It's Mom.
You're one year and twenty-six days old today (I checked my iCal) and, bizarrely, I've been feeling increasingly sad about my birth experience. Yes, you were the ultimate outcome and yes, you are my life's greatest joy and most beautiful, brilliant achievement - but the few hours before you arrived were among the most traumatic I've ever had. And I need to think it through by writing it.
So, please bear with me.
1. I feel let down by my antenatal teacher and her posse of lactation and other specialists.
Dad and I took the classes so seriously and, at the time, they made me feel so much more prepared for what was coming. I even wrote to Tina Otte afterwards, to thank her. (Not to mention dubbing her 'Tina the Terrific' in this very blog, which now makes me want to howl with pain...)
How scared I was. How blind. How desperate for any knowledge at all. And how wrong of her, and the industry at large, to never once tell me that no lessons could prepare me. To look me in the eye and say: 'These are my opinions. They aren't the rules. And no matter what you hear, the only thing you can be prepared for is how unprepared you both are. And that's fine. Do what works.'
I lapped up the breast-feeding propaganda and the natural birth pressure. I decided that drugs wouldn't be part of my 'birth plan'. Nor would forceps, vacuums or anything else 'unnatural'. I was ready to do battle with the clinic sisters over formula top-ups. I had my birthing ball pumped up. And I silently judged every other expecting mom who told me of her scheduled Caesar and/or her intention not to breast-feed.
Tina, you told me that everyone can breast-feed. That's a lie. Not everyone can. And the fact that I couldn't, because my small breasts and little breast tissue meant unbelievably low milk volumes, made me feel abnormal and damaged. It made me struggle and battle and half kill myself to pump 10 measly millilitres of milk a night, when I should have been holding my baby instead.
2. I feel let down by my gynecologist, who I referred to in Feb 2011 as 'Jivvy the Genius'.
We'd worked so hard, Dad and I, to build a rapport with Boris Jivkov - starting with leaving my old gynae because Boris had a reputation for being pro-natural birth and the old guy was a Caesar king. We even put up with the 90-120 minute waits in Boris's reception area, every time, because he had such a great manner and seemed to care so much and really talked to us. Both of us.
But all that means nothing when your gynae makes holiday plans for the weekend before your scheduled induction and doesn't tell you. Or doesn't get his staff to tell you. Or doesn't get the midwives he recommended you use to tell you.
It means nothing because, when you do go into labour, two nights before the induction, and you fail to progress after 10 hours, and your baby turns to face up, and an emergency C-section is needed, and you're rushed into theatre sobbing at the loss of your imagined birth experience and stoned out of your mind on the pethidine that you should never have agreed to take, you see a glowering face there that you don't recognise, and she doesn't recognise you either, because she's Dr Bothner, a locum, and she is in a real hurry to get your CS done so that she can get to a bar mitzvah, and she's never seen you before, and still hasn't, a year later, because she never made eye contact. Not once. Not even when she snapped off her gloves and fucked off.
Boris, how wrong of you not to get Sandy or Reggie to give me a call - or actually, bugger it, to give me a call yourself - to let me know that you'd be going away and that, if you happened not to be in town if I did go into spontaneous labour, you had a plan. And the plan's name was Dr Bothner.
3. I feel let down my my midwife, who fell asleep during my labour. And who hurt me.
This little element of the story begins with a friend of mine. Let's call her C. She fell pregnant a few weeks after I did, and - around 13 weeks into her pregnancy - began calling me for advice. One of my first tips was to use Boris. She did. One of his first tips to her was one of the same he'd given me: if you want a natural birth, use a midwife. He recommended a few, but I chose Marilyn Sher - his preferred one.
And so did C.
C went into labour a few weeks early, which happened to be the night before I did. And the result of that was that, by the time I phoned my midwife to tell her labour had started, she'd already been up for 12 hours with C - helping to deliver, via vaginal birth, a beautiful and tiny little girl. Marilyn had a few hours of sleep, and met us at the Parklane, where she subjected me to the most excruciating agony in the form of an internal exam, that I remember now as far, far worse than the contractions at their very worst.
But then, she kept leaving the room. In fairness, my progress was slow. I dilated only one centimetre in four hours. And after the two epidurals failed and the pethidine was administered, I was in and out of consciousness. But Dad had to keep going out to find her - and waking her up to see to me. I felt abandoned even then, in my state.
Baby girl...
I'm so sorry to harp on about what an ordeal this whole thing was, when you are what came from it. When you make it so worth it. But I am only now beginning to realise that it has traumatised me so severely that I feel sick to my stomach at the idea of going through it again.
And that makes me very sad. Because if the people I trusted so blindly to be on my side; the 'team' Dad and I were so smug about, had really been there for me, everything may have been different.
I may still have had the emergency Caesar, but I'd have felt less of a failure for it, and I'd have given up on the battle to breast-feed much, much sooner, and I'd have been less shocked by the strange OB, and I'd have felt supported and cared for by my midwife and maybe I might not have had such severe post-natal depression.
And I think the reason I'm thinking about all of this now is because I'm writing for Living & Loving, about things like hypnobirthing, and I'm hearing and reading the birth stories of people who describe theirs as 'beautiful'. And I'm meeting moms with three and four children, and wondering, 'How could anyone go through birth more than once?' And tonight my heart feels bent and slightly broken.
But I love you. You are worth it. I love you. And tomorrow when we see each other again, you'll smile at me and my heart will feel better. Just like it does every day.
Love Mom x
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