lafemmedesfemmes, what a gorgeous story!! Absolutely beautiful. Thanks for writing it down and sharing it.
Now, I don't know if UC births are somehow different, but I remember little of the birth of my daughter. It isn't that I surrendered my birthing process - although I was in a hospital, I didn't go in there expecting them to do the work for me or to save me or anything of the sort - but something about needing to tune out everything that goes on in the environment, does this stop you from remembering? Would I remember it more vividly had I not had to detach myself from my environment like that? As it is, I remember things in bits and pieces - I remember the curly red hair of the very kind and competent nurse who was there at the very end. I remember reading the warning label on the bed during a contraction, pressing my head against the wall and squatting down to push, I remember laughing when I said I needed to throw up and a bed-pan was produced. I remember my daughter's head was out and her cord was wrapped too tightly around her neck to remove, and it was cut, and the doctor told me to push her shoulders out quickly. I remember the feeling of tearing, tearing, it was a third degree tear, it was awful, and surprisingly, I remember the feeling even though I can't remember most other sensations from that birth. Maybe the extreme wrong-ness of it? And I remember most vividly looking down at my daughter, fresh out of me (she had started breathing on her own right away despite the early cord-cutting); I remember the crinkles in her forehead, she stared at me with one eye open, wanting to check me out even though the lights were so bright she had to use only one eye at a time - and all I could say was "oh, oh, oh" like an idiot, totally overwhelmed by my daughter.
I did not write the birth story of my daughter. So these are the things I am left with. It seems....empty. My memories of the birth. A few instants burned in my memory, and then the over-all 'knowledge' of the experience, that I had my contractions and pushed her out and it was over. The 'birth-fuzz' that everyone talks about, that I am still not certain we are supposed to have. I would love to look back and see how I felt, see my memories as they were when they were more vivid. In my son's birth story I wrote of how it felt when I pushed, what I was thinking, how the water felt and sounded and how I did this or that or whatever - and it is a much more 'rich' memory.
Any of this make sense? Sorry for the wordiness (bad habit of mine...). I suppose I am wondering whether my son's birth story is richer in my memory because I 'owned' the birth to a greater extent, or simply because I wrote it down and seized those memories back. Those of you who have had a UC - is the memory rich, or is it still covered in labor-fuzz? I mean, we've all heard that you are 'supposed' to forget labor/birth so that you can do it again, but is this is a load of bunk, invented so that we would believe that the trauma done to us was part of the normal process? Or is it something that legitimately happens, that we forget all but a few especially burned-in memories and the overall 'experience'?
We watched some birth videos with my kids yesterday - the first non-tv ones they've seen (so the first where there wasn't blocking out of the important parts). They were so excited. And now they ask all the time if I'm going to have the baby now. When I'm on the toilet (there was one birth that happened mostly on a toilet), and last night I was in the bath and they came running in, clamoring, and I had to dissappoint them (no, no baby tonight, just washing). I wish I could just look at birth with the simplicity they see it - mommy's body will tell her it is time to have the baby, mommy will call them, the baby will come out, mommy will hug the baby and we'll meet him/her. For them, that is all there is to it. They look forward to it with an excitement I could not have anticipated (they have been ready now for months, they are so eager, so worried about missing the event).
Have a wonderful time in NY.
(I CAN'T believe that!)
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