I’m the mom who struggled with her unplanned c-section

When my son was placed in my arms for the first time, I waited.

I waited for every transcendent emotion people always talk about feeling when meeting their first child for the first time to descend on my exhausted body.

I waited for my body to tingle alive, for a heaviness to settle into my chest as my heart grew in size. For all the purposes I never knew I had to suddenly be realized.

That’s how everyone describes that moment. The moment a newborn is laid across their mother’s chest as they yowl their first cries after passing through her body from one world into the next. I waited for a feeling akin to someone having plucked a star from the sky, its distant light a constant and mysterious companion in much the same way my flesh colored bump had been the last nine months, and handed it to me.

I didn’t fully experience that.

I was too shell-shocked after his birth to have that moment.

I had been awoken minutes before that by a gentle shoulder tap from my doctor, her voice piercing the gray fog that had settled in a cloud over me, floating though tethered by relief. I had a son, she said. She conversed with a nurse who was with her as I tried to distinguish the ceiling from the walls and the curtains from the floor.

On the way back to my room, my gurney wobbled along as ceiling tiles swam past overhead. A few times, my nurse told me to hold my gut as she made a turn too sharply or the wheels of my unwieldy bed skidded against the wall. The thought of touching myself where my incision was felt nauseating as I gently braced my abdomen.

My first moments awake were peaceful, but the last few minutes I remember being awake were filled with unrest. Hospital staff hurried as contractions ripped through me in a cold operating room. There was no time to be afraid of the anesthesia, or think about the what if’s. People prepared the room as I laid there waiting, watching the hands move on a clock on the wall, hearing the radio blare in the background, wanting the entire thing to be over with.

If there was ever a moment in my life, ever an impasse where I might have decided to go back and change my mind about something, it would have been that moment. I had no idea it would be like this, I thought to myself.

When I considered birth plans, I had in mind the fairly typical experience: I would give birth at a local hospital, avoid drugs if I could, not let my labor be augmented in any way.

I felt most strongly, though, about not wanting to have a c-section.

Famous last words.

Afterward, when I first considered everything that had gone on, I realized I had “failed” on nearly every front. I had drugs. I had pitocin. I was induced. And the crescendo was a c-section under general anesthesia.

I thought women were supposed to feel powerful and reborn after giving birth. I felt like the weakest woman who had ever endeavored to have a child.

It felt the most presumptuous thing in the world to be handed a new baby to care for after surviving what felt like my own private war. It was painful. It was terrifying. It was everything I didn’t want. And now, I had my child connected to my skin as we tried to work through the motions of breastfeeding for the first time, and I tried to reconcile everything from the fifteen hours before that moment when I’m not sure I could have told you which day of the week it was.

I had missed his first cries. I hadn’t seen him pulled from me. I didn’t get to watch his first bath, see the first time they slid a knit cap onto his head and wrap him in a froth of knitted blankets. I didn’t know how big he was. How long he was. I didn’t get to experience seeing my husband fold him in his strong arms for the first time as he became a father.

My son was the most beautiful creation I had ever seen, despite every imperfection I was sure I would pass on to him. He hardly cried. He slept. He was a gentle introduction to this parenting gig. I still couldn’t shake an underlying detachment or distance from what should have been the greatest moments of my life.

 I felt the sharp expectation to adapt automatically. I felt like what should have been some of the biggest moments of my life had been stolen from me. I felt like I needed to force some of the instant maternal happiness mothers are expected to have.

Before I was sent home, nurses gave me papers with care instructions for my incision. I would need to clean my wound with a gentle soap and peel the medical tape strips off by the end of the week. The thought of having to actually touch my bare incision was awful. When we got home, I could barely stand to pull out a handheld mirror and check the status of it as it healed. It was a part of my body I refused to recognize.

I didn’t have words for what felt so confusing and almost hurtful about those first days. I knew I should be glad my baby was born safely and that I had made it through relatively unscathed. But that didn’t change the trauma I felt like I had experienced. And I was ashamed to admit it. Mom guilt kicks in early before we even have a name for it.

When I think back on that young mother, I wish I could grab her hand from beside her hospital bed. She must have been so afraid. And she wouldn’t believe me if I told her she was going to willingly go through this ordeal three more times. In that moment, she might not have believed me if I assured her a thousand times over how worth it it was. She just didn’t know it yet. The miracle of chocolate milk rings around tiny mouths. The gift of fuzzy bed head, tiny hand prints on the windows and being so needed and wanted by someone.

I would tell her she wasn’t broken. And that she was going to spend an inordinate amount of time needlessly thinking she was. She would wonder why she felt like she wasn’t like other women. She would wonder why it was this particular thing she couldn’t manage to do. When, truthfully, each parent experiences this reality for one reason or another, at one juncture or another, multiple times. This one just happens to be hers.

There are so many times in our parenting journey where we feel more like a passenger than a parent. We might weather one crisis or another, one setback and then the next, wondering what happened to feeling in command of everything. Because the world expects you to give account for everything and to be in complete control. To be ready to explain yourself when things go awry. To enjoy every part of this motherhood experience without caveat.

For mothers who experience unplanned c-sections, that is one of our first introductions to the frustrating, breathtakingly hard and beautiful terrain of parenting. We wonder if there was anything we could have done differently. We’ll stack ourselves against the mothers we think are more cut out for this than us long before we realize that every parent feels this way about one thing or dozens of others.

It’s our first experience of making peace with our limitations and differences. And the truth is, this parenting miracle never really belongs to us. We belong to it.

And we all have that in common.

 

 

 

 

 

We need moms who talk about it.

I can’t tell you how many mom-related “S.O.S.” signals I’ve sent over the last decade.

Why make one five minute phone call when you can send eight text messages in a row from a Dunkin Donuts parking lot about how you’re going to absolutely lose it on your kids when it’s only 11 a.m. on a Tuesday??

Friends who listen are the lifelines you never realized you couldn’t live without until you wanted to know you aren’t the only mom who has thrown a box of graham crackers across the kitchen because of undiluted frustration and exhaustion.

It’s texts sent at three a.m. even though you know they aren’t awake, or at least they shouldn’t be, but you know they’ll write back at the crack of dawn when their feet hit the floor. It’s conversations spent staring into the rings of your coffee cup as you try to put all the aching you feel into words. It’s having the person whose couch feels so familiar, so safe, you can spill your ugly guts on it and know you’ll be held in quiet confidence.

I’ve tried to funnel my thoughts into words when they feel so tangled it doesn’t seem like they will all come out.

I’ve talked about how scared I was.

How tired I was.

How depressed and anxious I have been.

How unfulfilled I felt.

How detached I felt.

I’ve talked about wanting to cop out of whatever it was I had committed myself to when  I just wanted someone to humor me and tell me it was okay to quit. I’ve lamented over why something happened to me. Why one particular thing or another needs to be my particular burden. I’ve asked a listening ear how exactly does a person parent well while they try to scrape up their shattered dreams and expectations from the pavement?

I’ve talked miles around people’s heads. Sometimes, about the same things over and over again.

And every time I think I’m charting some unknown territory when sharing my fears and failures, I realize I’m surrounded by moms who have walked similar paths to me already. Every time I think, “this conversation, this admission will be the one time someone says they don’t understand. This will be the one that changes how this person sees me,” I’m amazed at how wrong I can be.

I’m amazed at the willingness of some to “go there.” To talk it out. To listen and reserve judgement. To share their own battered hopes and dreams in quiet trust, with the hope of reaffirming someone else’s story that seems to be coming undone at the edges.

I get what it’s like living in this social media saturated world. There are many people out there who are so brave. Who have shared their stories on large platforms, thinking that if it reaches even one person who needs to hear it, then they will have done something akin to moving a mountain: they will have loved someone enough, even a stranger,  to reaffirm to them that they are not alone.

The older I get, the more I write, the more I grasp how much I play things really close to the chest. I realize just how much of myself I don’t share because there’s always the invisible tether of self-consciousness attached to me.

The more the years tick by, the more I work to shed the weight of expectations and decide what I actually really want to care about. Even if I don’t blast every part of me as loudly as I can, I resign myself to thinking that perhaps one day, every secret shame and hurt can be used for something greater than myself. If I can be as brave as the person who reaffirms me, then I’ll be learning how to do something right.

I’ll get there.

So many out there feel the same way. They just might be quieter about it than others. We might just have to look harder to find them, but they’re there.

They might not share every cog in their stories in 800 word posts, or from their seat at Bible study. They might not lay it all out there, at least not right away. They may even seem detached or removed, running cool instead of burning hot. But, oh. Their heart? Their heart beats fast and true and holds an ocean of secrets.

Sometimes, the ones who can change everything with their story are the ones who grasp the hand of some hurting heart sitting across from them, look them in the eye and say, “me, too.” They might just be the ones we never see coming, and sometimes the most common miracle we can experience is the kindness of another.

None of us are perfectly nailing this motherhood thing (or this living life thing.) We are all broken in some way.

For so long, though, many of us have sat longing and lost behind the veneer of motherhood. Wanting just one person who understood the immense sacrifice, the trials, the hurts that come with raising a family to reassure us that we weren’t weak at all. It just really is this hard.

We sat waiting to be understood. Many of us still are. Worried it will cost us something to say, “I didn’t know it was going to be so hard. But I feel alone. I feel scared. I feel detached.”

We need the brave ones, even when they’re quiet, even when they are still a little scared, even when they are the ones you least expect.

Who talk about how they went to counseling. How they take the little white pill every morning.

How they had the most terrifying and vulnerable conversation with their doctor after circling “almost always” on a paper quiz after giving birth just weeks before.

Who drop off casseroles with no expectation of even needing a thank you.

Who answer the phone when it isn’t convenient, and open their doors even when their home is messy, but at least there is a clear path to the sofa.

Who pour cups of coffee or wine and absorb the shock waves of another who is angry, hurting, lost or broken.

Who talk about their child who died.

Who share about their broken marriages.

Who talk about being ashamed.

Who break the silence of infertility.

Who challenge the stigma of miscarriage.

Who open up about their grief.

Who say, sometimes, they think about what might have been if they had made another choice, even if they wouldn’t change anything about their life.

The people who change the world are the people who share the scars of their own world.

And let the light in.

 

 

 

 

 

Tell them while they’re still here

Tomorrow, it will be two years since the day my father passed away.

Last week, it was two years since my grandfather, my mom’s dad, left us, too.

They died four days apart, and we all thought, for just a moment, that the world was going to hell in the strangest of handbaskets. 

I remember being so caught up in everything relating to my grandfather that when I think back on the days before my dad died, I can’t really remember anything significantly affectionate or deep between him and I. Which sucks when you very much want life to play out like movies do.

We’d love to live in a world of goodbyes wrapped up perfectly tight. We would like grief to be neat and contained, the peace of knowing we did everything perfectly in the last moments sustaining us through the messiness of carrying on.

Our last time seeing each other, he was shuffling down the sidewalk in front of my childhood home with a walker. He was going to get checked into the hospital. 

He had battled prolonged illness relating to his kidneys and liver for almost a decade. Nearly every time he needed to go to the ER relating to his illness, he fought us.

He always waited until he practically bottomed-out before he would give in and let us drive him to the hospital, usually at 9 o’clock at night when he finally admitted to himself he couldn’t take it anymore.

Not this time.

I drove over to my parent’s house with the kids in tow to greet my mother who was returning from her parents house for the first time in several days. For the first time since my grandfather died.

We were all heartbroken. We knew we needed each other, but the feat of talking everything over seemed exhausting. We spent time just sitting together, trying to piece everything from the last few days into something that resembled a new but familiar reality. 

My older sister would be driving dad to the hospital to get checked out. This time, he didn’t need to be convinced. He simply gathered what he needed should he have ended up staying for several days. He got dressed. And he waited patiently for one of us to drive him. 

Our hope was that he would be released the day of or before my grandfather’s funeral. I took a suit of his to the cleaners on Thursday.

I picked it up on Saturday.

The funeral was Monday.

That suit is still hanging in my closet, wrapped in cellophane. The ticket from the cleaner’s still clinging to it.

If I had known that would have been the last time I was going to see him conscious, as himself, it would have gone so differently. But, as we all know, we don’t get do-overs in real life.

In the haze of everything, I at least know our words were warm to each other in passing. His trip to the hospital didn’t raise alarm or cause us a heap of concern. This was one of the few times he wasn’t taken to the hospital when we were all in pure crisis mode. It almost felt like a relief in a way knowing he was there, being treated and resting and safe, while the rest of us were trying to support my mother. 

I’m sure he reminded me, again, about picking up his suit, probably much to my quiet annoyance. I probably smiled and assured him I had this seemingly minor detail under control. I remember that he looked gray. And so tired. His own heart hurting, I’m sure, from losing my grandfather. They’d known each other for over forty years. My mother’s heart was broken. He hurt for her the way that only a spouse can hurt for each other.

I’m sure I thought that Monday would come, and then after that we could work on trying to be as close to normal as we were going to get in my family, probably ever again. 

That was the last time I saw him the way I knew him.

That was before a 6 a.m. phone call on a Sunday. My mind an ocean of confusion and sleep in my eyes as I tried to understand what was happening. Things like this don’t happen. People don’t up and die days apart. This wasn’t not supposed to be his time. Not when he seemed…so okay before he left. He was only there as a routine visit. Nothing was really wrong.

I couldn’t find the light switch to flick on to help my brain understand. To help my mind find it’s way to what was really happening. 

I have gone over the timeline of that day a handful of times. It feels like it was so long ago.

It sounds so cheesy when we talk about living each day like it is our last. We know it isn’t possible. We will all have days of groaning and rushing and hectic schedules and flat tires and fights with our spouse and dinner burning on the stove.

Sometimes, we have days or illness and hospital stays, funerals and depression, anxiety and penetrating sadness.

It isn’t possible to live in complete awareness of all we have. Life becomes foggy so fast. And we forget about what truly matters even faster.

We are seemingly at its mercy, at the whim of this endless cycle. Like I said, it’s but a breath. I’ve been a student ever since, to these mechanisms of time.

The way we break this strain of time, though. How we can climb out of its clutches – even if just for moments – is to throw everything open and let love in wherever we can. 

Which is why you should tell them while they’re still here. While you are still here.

I wrote a note to my father a year or two before he passed. I left it for him on his hospital nightstand while he slept. I couldn’t look at him and give it to him. I don’t know why I thought I’d rip apart at the seams if I did. 

He never mentioned the letter, or what was in it. It was all the things I thought I needed to say. We never talked about it together. 

Now that he is gone, there is so much more I wish I could say. I’ve faced down so many days without him. Without my grandfather. My mind ever busy writing a manuscript for them they will never read. The things I wish we could share but can’t. The love that’s trapped with nowhere to go. 

That day two years ago makes me ache. That girl didn’t know that the man she brushed shoulders with on the sidewalk out front was going to leave. 

But I know, at least once or twice, in a letter. At the bottom of a birthday card. On the phone when we exclaimed how good it was to hear each others voice.

In quiet passing. I said it. Not enough. But I did. We both did.

Something. Something that let him know how glad I was that he was here. Something, from him, that said more than that he was proud of me.

And this is how we break the chains of time. By breaking focus from the things that syphon joy from our lives. By helping someone understand how much you love them. By speaking the words out loud to someone who has filled your heart with such love that your life would have been a thousand shades darker if they weren’t there.

By giving someone’s life that much more intrinsic worth and meaning. By telling them you wouldn’t want to do this life thing with anyone else.

You let someone know they matter, and really, you let rays of heaven’s light in. You let divine purpose in.

When we do this, we elevate the things that matter. And the things that will matter one day. When they’re gone. Or when we are gone. It’s the people that prove we were here, the negative space around us shaping us into who we are.

I think about all that often. And when I do, the grayness of death stills. Just for a bit. It’s not the same as if they were here.

But it reminds me that they were here.