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Apr

26

The regret I wish I could forget

Filed Under Uncategorized | 49 Comments

April 26, 2006

Thanks for weighing in on the blog name question! I’ll let you know how it shakes out. I had this random paranoid fear when I emailed in my suggestions: what if they don’t like any of my ideas and they make me call it Baby Steps?

Nahhh.

So, this morning I was reading another blogger’s post about homebirthing, and as an associated topic in her comments section, there was a discussion about the high number of hospital C-sections, the risks of medicated births, etc.

I admit when I first started thinking about Riley’s great arrival, back when he was walnut-sized and I could still go five minutes in a row without peeing, I thought homebirthing sounded batshit crazy. I know of someone whose child has permanent hearing damage from a tough birth where they had to abandon their home situation and rush to a hospital, and to my fairly uninformed mind that was reason enough to surround yourself in a traditional medical environment from the start of labor to mitigate all the possibilities of something going wrong.

Of course, anything can happen during birth, and being at a hospital instead of your living room doesn’t guarantee a perfect outcome. The more I read about birth options, the more I started feeling much more open-minded about the subject; I never decided that I wanted anything other than a hospital birth for myself, but I learned a lot about the choices I had. I became less afraid, and more interested; I didn’t have any hard-and-fast goals for Riley’s birth but I did have preferences, I was gearing up for the experience and curious as to what it would be like.

My friend Jen had a gorgeous baby boy in March and her husband wrote a wonderful account of the birth; after I read it I was so happy for them, and yet I realized a nasty undercurrent, a weird sense of sorrow even through my feelings of congratulations. It was simple and stupid jealousy, an undeniable feeling of regret that I didn’t have a similar experience: the realization that labor was happening, the excitement of the escalation, the trip to the hospital and even the hours of painful work to produce a child.

I wouldn’t say that Riley’s birth was traumatic, there was no emergency, no fear for his safety. The consequences were ideal, as the result was a healthy baby and the rest shouldn’t matter. And yet here it is almost eight months later and I’m surprised by the amount of bitterness I feel.

I can’t help wondering, was it all really necessary? Was my blood pressure really that bad, and how could it have been–I felt perfectly healthy! All that terrible magnesium, did I really need that? Should I have tried harder for the vaginal birth, should I have taken the Pitocin, would I have increased my chances of avoiding the surgery and the fuzziness with which I remember everything that happened? Wasn’t it completely unnnatural to pry Riley out of my body three weeks early, was any of it–the medication, the sickness, the haziness, the fruitless attempts at starting labor–necessary?

I know it’s pointless to dwell on it. I know you don’t fuck around with pre-eclampsia. I know the medical staff made choices based on health and safety rather than their own convenience. But still. Still.

When I read the arguments against hospital births and all the advocacy of controlling your experience and making a better choice for baby I feel so conflicted; on one hand, yay for homebirthing and midwives and naturopathic herbs and all that, yay for choices, but sometimes things get way the fuck out of your control and all the books and websites and well-meaning opinion-holders in the world can’t make things different. I’m not sure that gets acknowledged much in the sea of righteous defense. Or maybe there’s some other reason I just can’t help feeling like I did something wrong.

(I hope it doesn’t matter to him.)