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| If anyone has insights, wanted to share their story, their path to healing or feelings after birth. |
Eight months ago I gave birth to my first child. I was not uneducated about birth, but looking back I think I was naive, but that is something you can only know in retrospect. It was supposed to be a hospital water birth in a birthing room with midwives. When I got to the hospital I was treated rudely by everyone I encountered, put in a triage room and not allowed to use the bathroom until they were done monitoring the baby's heartrate, then put in a regular L&D room and told that I could not use the tub in this room. I was in very intense pain and I panicked and asked for drugs, nubain, and it took 45 minutes to get it injected. I was only in labor at the hospital for three hours (labor was a total of six hours, really fast for me since I was told that labor lasts a long time for first time mothers and there was no early labor phase for me to get used to things) and so 45 minutes was a huge chunk of that. I was given countless vaginal exams, including very forceful ones that I screamed for the midwife to "get out", I was scolded for screaming and talking which was my way of coping, I was manipulated into allowing my water to be broken (for no reason that I can figure out) and I was given an episiotomy against my screams of protest due to a dropping heartrate in the baby. The midwife was overheard saying "I can't control her" and she said many other rude things to me. The nurses absolutely hated me and were happy to show that fact to me throughout the labor. The fun did not end there as I was then punished for laboring the wrong way (in their eyes) and after my baby was born, though we were both perfectly fine, he was taken off the bed (I didn't even get to touch him) and put in the hospital bassinet while he was poked and prodded for 20 minutes by the mean nurses. They then handed my baby to my husband (whom they all showed ample respect to) who finally let me hold him a few minutes later. He was quickly taken away again as I needed to be stitched up and they wanted to bring the baby to the nursery even though I had been told that rooming in was the hospitals policy, it wasn't in the L&D rooms. So while I was being stitched up and yelled at to relax and given more nubain without consent and being threatened to give me morphine, I also had to fight the hospital staff so that they wouldn't take my baby, who I was hardly allowed to hold, out of my room. I won the fight and two and half hours after he was born we transferred to a birthing room and I was finally helped to breastfeed him, which no one made any attempt to help me with before this time.
The midwife wasn't satisfied with the level of trauma I received during the birth, so the day afterward she made sure to add insult to injury by coming into my room and waking me up to tell me that I labored abnormally and that it disturbed her and she had been thinking about it all night, and insisting I tell her where that was coming from. She basically shamed me at an extremely vulnerable time to make herself feel better.
I didn't have a birth plan, but my wishes were noted on my chart, they just didn't read that. I did have a doula, and she helped me immensely, though there were a few things that we probably weren't clear on that we should have been. I know now that there were things I could have done differently that may have helped, but at the time I didn't know any better and I thought I was doing so much to have the birth I wanted. I just assumed that midwives gave people respectful, natural, empowering births. I had no idea that was not always the case.
I'm curently in therapy with a very awesome therapist who has Mothering magazines in her waiting room, so she is very suportive of AP and knowledgable about natural birth and everything. I have PTSD from the birth (and a childhood trauma which the birth trigured).
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| HOw does this affect the desire for more children, the attachment to the baby? |
I desire very much to have another birth, a homebirth this time with a hands-off midwife. I have the birthplan written and I think about it often. However that is seperate from wanting another baby, I'm not sure yet about that, I am really struggling right now with the one I have. I think it will happen but it may take a while.
I do have some problems with attachment. I am bonded to my baby and always have been, but the guilty feelings I have about the birth crop up in other aspects of parenting him all the time. I of course feel horrible that I exposed him to drugs when I didn't want to, that I didn't hold him right away or ever have any skin to skin contact in those first few days. I feel like a failure at motherhood because of those issues and that hinders attachment to my baby.
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| What is the fathers role in all this? |
He was very supportive for about two weeks and then he decided it was time to move on. He fluctuates between being supportive and humoring my obsessive questioning about the birth, to being angry that that's all we ever talk about. When things are better for awhile he is glad and then when I go through a rough time he gets annoyed that things aren't getting better fast enough. He is also the object of my intense irritability and I harbor a lot of anger towards him for some things that happened during the birth and afterward. He is going through his own depression, and rightly so, as things were traumatic for him too and his expectations of life with a new baby are not what he was looking forward to at all.
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| What ressources does a woman have to help her? |
Find a good therapist. Other than that, I never found anything very helpful. I told people, including a midwife at my six week check up (different one than the one at the birth) that I was depressed and she was very sympathetic, but didn't tell me what to do about it. I had to finally take care of it myself, but by then I had suffered for four months on my own. Friends and family were willing to talk to me about the birth for the first few weeks, but after that people didn't understand my need to discuss it.
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| Do you think just letting it go works or the body remembers and this issues needs to be delt with? |
In my case, I think that trying to let it go would have led to serious consiquences. I know that my body remembers it because if I go to the doctors or dentist I panic. If I drive through the city that the hospital is in I panic.
Also;
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In my mind there are two classes of traumatic birth:
1) where you do everything "right" education, support, etc. and something goes wrong.
2) You go in w/o a full edication/understanding of birth and birth interventions and subsequently make descisions the you wouldn't have had you understood their implications.
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What about the class where you optimistically assume that things will work out the way you planned them, and not only are you faced with your plans falling apart, but you also are faced with the care providers who you thought would treat you respectfully actually treating you abusively? One just assumes that everyone in attendance at their birth will consider it an honor and treat you with the support that you need. Being met with people who where violating me and disempowering me at every turn was a huge shock and greatly added to feelings of trauma about the event.
If anything, it made me *more* attached because I've not wanted to let her out of my sight since I got her home from the NICU. As far as my husband, I feel it was hard for him to try to be the strong one and did not know how to make me feel better, and bitter that his child is the one who had to have problems (he has since made comments when friends of ours had babies that they "get to be the lucky ones"- I discourage this attitude). I feel that no one can truly help anyone who is going thru this unless they have been thru it themselves- but validating and respecting the mother's feelings is important as is not downplaying it and expecting that she will just deal with it and get over it.
Thank you for sharing with me your stories, you path. I will make a copy of this thread for my friend as I'm pretty sure she would like to read others experience with this.
