The Finish Line

My mom was consistent from the very beginning.  She said that “you can count on only one thing: it won’t go the way you plan it.”  She was talking about my delivery and she was right: it didn’t go the way I planned.  I knew the risk of having a cesarean was higher with an induced labor but I didn’t have time to think seriously about it.  I didn’t learn that I was going to have an induction until three weeks before Gabriel was born - and that was three weeks sooner than my due date.  I went from thinking I had six weeks to prepare for the baby down to three.  Those last three weeks were hectic between having a baby shower, setting up the nursery, doctor’s appointments, hospital appointments, monitoring every other day, getting the house ready, going to work, etc.  There was no time to prepare for the possibility of a c-section, but then again, how can anyone ever really prepare for that?  How can anyone know what it’s like unless they’ve done it before? 

I was sad about how things turned out for the first couple of weeks.  I knew that the c-section was necessary, but after 9 months of pregnancy and 20 hours of hard labor I couldn’t help but feel like I got cheated out of something.  I had worked hard to get there but in the end my body just couldn’t cross the finish line.  There was a sense of accomplishment that I lost.  And I lost the experience of it too.  It is an amazing gift that women have to be able to experience giving birth.  The experience of feeling your child being born and then holding him as the nurses clean him off and then gazing into his beautiful eyes and being the first person in his whole life that he gazes back at.  My son was born but I didn’t see it.  I didn’t see him crying for the first time.  I didn’t see his slimy blue little body.  I was given a brief glimpse of him after he had been wrapped up and then he was taken to the nursery while I laid on the operating table waiting to be stitched up.  I was being monitored in recovery while he was getting his first bath and was being photographed by his new family.  I don’t remember nursing him for the first time because I was so heavily medicated.  I mourned those things that I expected but never got.

I don’t tell myself things like “it doesn’t matter how he was born just that he was healthy.”  Of course the most important thing is that he’s healthy – I know that and that’s why I had a c-section.  The truth is that it does matter how he was born, it does change things.  But it would never, ever change how much love I have for him.

I share this because it was a learning experience for me.  Yes I grieved in the beginning but eventually I was able to turn my feelings into positive ones.  I can now be grateful for the things that I did experience.  Like having a labor room filled with people that I love deeply.  And I can be grateful that even though I didn’t get to see my son immediately after birth, Ryan did.  He got an experience that many men never get because it is always the mom who gets to hold and bond with the baby first.  I am happy that Ryan got that experience.  I have evolved and I am happy for that.