Therapy and Grief

An old friend sent a message via Facebook the other day, having read my last post on this blog, and asked if I’d tried therapy to recover from my c-section. At first I replied back saying something like, oh yeah, I’ve tried two different therapists, and they helped some, but I live far away from plausible therapy since I was once a social worker in my small town and know all the therapists here on some sort of professional level, so don’t feel comfortable seeing anyone locally and the commute to the city is too long and so on and so on. And then, later in the night, I thought – what the hell? Is she implying I’m depressed? Do I sound that bad? Maybe my friend meant something else entirely, but still, I read the blog again and thought, maybe I do sound depressed.

I think therapy is extremely useful and a great way to practice self-care – I mean, I get to talk about myself for an hour, what’s better than that? (Writing that makes me realize therapy is like blogging, but with more instant commentary.)

For four years when I was a social worker, I went to a therapist as part of my professional responsibility. A lot of personal growth happened for me during that time, the end result of which was a determination that, though I might have been a good social worker, really what I wanted to do was write and teach people how to write. So I quit my cushy job and went back to work as an underpaid teacher, thusly ending my health insurance and the therapy.

After the birth, when I knew I needed help for my delayed post-partum depression, I sought help from two different therapists, neither of who lived up to the work I did with my former therapist. With one, for example, I just couldn’t quite wrap my head around paying her two hundred bucks to guide me through a personal visualization, even if I did process some feelings. I stopped seeing each of them after only a few sessions. Nowadays, I still don’t have insurance and I’m not teaching at all; there’s just not a lot of money in our house for perks like therapy.

But if I did have the money or insurance coverage, would I go? Actually, yes, I would. Because I think therapy allows for personal growth – it helped me quit a job that was ultimately bringing me down – and helped me discover and uncover myself so that I could be in better service to my community and family by being more content. But I’m sure if I went to therapy, the c-section wouldn’t be all that I had to process about. There’s so much more in my life that’s important – like my desire to actually make a useful amount of money with my writing, in order to show my daughter dreams are possible if we work for them. Or to improve the relationship I have with my husband, which while pretty great, isn’t perfect, like any marriage. I’d probably still have something to say about my parents and what I garnered from them. And certainly I’d talk about being a mother, especially now, being a stay at home mom not earning income for the first time in her adult life.

There are other options for personal growth and healing besides therapy, and I’ve done many of them since my child was born: exercise, massage, eating well, meditation, sleeping, talking honestly with friends and family, and even that woo-woo energy stuff I’ve done with my healer friend. All of it is helpful and the more, the better in order that I can feel serenity and peace when, say, my daughter wakes up at four in the morning, or wakes up before I’m done working, like she might be doing right now as I listen to the rustling noises in the monitor. My point here is even after all that self-care, sometimes I have to cry about having had a c-section. I don’t know if I’m depressed, but I know I grieve. And grieving, contrary to the sound of the “five stages of grief,” doesn’t come neatly or clearly or on schedule.

When I was a social worker, I helped teenagers, “at-risk” teens, whose lives at home were difficult at best, and, more likely, abusive and violent. I remember one time a tough-ass girl stared me down in our group, her hair black, her eyes darkly lined. She said to me with a growl in her voice, “All of this processing stuff is stupid, because we just have to go back home again where everything is the same.” I looked at her dark, sad eyes and said something I learned to say more often: “You have the right to grieve the loss of the childhood you wanted.” She didn’t break down crying nor have a great catharsis but I could see surprise in her face, her eye widened and her tensed lips softened. She also turned quite quiet. She may have been taken aback by hearing she had the right to anything at all.

And that’s how I feel about grief from c-sections: we have a right to it. In our own time, in whatever messy way grief comes. I’m a Pisces by birth and I’ve been a walking nerve ending my whole life; I’m used to crying and feeling feelings even at the silliest of moments, like lately every time I hear India Arie sing the ABC’s with Elmo. But I’m glad I’m sensitive, because feeling my feelings, I think, fends off serious depression, which would be easy to fall into with all the crazy shit happening in this world. I want to be the kind of mother who teaches my girl to know she has the right to feel all the tough stuff – the grief, the sadness, the anger – and if she has to go to therapy to feel all that, fine. Just as long as she gets to experience what waits on the other side: joy.

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.