You Are Not Your Story

I am an eternal optimist. I can find the bright side in almost any situation. I’ve been known to say “If it doesn’t kill you, it makes a great story later.” As a writer and a speaker, I love turning difficult and emotional events into funny anecdotes. I essentially have a Ph.D. in minimizing the negative parts of life, or so my therapist tells me.

These traits have their charms, sure, but they’ve also given me many, many hours of material to work through in counseling. I recently re-read the brilliant Sarah Bessey’s essay “The Sanitized Stories We Tell,” and it brought me to my knees. My birth story is not nearly so dramatic, but the emotions behind it resonated in a part of my heart that I’ve been ignoring for roughly three years.

I have dreams about giving birth again all the time. They are never happy dreams. I’m always afraid, alone, and unprepared. In the dreams, I’m usually all by myself in a sterile room when the baby comes in a sudden rush of pain. Or, I’m relegated to a crowded room full of miserable, laboring women, left to ride it out without any help at all. Where on earth are these dreams coming from? Perhaps from the fact that I haven’t acknowledged the parts of my birth story that still make me feel angry and sad.

My son’s birth was, overall, a tremendous success. I was healthy. My baby was healthy. No major interventions were needed, and no major complications occurred. Easy-peasy. So why do I still feel sick to my stomach when I think back to that time in the hospital? (Followed immediately by guilt, because who wants to feel sick about their precious baby’s birth?) For three years, I have focused with laser-like intensity on the positive aspects of my birth story and mentally compartmentalized the things that made me feel scared, unsafe, and unheard. Until right now.

For one, my midwife failed me. I chose to have a midwife-attended birth because I hoped for a natural, more personal, less medical experience. My prenatal care was good, and I got along well with most of the midwives in the practice. But when it came time to give birth, the midwife on call was cold, impersonal, and harsh. I only saw her for a short time during my labor, and when it was time to push, she scolded me and threatened to cut me against my wishes if I couldn’t get the baby out quickly enough. (By the way, I only pushed for twenty minutes total, and my child was both posterior and weighed 10 pounds, 5 ounces.)

The hospital I delivered at offered doula services, but every doula was already occupied with other patients when I was admitted. One doula stopped by my room once or twice to check in, but she talked over me like I wasn’t there and made jokes about the mother she was supposed to be helping having “given in” and gotten an epidural.

After Finn was born, the nurse who came in to assist with breastfeeding was awful. She never looked me in the eye, never introduced herself, and never spoke to me as she grabbed my breast and tried to shove it into my child’s wailing mouth. After about forty-five minutes of no success, she gave up and left. I felt thoroughly dehumanized. I had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours at this point and was simultaneously being stitched up while this was happening. It was all very unsettling and disorienting.

(God, I hate writing this. I hate acknowledging that any of this is true and that it still bothers me after all this time.)

 When it was finally time to go home, my child had lost 10 percent of his body weight and still had not successfully had a full feeding at the breast. Despite our anxieties and multiple visits from a lactation consultant, they let us go anyway. No one came to give us discharge instructions or paperwork to sign. They just said we needed to leave by noon. While every other mom was being tenderly loaded into a wheelchair to proudly exit the hospital with a bundle in arms, a wheelchair was never even offered to me. I walked out on my own two feet without so much as a “See ya later” from the nurses. I felt forgotten, uncared for, and small. It was the most transitional, vulnerable moment of my life, and the hospital made me feel like I didn’t matter at all.

(I need to interject: Thank God for my husband and my mom. They were with me every moment, and they were everything I needed during that delicate time. I quite literally couldn’t have done it without them.)

 Fast-forward six weeks, and I saw my midwife again for the first time for my post-natal check-up. Once again, she was cold and dismissive with me. I told her that we had committed to exclusively pumping since Finn was never able to latch or transfer milk. Her response? “You’ll never keep up a milk supply that way.” (Actually, my child got 100 percent breast milk for sixteen months via exclusive pumping.)

 She noticed that a spot on my stitches hadn’t healed properly and proceeded to burn me with silver nitrate without telling me what she was going to do OR getting my consent. The pain quite nearly made me faint, and when I asked for some water to sip on, she just said they didn’t have any.

I was beginning to feel the first waves of postpartum depression, anxiety, and OCD, and I was hoping to get some help. There was no postpartum depression screening, unless you count her asking me, “Can you get out of bed?” When I finally worked up the courage to request a referral to a counselor, I was dismissed again. “Oh, we might have a card around here somewhere,” she said.

Before leaving, I showed her my precious baby boy and asked with hope in my fragile heart, “I did really well, right?” Her response? A deadpan “Yeah. You were fine.”

Once again, I didn’t matter. At all.

Those first months of parenthood were brutal for us. Between severe postpartum mood swings, pumping around the clock, and getting very little sleep, it was one of the darkest, most challenging times of my life. I clung to the positives of my birth story like a lifeline. I couldn’t handle having to process another hard thing. But I’ve since realized that the only way to process pain is to acknowledge it. So here goes:

• My midwife failed me.
• Many of my nurses failed me.
• The hospital let me fall through the cracks.
• I did not receive adequate postpartum care.
• I was not treated the way I deserved to be treated during my labor and delivery.
• I am not defined by how I was treated before, during, and after my birth.

So what’s next? I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll need to bring this up in therapy next week. But I think a good place to start is by simply telling the truth. Perhaps if more women tell the truth about their stories, we won’t feel quite so alone. Acknowledging and grieving the death of my expectations is important and real, as is embracing the fact that no matter how dark things got, I was never alone. Following Jesus is rarely an easy, comfortable journey, but it is one where we will never walk alone, and for that I am thankful.

Kimberly Poovey is a writer, speaker, wife, and over-caffeinated toddler mom. After 10 years in the nonprofit world, she now writes full-time. You can find her on Scary Mommy, The Mighty, The Natural Parent, Parent Co, and Her View From Home. She loves Jesus, long walks on the beach, honey habañero lattes, and Zoloft. Her website is kimberlypoovey.com.

Photograph © Carlo Navarro, used with permission