This past friday I had a regular OB visit. I mean that it was regularly scheduled, the visit itself was extraordinary for me. I have had one vaginal birth and 2 subsequent c-sections. One of my sections is considered a "special scar" because of the shape of the cut. I pretty much resigned myself to repeat c-sections. This, I was pretty much ok with, I had three healthy children and tried to consentrate on that. Then my docter said to me, "What about a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean)?" "I didn't think I was allowed" I said back. She talked about my risks of rupture still being small, that I could labor and if stuff didn't go well we'd just do the section, that we could schedule a section and give me time to go into labor on my own and if I didn't we'd just section. This was so cool! I was being given a chance to do something that I had been told wasn't an option... this was so me! So exciting! So everything I live for! So, what did I do? I cried.
I cried, right there on the table. The docter looked patient, the medical student look alarmed. I felt... relieved. It was right there and then that I realized how much my birth experiences meant to me. I said to the docter, "I don't feel disabled anymore. It's like I've been using a wheel-chair and you just told me that I really could walk if I wanted to."
Being human is a very hard thing. You are an animal with either God-given or evolved (or both) intellect. I can feel how important birth is to me, like an animal instinct or an innate urge I can't get rid of - not the amount of births or an urge to keep having births, but the act of giving birth. But I'm intelligent (how much is debateable) and my intelligence plays ping-pong with my instincts usuing paddles called logic and social norms. After the appointment I called my husband at work and sobbed into the phone, I could feel his alarm and first, and then his deep understanding. We don't always get each other, but this, he mercifully gets and appreciates. Second, I called an old highschool friend in Ohio. When I was pregnant with James she wanted to be a mid-wife and now is one of those annoying, amazing people doing exactly what she said she'd love to do and more. She get's it too, and has been my phone and FB counselor.
This weekend I did research on VBAC's and baby positioning and natural birthing... all kinds of crazy shit that I had always been jealous of. In fact a friend of mine had a water birth and hired a professional photog to snap away the memories. She showed me the beutiful scenes of herself laboring over the side of a tub, her husband rubbing her back. I looked at the really tear-jerking black and white of her clutching her freshly birthed baby boy to her breast. I loved it and hated it all at the same time. It's a weird feeling, really. I thought of my own photo's of my c-sections... my head in a blue cap with some random nurse holding the baby to my face. The photos that my husband took when his curiosty and sense of humor got the best of him and he snapped away at my cut open abdomen and uterus while the docter gave him an up close and personal anatomy lesson... my baby on the warmer and me on my side of the curtain hanging with my new best friend, the anesthesiologist, thinking, "Is this really happening right now?"
I also read about how healing and empowering birth after a c-section can be. Just reading the words "healing" and "empowering" made tears come out of my eyes. "What the hell is going on?" I thought. Then I went and had a tearfull talk with my husband. I told him that I hold some blame for a family member for my bad birth experience with my second. That baby was breech and I was scheduled for a version (turning the baby). But he was born pre-term and low birth weight... both a sympton of mental stress on the mother. This family member was relentless during the last months of that pregnancy putting pressure on me about everything she didn't like... a big one was the location of the nursery and if there was lead paint in the room. She laid guilt trips on my husband and even called my parents about it. Another family member got so so worked about it that she screamed at me at family function. I cried and we left early. It was a miserable pregnancy and c-section, and I blame this person. And it snowsballs in my brain... if she hadn't gone out of her way to stress me out, I wouldn't have had pre-term labor, and I could have prevented a c-section. Then little David wouldn't have been a c-section and he wouldn't have been in the NICU for a week and I wouldn't be overly-angry at every small idiotic thing that this person does. I don't know how much she really is to blame, but I do know that James and David where full term, normal sized babies... and those pregnancies weren't made miserable by her.
So, I realize that I have issues - anger, sadness, blame, jealously - and I want to feel healed and empowered like those VBAC woman. So, now I'm researching doulas and working on making my perineum (the nice word for taint) strong. I'm going to indulge my animal urge to birth this kid like a cave woman. I want to be like our first human mother Eve, birthing her sons outside the Garden of Eden, probablly squatting against a tree. I want to feel her pain, and her joy, and when it's all over I'll request an apple and take a satisfying bite.
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