d be pregnant forever, have to get induced, experience the same trauma and recovery, and feel underwater for approximately the next year of my life. The hospital where I planned to deliver was just down the road, and I joked cynically (the only way you can joke at 40 weeks pregnant) that it was too bad I couldn’t just go into labor right then and there.

Instead, we went home and went to bed.

A few hours later, as the clock ticked into the early hours of the next day, I woke up feeling regular rhythms in my back and stomach that felt nothing like labor, but seemed at least worth a call to the doctor. Soon, we were on our way to the hospital “just to be safe.”

Much of the early morning hours that followed are a blurry haze, while other moments are recorded in my mind in vivid detail…

There’s the moment in triage where my husband is settling in for a long night with an episode of Friday Night Lights on his phone, when I have the first contraction that feels like the “real deal,” and I snap at him: “Turn it off and focus.”

In another moment, the nurse comes to escort us from triage to our delivery room when my contractions start coming hard and fast, as though the baby was out for a saunter and suddenly spotted the finish line. Is my body actually doing this? It’s all happening so quickly.

What seems like seconds later, I answer “yes,” very decisively, to an epidural. It is part of my labor plan this time, in case I experience the same type of damage as before. But as the needle enters my back, I have a massive contraction with the urge to push, and my nurse has to bear hug me to keep still: “DO. NOT. MOVE.”

“Yep, we’re having a baby!” the doctor chimes only minutes later. All at once I think, “Why didn’t I just push her out?” and “Thank God I got the drugs!”

Soon, I’m pushing, completely overwhelmed by how hard this part is – even with the epidural setting in. How did I forget this? And are my insides currently ripping into a thousand tiny pieces? My body has taken over; I have lost control. At some point, I tell my husband to start praying — pray my cervix doesn’t tear, pray she gets here okay. I think mostly about the baby. I just want her out. I pray with every push, ask for help with every deep breath.

And in the greatest moment, I hear my daughter cry.

I will weep each time I recall that sound later, but for now I am too stunned to cry with her. I only know to accept her into my arms, feel the whole weight of her body on my chest, and marvel that she is here. Sweet gift of flesh in seven pounds and fourteen ounces.

Suddenly, I do not care if my body has been destroyed or if I have to walk through another long road to recovery. It’s true, the refrain so many moms echo after childbirth: the joy is better than the pain.

But the doctor soon makes a happy announcement: I do not have to go to the Operating Room. I am simply free to enjoy my baby girl.

***

As the sun rose that same morning, I was wheeled to a room overlooking the exact park my husband and I had walked around just hours before–the place where I had lamented I would never have this baby.

It is hard for me to express how healing the next hours, days, and weeks were for me. It almost sounds silly to say that. But from the uninterrupted hours I got with my girl, to the affirmation from my amazing hospital nurses that what I went through last time was rare, to the way I could get up the next day and stand in the shower on my own two feet, to bringing a baby home and feeling much more joy than fog: it was a gift from God Himself. I mean, I was sort of having fun.

I had healed physically from my first delivery, and I had thought that was all there was to it. Yet I had not understood the ways a more difficult delivery experience had affected me—how it had colored my experience of new motherhood, even subtly, and made me think having babies was all work and no play.

Now, I can name the trauma involved in the first delivery without feeling ashamed or ungrateful. That harder initiation into motherhood has made me more sober and amazed—more aware that having a baby is not a merit badge to earn, but a weighty privilege to accept. And my second delivery has lightened the load, so to speak, and reminded me that life does not always write us the same stories.

It’s true that having a baby can be hard and traumatic, but it can also be fun. More than anything, it can simply be different.

Jenna
Jenna lives in Midtown with her husband and two kids (ages 6 and 4). She has an M.A. in English and too many overdue books at the library. She has been working with writers for over a decade, as a high school teacher, college instructor, and writing coach. She loves good coffee, serious conversation, and not-too-serious fiction.