In the first few weeks after the delivery of my son, I wasn't really watching a whole lot of television anyway, because I would have just fallen asleep on the sofa or fallen back to sleep in my bed, because I was, like all or at least most new parents, exhausted and trying to learn how to function, but you would think over 4 months down the line I would be able to lift that ban now? Well, not really.
Whilst I'm sure there would be a lot of people who would look at my situation and call me lucky, I did experience a level of birth trauma that I'm finding it hard to navigate. Whilst it wasn't the whole thing of being rushed in for an emergency C-section where the surgeons are racing against the clock to make sure the baby, me or both of us are not in danger, it doesn't mean it was easy, or an experience I want to repeat, and there are a lot of times where I feel like the situation I was in, the stresses and worries and circumstances, basically robbed me of the birth that I wanted and the impact that that had, especially early on, was huge, but it means that watching women in labour on TV programs is hard, and watching storylines about people experiencing complications is even harder. I know it's worse at the moment because even though our little guy is sleeping pretty well for a still pretty small baby, I'm not sleeping properly and I'm not a hundred percent sure as to why, but lack of sleep always means I have more of a hair trigger for things like this, so I've been having to ask my partner to mute things or skip through scenes, because I just can't cope with them right now.
It's the sort of thing that people tell you gets better with time, and I honestly hope that it does, but I think it's not just time, but distance, and distance requires not poking a wound, even a mental one, whilst it's still fresh and open and healing, so for now, I'm trying not to poke it by staying away from things which remind me why it hurts.
