My first birth, I was 18 and knew nothing about pregnancy, or birth, or breastfeeding. I happily got induced at 41 weeks with cytotec. Crappy labor that accomplished nothing, and I wound up with a c/s for fetal distress and ftp (never dilated. At all. In 9 hours of labor). Honestly it never bothered me until I started getting in to the NCB community. And while I definitely regret my willful ignorance regarding pregnancy and birth, I also regret letting other people me feel so horribly about my c/s. When I got pregnant again 3.5 years later, we planned to birth at a birthing center with a cnm. At 20 weeks pregnant, the bc decided they weren't going to do vbacs at the center anymore, and wanted to transfer me to the hospital. I was crushed. I bawled like a baby the whoe 1.5 drive home. It had pretty much been beaten into my head that vbac in a hospital was impossible.
I got the name and number of a homebirth midwife. Dh was really resistant but I basically forced him into it. I did everything "right." I ate my brewer diet and walked a mile a day, I did visualizations (I believed so strongly in them that I was terrified to even think too much about the actual birth visualizations because I was convinced I would put myself into preterm labor). I read all the books and didn't even bother to make a birth plan "just in case" I had to go to the hospital, because that violated the whole concept of positive thinking! I wasn't going to "try" to have a homebirth, I WAS going to have one. I really looked down on women who had hospital births, especially "failed" vbacs with pity and even contempt, honestly, because they were "doing it wrong." They were uneducated and weak and it never, ever occured to me that that could be me again.
Everything seemed okay, other than the fact that my fundus never went over 36/37, even though I went 11 days "overdue." But baby seemed low in my pelvis and everything else looked fine, so the midwife wasn't concerned (big mistake). The first day of labor was really prodromal, irregular contractions. They were regular by the second day, but SO painful I could barely handle it. I spent most of the time in the birth tub crying. I was progressing very, very slowly, so the midwife had us take bumpy car rides over our country roads. It was horrible, every time we hit a bump while I was having a contraction my whole body would seize and all I could do was scream. The baby was posterior and asynclitic and it was so, so horribly painful. The midwife had me on my hands and knees trying to turn her. She did turn some and then it wasn't so painful, but by then I was so exhausted I just couldn't do it anymore. I just hung off the side of the birth tub and fell asleep in between contractions. I remember her checking me at one point and saying I was at 7cm and transition should only take about an hour. Well, 5 hours later I was at 8cm and labor was stalling out. My contractions went very irregular and up to 20 minutes apart. The baby's heart started dropping and the mw said I needed to transfer. The local hospital was full so we had to drive 45 minutes to another one.
The l&d nurse was awful. She was mean and rough. They put me on the monitors and her heart rate was awful. I was only having one or two contractions an hour by that point (and I had been in labor nearly 72 hours by the time I got to the hospital). So they did another c/s and as soon as she was born she started having seizures. Her one minute apgar was 1 and they took back to the NICU immediately. (The ob was a jerk but the anesthisologist was very kind, I was really glad to have him there).
So long story short she had had a massive stroke at some point in the pregnancy and it left her severely brain damaged (about 50% of her brain mass was completely dead). With how far gone the dead areas were, they figured she could have had it as much as a month before birth, which is probably why my fundal height stayed small (she was only 6.10 at 11 days over due, dd1 had been 8.9 7 days over). It was horrible and heartbreaking and so unfair I could barely stand it. It was even worse when I had people that I thought I could count on questioning me and treating me like I had shamed the whole NCB community by "failing" to have a hbac.
But humbling, yeah. It doesn't get much more humble than being told your newborn might be a vegetable her whole life, assuming she doesn't die first.
It was a hard lesson in the fact that there's no such thing as "control" over birth and that mother nature doesn't give a shit about me or my baby. I learned that advocating for myself and my baby also means standing up against people I otherwise agree with. So when I was planning a hospital vba2c with an ob with the next baby, I was able to shrug off the "you'll never have a vba2c in the hospital" crap and have a great birth. It wasn't "perfect" by the strictest standards of natural birth, but it was MY birth and it was great. And really, that birth humbled me again, because I realized I was still holding to this fantasy that a vaginal birth would "fix" something, would make me somehow "more"...more of a mother, more of a woman, whatever. And it didn't. It was great and I felt fantastic physically, but I didn't love my vba2c baby more than my c/s babies, I didn't bond to her better or faster, I didn't magically morph into some amazing birth goddess. I guess I realized that it's becoming a mother itself that's transformative, not necessarily the process of birth itself.
My birth experiences have really made me a much more humble, understanding person. I don't judge moms when they talk about their birth experiences any more, I believe them and support them.
