To Leave "Well Enough" Alone,

I'm so on the fence about this right now that the best I can do is write it out and then see how I feel after it. 

Recently, in order to have my son, I had a C section. The actual procedure went relatively smoothly, but everything around it emotionally has been a total rollercoaster, not least because it happened almost immediately after the announcements of the NHS birthing statistics and the noise around the fact that the number of cesarian births in the UK now outnumbers spontaneous (unassisted) vaginal births. I call it noise because that is how it feels to me. A lot of the voices involved seem to be whipping up a frenzy which is so unnecessary and it seems that there are those endeavouring to cause more tension and division rather than address tensions which already exist, and accept that how a person gives birth shouldn't matter to anyone other than that person, their partner and their close family, unless we're talking about medical coercion in maternity care, where the vulnerability of the patient is exploited in order to make life easier for staff involved. 

I've been speaking to my midwives and my partner, my family and a few of my mum friends about the experience of it all and how I've felt about it, and had I already moved to the hospital closest to me I would have an appointment in a specialty clinic where one of the midwives goes through your medical notes with you, discusses the things that happened and helps you to understand what was done and why. As things stand, I don't think the hospital I gave birth at does these type of appointments, or if they do, I've never been told about them.

Whilst my partner and I have discussed that things could have been a significant amount worse for me, for us, for our son, I still struggle to accept what happened and there is a lot where I feel like it was my own fault, for going forward with the induction initially, and then for agreeing to something I knew I absolutely didn't want, but at the time I had to make the decision I was stuck between two really crap options, and even before I decided to go through with the induction I was stuck between a couple of crap options, because I was in a lot of pain and struggling to walk, struggling with sickness and struggling with all of the emotions that came with all of that.

I have been trying to give myself the time to write my way through what happened, partly to process it, partly because there are some parts that I want to remember, like the first time I got to hold my son, but there are a few that I don't really want to remember, and those are the bits that are stuck in my head. Things like the details that the surgeon was discussing with his junior feel like they are imprinted into my memory, and those are not the memories I want from when I was watching my partner holding our boy and going through all of the emotions you go through when you become a new dad. I have struggled a lot to find the time to go through all of this, and also to prioritise it because when I have time I just want to spend it sleeping, because I'm still recovering from the C section and also trying to get through the newborn era and take as much of it in as I can, because I know he won't be this small forever and even if we were to do something crazy like have another one, it's not the same, because at whatever point we have another (if we do, or if we can) they'll have a sibling, and our eldest will still be doing things and hitting milestones and needing attention, so it'll never be just me and a baby this small again. (Obviously I mean my partner, our baby and me!) 

So the question I have been considering is whether it's worth me keep trying to go over everything, especially as the further I get from the date that it happened, the hazier it all gets, is it worth trying to go over it all or am I better leaving it alone and accepting the fact that there will always be some difficult moments in the memories of the day my son came into the world, but that probably would have happened even if he had arrived according to the plan that I had been so attached to. I would hope that I can find a way to talk to him about it that our son knows that it's not anything to do with him, but obviously he needs to be a lot older for that, and I would have to find the age appropriate way to discuss it with him, but I'm not sure how I do that without some guidance or some help, and I think that has to mean going over it with a professional when I can. The other important thing is if, and it's a big if these days, we decide to have another child. Prior to having our son we had definitely intended to have at least two, and one of the things I said, though it might have been just from sheer terror, or sadness, or disappointment in the 'experience', was that I didn't think I could do this again. I know it's a bit of a cliche that women say they don't want another child after they've just had one and it's only as they get a bit of distance from it and as their hormones tell them that they want another, they forget how bad it really was.

I guess the important thing to remember though, or one of the very many important things involved in all of this, is that whilst I'm calling myself "well enough" I'm not. I'm still hormonal which is normal, but then I have random crying episodes that are more to do with the details of what happened and whilst they are affected by hormones, they are still a problem in and of themselves and not addressing them means they can affect me, my partner, our relationship, our child and our family in general, so even if it's uncomfortable or inconvenient, even if trying to find the time is difficult and it doesn't happen overly soon, I think it's important that I actually spend the time to get myself right with what happened, how it happened and if there's anything I need to do to address any of it, because if I don't do it now, or when I can, that doesn't mean that it's going to be going away. 

Ready or Not,

A few weeks ago, on what was to be my last midwife visit, the midwife told me that the amount of pain that I was in was enough of a reason for the consultant to consider booking me for an induction, because at the point I couldn't walk properly, I couldn't climb up onto an exam bed that had been lowered to the very bottom of its settings, and I couldn't climb off it again either. What started out as 'just a bit of pelvic girdle pain' had got so crazy that when I tried to sit down on the sofa or get up from the sofa, there was a lot of pain, there was noise and I felt like I couldn't go on with it, especially not if I ended up going to 42 weeks. 

Obviously, I discussed it with my partner. My mum had been with me for the appointment and I'm not sure if she was shocked by the idea that that was where we were at with it, but my partner was a bit surprised, because he's never had a child before either and a most of his friends aren't parents yet, so he didn't know it wasn't normal. When we discussed it, the most important things were, of course, the baby's health and mine, but it wasn't a point that he had thought we would get to at the time we did either, because it was on the early-ish end of when inductions are considered.

When we finally got to discuss it with the consultant a few days later, we discussed a couple of dates, and eventually were able to go for the soonest one, but it didn't give us a lot of time from when we had the appointment with the doctor to when we would be going in for the start of the process. (It was still about five days, but that was less time than we might have expected.) Obviously when we walked out of that appointment we felt in a very different position than we were when we had walked in, even if we had had a clue that that was how things were going, but it was very much like a firework up the backside that our little man was going to be here soon and we had a few things we needed to do. 

We've not been too pressured about things like sorting out his room, because we know that he won't be sleeping in there fore a while, but we do know that we're going to want to be spending a lot more time around the house as opposed to doing things like tip runs and taking the rest of our stuff out of the storage unit. We've been trying to get everything back to the house, but without it being a complete a total mess, and so that we can still get one of the cars into the garage as well, so that she has a chance to dry properly before we put the winter cover on it. 

As though five days before going into the hospital wasn't enough of a countdown, as we were getting through the weekend I realised that I wasn't just having contractions, they were quite strong and seemed to be getting closer together. Sadly they didn't seem to stay that way, and eased off again just as we were really getting to the point of thinking about what we really needed to get done before we were leaving for the hospital. It really put the question whether we were ready for the baby to arrive yet, and honestly, other than all of the stuff and nonsense of things like, do I have enough snacks for the time in the hospital? Have I packed enough nappies? and really all of the questions that just won't matter when you get there, because there are shops and there are family members who can go running back to the house if it's something that really needs to come from there, we were ready. We were ready to meet him. We were ready to be his mum and dad, even then, even though he decided he was staying where he was for a bit longer, perhaps not realising he was getting an eviction notice soon for the good of my muscles and pain levels. 

Whether I will still feel like we were ready when it gets to the point of this being posted (a couple of weeks after this was written and a couple of weeks after the induction date is booked) is obviously up for debate, but that's where my head is now when I'm drafting this, when I'm still in the life before baby, even if only just.