How does it feel to look back at the birth of your child or children? For most laboring people, they describe this time as the most difficult thing they have experienced in their life. Perhaps they’ll include some specifics about the events that occurred depending on their comfort level with the listener or audience. A select population might even describe their experience as utter bliss. Each birth story is rather unique in the string of events that lead up to the birth of a baby and the time that follows. Sharing these birth stories with one another are powerful ways to connect, discover meaning, inform, normalize and heal.
Birth is a catastrophic event in a person’s life and changes them in some form, if not many. Whether we accept this reality or not depends on the courage to be vulnerable with ourselves and others. Many withhold sharing the truth of these stories for fear of judgement, shielding ourselves from reliving the experience, or guilt about not having a difficult labor. Opening ourselves up to be vulnerable with our stories sets us on the path to emotional healing. By forging these deep human connections through the sharing of raw honesty, the collective birth experience will begin to normalize.
While a healthy baby is of course what every birthing person, partner, family, and birth team hopes for, a healthy mother is just as important. When left fragile and broken from birth, we walk through parenthood and the rest of our lives with these shattered lenses. Take a moment to reflect on your birth stories. Do you edit the content for your listeners? Do you lock away certain events that even you don’t dare look at? Is there a sense of despair or shame that shadows that day?
We will begin a journey of self-reflection through a series of posts titled, Birth Trauma for the Laboring Person. The reader can slowly begin to shine a light into the dark corners of their past birth in hopes of feeling their way through the pain and discovering a way out.