Rather than experiencing the birth as an empowering moment, Emma felt like a failure.
Transcript
And then it just hit me one day, and I just had an anxiety attack. And then I was like, whoa, I don’t think I’m as good as I thought I was. And this pregnancy was difficult. I was tired, and then I started to feel that shift from one to two, where I couldn’t be with my daughter as much, and then I started to resent being pregnant, and tired and sick, I was sick through my whole pregnancy. And then it was like, OK, now I have to think about being a mom of two. So kind of what brought me that comfort was thinking about how my birth was going to be so empowering this time. I was going to have this beautiful home birth. And, you know I had a midwife, I had the birth pool, I had everything I needed. And I was like, no, I got this, I’m gonna rock this birth, I’m gonna come out the other side, I don’t have to worry about my postpartum, because this birth is going to just change everything for me.
And that didn’t work. I ended up having an emergency C-section, and my son was taken to the NICU. And I was so frustrated and angry at my body. And I was, I felt like a failure, you know. And one thing I remember thinking on the recovery bed was, what am I going to tell my mom? And I think that speaks a lot to the birthing culture of how much we put on ourselves as women, to carry, like somehow we fail if it’s not this perfect way, or if it’s not exactly how we planned, that we fail, but we didn’t fail. You still did it, your body did an amazing thing. And I mean, in that moment, that was the last thing I would hear. I had my doula there with me and everything she said, just went in one ear and out the other and just – this guilt, just started building and building and building and building.
And you kind of go into that survival mode pretty quickly, of OK, what do I got to do to get my son out of the NICU? OK, so every day, I’m in there, trying my best to get him. What can I do? How can I help? How do I get breastfeeding going? And then he was out of the NICU. And it was like OK, now we can move forward, but then you still have this birth trauma that’s kind of replaying in the back of your mind. And it’s that elevator music that just kind of sits there and you have to listen to it involuntarily and it’s playing over and over as you’re simultaneously taking care of this baby. And he, from the get-go, he would not sleep [laughs]. So that really impacted me a lot.
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