Rebirth post-caesarean

Anya Hayes - 24 Feb 16

Much has been said in the media recently about maternity services, and it’s clear that the way your baby comes into the world, particularly your first baby, has a huge impact on the way you are able to approach your new full-time job of motherhood. Whether you can frame the early months in a positive energetic light, or if you feel you’re being washed up on shore and in danger of being pulled out to sea again. Too many women have experienced a traumatic birth – if you haven’t had one yourself I’ll bet you know at least 2 people who have. You can see it in the fact that when offered a forum: a friendly shoulder, a radio phone in or a blogzine, stories come out in torrents, cathartic release of the darkest depth of experience. And yet, birth is a joyous thing, you’re expected to feel euphoric and able to take on the world with a smile on your face. It should be, if not easy, doable at least, for a strong capable woman such as yourself, right? But at its worst, the aftermath of a traumatic birth can leave you feeling really isolated and unsure of your footing. For a lot of first-time mums, giving birth may be the first time you’ve ever been in hospital in your life, or the first time you’ve had to offer your well-planned, controlled, groomed and ordered life up to chance. And this in itself can be a mighty shock nowadays when we’re so used to the illusion that you can plan things meticulously, you can have what you want, your life is yours to steer exactly where you so desire.

I wanted a “beautiful” birth, where my baby arrived when he was ripe and ready. I had done all the yogic hypnobirthing preparation, and visualised going into labour naturally, my body smoothly wending along the intricate hormonal domino-effect path of events it was designed to, baby emerging with a hearty wail as it took its first breath and was delivered straight to mummy’s breast. Also while we’re dreaming, it would have been great to have looked Insta-glam glowing and healthy in pictures, with slightly sweaty hair, rosy cheeks and clear bright eyes, smilingly clutching my content baby at my chest…

My reality was different. Two weeks late, induction was followed by a 2-day unrelenting and truly laborious labour, stalled for an eternity at 4cm (why do they even tell you? Much better not to know and to believe you’re nearly there?), baby became distressed…you’ve heard similar horror stories many times before no doubt. Emergency crash caesarean saved his life, although when he came out he was silent…it remains one of the worst moments in my life to have been told that I’d had a baby boy, but that he wasn’t breathing. Lying on the operating table utterly helpless to do anything to change my destiny and that of my baby’s, trying to breathe although it felt like there was a ten-tonne truck sitting on my chest. Thankfully, he was resuscitated, but he was very tiny. I was very sick, and couldn’t hold him for the first 8 hours of his life so no skin to skin, none of the calming hormonal triggers to allow things to get off to a good start…and then thrown into the breastfeeding battlefield on a public ward at the lowest physical and emotional ebb I could’ve been at, confronted with a tiny and unhappy wailing creature, both of us traumatised by what we had been through. My scar is a grizzly jagged smile across my lower belly, a testament to quite how quickly they had to tear me open to get him out in time to save his life. He’s now a rambunctious and defiant 4 year old who bears no sign, no signal to the outside world that his entrance was such a drama.

Quite apart from the physical, there is a mountain of emotional issues that confront you after an emergency caesarean, particularly if you hadn’t even really allowed yourself to contemplate it as an option prior to the event, swotting up on natural birth and keen to avoid the “cascade of intervention”. You sort of feel that, although you have a baby, you didn’t actually give birth to him. You might feel like your body has let you down completely, and that maybe you’re a bit of a failure. Particularly if you start to get tunnel vision and allow yourself to feel jealous/envious of other women who can recount their birth stories involving steady progression and dilation, birth pools, successful epidurals or no drugs at all (albeit a lot of screaming, swearing and threatening to jump out the window no doubt…). With every “perfect” birth story I heard, it felt like someone was thwocking me round the head with a small mallet. I remember one lovely friend who had had a speedy home birth with no complications, telling me at 3 weeks postnatal she couldn’t wait to start running again, her baby was calm and slept all day, she was baking lemon drizzle cakes and muffins, she was practically fizzing with energy and abundant joy. “You know that feeling when you’ve had a baby that you’re all-powerful and can do anything?!”… all I could think in my head in response was no…no, I really truly do not know that feeling at all. Three weeks postnatal with my first I was deep in a sleep overdraft that had started during my labour with two nights on the public induction ward, I was in pain, I was in shock, my baby was a colicky screaming feeding disaster, I was barely able to put a piece of bread in the toaster, let alone bake cakes. It was easy to blame my horrendous birth for the cranky sleepless unhappy baby I had – even though as we know this baby thing is a lottery and it possibly had no bearing at all. But every day, little needles of self-blame pricked their way into my consciousness. It was my birth, it was my fault I didn’t do it better.

So alongside grappling with the new little person you have in your life, post-emergency caesarean you’re left potentially sitting in a pool of other malaise which you can’t quite deal with right now through the sleeplessness and other matters to attend to. Ah, and the belly overhang. The dreaded c-section overhang. I’m a Pilates teacher, and once upon a time had abs to be proud of. I foolishly looked in the mirror 2 weeks postnatal and tried to draw my belly in, and saw nothing happen. My belly hung as low as my spirits.

The physical scars fade, and the overhang becomes less rotund with time. The emotional healing is the challenge in the long term. This kind of experience tends to be locked down into your fibres. If not addressed, it gets packed under many layers, but remembered in your muscular and emotional tissue, even manifesting as physical aches and pains if the emotional ones don’t have a release. Accepting the birth story that you had is essential – more than that, own it, give yourself a massive high five for coping brilliantly when things spectacularly swerved off course. Don’t compare it to other “better” experiences – everyone has their “thing” that is getting them down even if you don’t know about it. Embrace the narrative of your wonderful baby’s birth, a legitimate birth as any other. Here, it’s the destination not the journey that is important, long term. Let that shit go. Let go of any fear, anger and disappointment that might have unfurled from the experience, and live in the success – you spent 9 months cooking up a baby by sheer alchemy in your belly, that’s pretty spectacular stuff. Not even the most powerful man in the world could do that.

For me personally, letting go of it, like allowing a balloon to sail up into the skies, involved talking about it…but not until well after the event, until I became pregnant with my second. After a few miscarriages I was truly doubting that my body was on my side in this whole journey. And once this “second” pregnancy was well under way, I noticed aftershocks that began to rumble when it became unavoidably clear I was going to have to get this baby earth-side at some point and I couldn’t just sneeze him out. I’d have to face up to the trauma I had experienced before. So I talked about it, found my tribe, made the most of a mama village to exorcise the demons of labours past, learnt to congratulate rather than berate myself. Connected rather than withdrew. I also saw a cranial osteopath, which rejigged the energy in my body and made me feel like something had been realigned with the stars as well as with my pelvis, that things were going to be ok this time round. There is a huge emotional power of reconnecting to your body and rediscovering a faith in it which may have been lost. I teach Pilates, and through Pilates, yoga, swimming, running… by gaining strength in my body again I was able to forgive myself for my perceived failings and fill up my self-love tank.

I had an elective caesarean second time round. I thought I would need a redemptive VBAC, that I would always mourn and feel like I’d never given birth. But my pre-eclampsic tendencies saw that notion off and actually I felt a blissful calm once I knew the decision was out of my hands. And, truthfully, glad I didn’t have to go through a potentially horrendous labour again. My second baby was born – I gave birth to him – loudly protesting at being pulled out of his warm soothing cocoon, pulled straight to my skin, latched straight to the boob. A complete reversal of fortunes from the first time. I look back on my first-time-mum self and I’m sad for me, I feel sorry for how battered I was, how mean I was to myself. Comparing it to my second, where with a calmer start and a kinder disposition things were just so much easier, smoother, better. So it is possible to reconcile yourself to a traumatic birth, and to allow the scars, physical and emotional to fully heal.

Anya Hayes

Anya is a Pilates teacher specialising in bumps and mums, and a pregnancy and wellness author and speaker. She's the author of four books, My Pilates Guru, A Little Course in Pilates, Pregnancy: the Naked Truth, and The Supermum Myth: Overcome anxiety, ditch guilt and embrace imperfection. Her next book, Pilates for Pregnancy, publishes in 2018. Anya blogs at motherswellnesstoolkit.wordpress.com, where you'll find tips and information on everything from pelvic floor recovery to mindfulness and meditation, to help you cope better with motherhood's mayhem. She lives in South east London with her husband and two boys, Maurice, 6, and Freddie, 3, and loves nothing better than a glass of red and a flash of bright lipstick (detracts from a tired eye!).

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