When the Healing Has Begun

Two days ago, on my husband’s birthday, a well-known blogger and advocate for natural birth, breastfeeding, and women’s rights, whose blog is called The Feminist Breeder, had a live homebirth on the Internet to a big baby. I am excited for her and thrilled her homebirth was successful because it shows women in many places across the globe, but mostly in this over c-sectioned United Sates, that homebirth can be done, that women have a right to do it, and that natural birth can be a lot simpler and healthier for baby and mama than interventions.

I’m a horrible blogger, in terms of the “business” end of things – I have only commented on a few (by which I mean less than a handful) other blogs, I don’t network, I rarely “follow” anyone, etc. But I did check in every few days with The Feminist Breeder to see what was up with the birth. The baby was overdue and that made me feel nervous in remembrance of my own birth circumstances, so I checked in periodically, like a lurker in the shadows.

That night, I put my child to bed, which even though she insists she’s a “big girl,” still entails me laying down next to her while I read many stories, usually while she’s nursing, and, when she’s done with “boob,” she’ll “lay on my arm,” at which point I turn off the light and sing her lullabies until I am drifting off to sleep and then I know she finally is, too. I wake up with a kink in my neck around two hours later.

So it was; I woke a little after midnight, rubbed my neck, tucked my child under her covers, and inexplicably, checked my Facebook status updates to see that indeed TFB had given birth. Not live, but a few hours after the fact, I read all the posts from the live birth and watched the few second video of the little (big) baby being born. And then I cried. I bawled, actually. Bawled and bawled, mostly in the bathroom so as not to wake up my husband. Until two in the morning I cried and I woke up with a giant migraine from the stuffed up-ness of my sinuses.

Why all the crying? Because I’m still so damn sad, every once in a while, that my child didn’t come through my body like that. I wasn’t even trying to share my homebirth with the world, and thank god, because I didn’t get it. But sometimes, like the other night, I wonder if I’ll ever really heal from the loss.

I recently finished a book called Poser, My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, which a friend sweetly and unexpectedly sent in the mail. I liked the book, even though it reminded me of how I used to be able to do a lot of the poses mentioned, and how I used to have a pretty regular yoga practice before my child was born, and how yoga is another thing I’ve lost (but hope someday to regain) while becoming a mother. The book describes all sorts of truths about yoga and marriage and motherhood and the effects of Pacific Northwest weather. But one reality I felt the author never addressed was her feelings about having two c-sectioned births. True, in her case, the two babies she birthed had more complications than her own body, and I’m sure the emotion and fear about their survival and wellbeing overshadowed any sense of the sadness from the c-sections. A few times the author mentions the weakness in her “core” from the operations in relation to doing yoga, but otherwise, she kind of glosses over the fact that the c-sections even happened and, more relevantly, how they might have been related to the baby’s complications. I don’t fault or judge this author for not analyzing the c-sections; as I said the babies’ lives at their birth were more emotionally exacting. And the fact that I do analyze my birth experience is probably a product of my own “core” weakness. But while reading, I just wondered how women who have had a c-section can gloss over it. Or ignore it.

The day after bawling about TFB’s homebirth, I received a copy of an email from a friend that she’d sent to our local ICAN chapter about her VBAC story. I read that story with joy, though I pretty much knew the details since I see this mama regularly, but, still, I was glad to read it all in writing. She mentioned at the end of the story how her second child’s birth was such a healing experience for her first and this sentence made me cry all over again because that kind of healing isn’t available to me. My husband and I are not planning on a second child (I’ve learned to never say never) because of our advanced age, lack of space in our house, and the fact that my body would probably completely fall apart with another pregnancy and, moreover, I’d be hard pressed to find a midwife in the world who would allow me to try again with a natural birth after the hemorrhage I had, and I am quite sure I couldn’t go through another c-section. Thus, a VBAC healing isn’t an option for me and while I have, of course, healed a lot from my experience, the fact that I still cry and bawl, and feel such envy and “why me?” feelings about not having a natural birth makes me know there’s still more, after almost two and a half years, much more to be done.

Before I started this blog, I’d done quite a bit of writing about my birth story and my feelings about the outcome, and that writing helped me heal some, but I knew I needed to do more. So when I decided to publicly put some of that writing up on a blog, my intention was to help other women who wonder why they still have feelings, sad and difficult feelings, about having a c-section, especially when those feelings seemingly come out of the blue. And so, two and a half years later, when I still feel those difficult kind of feelings, I write about it in order to tell someone else who’s out there crying, you’re not alone.

All that Matters

The following is the piece I originally wrote in a folder entitled 54 Hours Blog.

Created: Tuesday May 5, 2009, 10:34 a.m.

Of course all that matters is we have a healthy baby girl. This pat phrase is what many well-meaning individuals said to me for weeks after our birth experience, an epic fifty-four hour travail that included over ten hours of pushing, a botched attempt at a vacuum extractor, and then, the inevitable and very unwanted cesarean section where a nurse had to manually shove my daughter’s bruised and battered head back through my pelvic bone just so the doctor could pull her out of me at all. Then, only a few hours after her birth, I hemorrhaged: a nearly-fatal four thousand cc’s of blood gushed out of me like surges in a flooded river canyon, my blood pressure dropped to thirty over forty and nurses and doctors shouted at me to stay with them, stay with them as they pounded on my uterus and stomach while trying to save my life. I remember the baby being snatched from near my breast where she was nursing, then wailing in the corner where her father, my tired, stunned husband who was also crying, held her until a young nurse led them both out of the room. But I lived and our daughter is healthy. And of course that’s all that matters.

A little over six months later, I’m walking around and functioning like any new parent, learning each new day, enjoying my daughter’s sweet laugh, funny faces, and new discoveries, and managing to live on very little sleep. Friends and family members don’t really ask anymore about my health, physical or otherwise. But in my quiet moments, like before I fall asleep at night or when I have some private time alone with my journal, or during one very intimate moment with my husband when we made love for the first time without it hurting me inside, I cry, or, truth be told, I sob, because, despite my very best attempt at surrender, and despite my own will and abundance of physical strength, I didn’t push my baby out through my pelvis. I don’t know how other mothers who’ve given birth by cesarean section feel, but for me, having my child cut out of my abdomen has left me bereft. In the space where she should have traveled through, I feel a constant blankness, a sad unfinished length, a dark place abruptly interrupted, like a life cut short by an early death and the unanswerable question of what would have been echoes loudly as though in a large empty room.

The medical world told me my daughter’s head was asynclitic, a word I’d never heard before and one, as my mother said, “was a word you wish you never had to learn.” They explained to me my baby’s head had been askew inside me, like she was pressing her ear against my cervix to listen for wolves outside the door rather than heading out soft-spot first. The sharp bump on the forward right part of her head and the red, raised, jelly-like caput from the vacuum extractor on the back left part of her head showed me exactly the angle at which her head had been tilted.

In the first raw weeks of being a mother, one afternoon while my sweet swaddled daughter napped in her crib, I looked up asynclitic, but couldn’t find the word in my dictionary. I flipped through the thin crinkly pages of my giant book and tried all kinds of different spellings, but no version of the word existed that I could find. The dreary November sun faded in the sky from my window. I cried and felt again my failure. I couldn’t even find meaning in a word.

In those early months of my daughter’s being, no matter what anyone told me, I believed the challenges of our days had a lot to do with the asynclitic nature of our birth. I worried that, out of pure self-will, I had pushed too soon and forced her head askew and now I suffered the consequences. In the middle of the night, almost every night, my daughter woke from a deep sleep with a piercing, devastating cry and I thought for sure she dreamed nightmares of being stuck inside my pelvic bone. I’d go to comfort her but because of my hemorrhage, my anemic body felt more frail than I ever imagined it could. As I plodded to her crib, my arms felt too weak to lift her over the railing and I fretted I would drop her on the floor. My exhaustion, on top of the reality of only a few hours sleep here and there, caused me to break down into tears in random moments. In reality, my baby probably fussed and cried like any newborn, but in my mind, I couldn’t help but attribute our difficulties to our difficult birth experience.

One morning, in a state of sadness at the reality of my daughter’s birth, I wrote a poem, one of those poems that appears like a blessing out of nowhere. The poem was about the myth of Scylla and Charybdis, those Roman nymphs turned monsters that give us our proverbial “rock and hard place” analogy. In the poem, the mother/speaker acknowledges the difficulty of the infant stuck between these terrible monster-rocks, and she wants only to soothe her child. Writing the poem helped begin my healing and I was grateful to the gods and muses that allowed me the gift of creativity. Afterwards, I felt more relaxed and more connected to my daughter. But I still wasn’t fully the mother I hoped I would be.

Since that poem, I have been trying, rather desperately, to write another one because I feel an urgency to heal more quickly in order to be more present for my daughter. But between diaper changes, laundry loads, and tummy time, I have not yet found another metaphor that works. Finally, it dawned on me that perhaps the gods and muses don’t have another metaphor for me. Perhaps what’s needed is to examine the words themselves. Sometimes, for me, the origins, the very roots, of words can help make sense of my experiences by literally grounding me in the language.

For starters, I go back to asynclitic. Surely by now my mind has defogged and the rawness of motherhood has eased into enough of a lifestyle to help me re-see more clearly. I look up the word again in my dictionary but, alas, it is still not there. So, I think back to my days of Latin classes, break the word into pieces, drop the “a” prefix,” change the suffix and find its origins in the word synclinal. Syn, from the Latin sun, from the root ksun, is a preposition meaning “with or together,” as in “in synch.” Clinal is a suffix meaning sloping at the same angle, the root of which is keil, to lean, with derivatives including incline, decline, recline. Synclinal as a full word means sloping downward from opposite directions to meet in a common point or line. In geology syncline means a fork in rocks in which the rock layers dip inward from both sides toward the axis. According to Dictionary.com, synclitism is the condition of parallelism between the plane of the pelvis and that of the fetal head. If I add the “a” to make asynclitic, I see now more clearly: my baby and I were not parallel, not together, and not dipping inward toward the same axis.

When I wrote the Scylla and Charybdis poem, I hadn’t known the roots of the word asynclitic had to do exactly with geology and slopes and layers of rocks. To find that out now lightens my heart, again being validated, that words have meaning deep within our experiences before we even articulate them.