A Work in Progress

I have been conversing via email with my midwife, just trying to work through the issues of my labor and birth. She has clarified for me that the main reason she recommended we go to the hospital is that DD had not descended, and she did not believe she was going to. She did not want to risk undue exhaustion and perhaps infection (which can be fatal) by staying home longer. That was helpful for me to know.

There are more issues at hand between us, but that is for us to work out, and I think she was doing what she thought was best. There is really no point in "what could've beens." After all, although there's the chance it could have been better, I acknowledge that it also could have been much worse.

Conversing with my midwife has brought out some issues in in my heart as I wrote to her. I realized they were not really about her, so I decided to write them here:

Three months later, I am happy that whatever happened, DD is a fine and wonderful baby with a very relaxed nature and a beautiful smile. I may not have had wonderful birth experiences (maybe I expected a little too much this go round), but I grow them well and strong! ;) She is a blessing to me in so many ways. The birth is important, but she is much more so. In the end, the days my babies were born were moments that changed my life so much for the better.

I do hope, someday, I can pass some strength on to other women, perhaps as a doula or a childbirth educator, or just as a friend, when their bodies can't or won't or are not allowed to do what they were "designed to do."

That is just a hard thing to come to terms with, that here you can be a mother of two, yet never have experienced that "magical birth." Society doesn't see c-section as a birth, I'm afraid, or maybe it's just in my mind. I don't want to be bitter, but it's so easy to feel like you didn't do what you were meant to do, that you couldn't cut it. It takes a lot of effort to work through all that, and it can be pretty painful (it's painful now but it was much more so in the hormonal aftermath of birth). Without the success of breastfeeding, I'm sure I'd feel like a complete failure with respect to my body's abilities.

I thought I had gotten over that after my miscarriage, but I guess life is always a work in progress.