My story starts before I even began labor.  On a nice, sunny fall day, September 28, 1996 to be exact and I was 21 yrs old, pregnant with my first son.  I was spending time with my husband, his mother and younger brothers, when one of them noticed my feet were really swollen.  His mother suggested I go to the hospital, just to be safe.  Although I felt perfectly fine, she had 4 babies and I was working on my first and quite frankly was ignorant to the whole process of giving birth, so I went in.  The visit was pleasant enough because the wait wasn’t long before I saw a doctor and he thought everything was okay.  He was pleasant and even joked that surely after laying eyes on him, I would go into spontaneously labor! “But”, he said,” just to be sure you go into labor lets check you”.  I didn’t know what that meant, and I certainly didn’t understand why when he “checked” me it was so much more uncomfortable than all the other times I’d been checked.  Of course now I know that he stripped my membranes, without even telling me what he was doing, let alone getting consent.

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I was checked, I was 8cm and I was in pain, but still surprisingly manageable.  Once I was checked I was told I needed my water to be broken.  Again, I asked if that was necessary, and I was told, by a male doctor I’d never even seen before, either they break my water or I can go home.  No joke, I was actually told that.  I looked over at my ex-husband, helpless as I was laying there with legs opened and this guy frowning at me, my ex looked even more helpless.  Of course, before I even had a chance to respond, he broke my water.  I remember my feelings being hurt, but then I got a contraction and that contraction felt monumentally different from any I’d felt before.  I couldn’t relax during it as it did before, I was tense and hurt.  But after getting sick twice, I was told it was time to push in less than 2 hours of being in that hospital bed.  And so I began to push.  All my efforts were focused on just getting this over with so I get the hell out of this unpleasant cold place.  I really wasn’t thinking, I can’t wait to see my baby, I can’t wait to hold him, I want the pain to end, I was thinking, I want these people away from me. And then I heard my good friend who was present at my birth say something like, “Do you know she is going to cut you?”  Some other doctor, a woman this time, I’d never meet was giving me an episiotomy, something I knew I didn’t want, without so much as telling me what she was doing.  I pushed my son out in less than 20minutes.  He was 8lb 8ounces, laying in the warmer, and for the first 10minutes I had no interest in him at all.  I wanted her to stop tugging at me like a piece of meat, while she was stitching me up.  I wanted all my attendants to leave, and I just wanted curl in a ball and go to sleep.  I didn’t nurse my son for 12 hours or so.  I thought at the time, I was just tired.  But as weeks, months and years went by, I knew it was more than that.  I felt violated and instead of anger or tears, I retreated within myself.  The sheer beauty and pride of having birth my son, and his total reliance on me is why I didn’t sink into a depression about it.  And I think all the time how tame my story is compared to other women.

Thank you to P.B. for sharing her story with us.