Learning to Trust My Body Again, Part 1: I Thought I Could Do It Perfectly
Learning to Trust My Body Again is a three-part series about my first birth and what came after. This is Part 1.
I’ve wanted to write this for four years. My little boy turned four this October, and for most of that time I’ve held this story close.
Part of me held it back out of shame. I felt betrayed by my body. I felt I should have done it perfectly, and that there was something wrong with me because I didn’t. As a nutritionist, a herbalist and someone who works in women’s health, I felt it discredited me. My first birth shook the beliefs I’d built my life and my work around: that natural is best, that our bodies know how to birth, and that if I prepared well enough, my birth would follow. It made me question all of it, and myself along with it.
But that experience has helped me see pregnancy and birth from a completely different point of view. It’s made me even more reverent of women, of what we go through, and of how amazing our bodies are. Putting this story out there is my way of letting go of all the negative beliefs I’ve carried around it. So here it is.
Where it started: fear
Growing up, I was scared of giving birth. I always knew I wanted children, but the thought of actually birthing them frightened me.
What changed that was my sister-in-law. We’re on the same wavelength: she loves natural health the way I do, and she had her babies at home. Her first birth was so easy, and the way she spoke about it made birth sound nothing like the scary thing in my head.
My own mam was my other blueprint. She had eight children, most of them born at home after two hard hospital births.
So by the time it was my turn, the fear had turned into complete confidence. Birth was the most natural thing in the world, and I knew I could do it.
I thought I could do it perfectly
Because of everything I knew, or thought I knew, and because of my work and my belief in the body, I expected myself to do it perfectly. Somewhere in there was a quiet belief that if a woman struggled, she must have missed something. I’m not proud of it, and I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I prepared for everything. My husband and I spent three months preparing our bodies before we tried to conceive. I got pregnant on our third cycle, and my pregnancy was easy. After twelve years as a vegetarian, I craved roast chicken, and I ate it, because I trusted my body completely.
I walked every day and did pregnancy yoga. My midwife came to the house. I had acupuncture, homeopathy and my own herbs. Every night I listened to my hypnobirthing meditations and practised my breathing. I genuinely believed I could breathe my baby out, with no pain relief and no intervention, in a birth pool in my own home.
I felt safer at home. I believed we’ve over-medicalised birth, and that in a hospital my birth would be interfered with.
So I had a list. No epidural. No induction. Absolutely no C-section. Breastfeeding was a must.
I did an online antenatal class, and the C-section part came right at the very end. So I turned it off. That’s everything I need, I thought. I’m not having a C-section, so I don’t need this bit. As if it were a choice. I was so naive.
On the clock
My due date came and went. Then a week. Then nearly two.
I was only allowed to go fourteen days over my due date and still have my baby at home. After that, the home birth was off the table.
The day before that last day, I was distraught. I cried and cried. It might sound like a small thing to someone else, but letting go of my home birth felt like letting go of something I’d been building towards for years.
And then, on that very last day, it became possible again. My hope came back. My labour started.
In the pool, the contractions felt manageable. Gentle music, my affirmations on repeat: I trust my body. I trust my baby. I trust my birth. My contractions can’t be stronger than me, because they are me. Then I couldn’t keep the pool warm (I burnt out the kettle trying), and out of the water everything got much harder.
When my midwife arrived, I was only 1.5cm. I was shocked.
My waters broke around midnight, and the clock started again. If labour didn’t move on, I’d have to go in. I laboured all night, squeezing a comb in my hand. In the morning I packed my little “just in case” bag, the one I never thought I’d need, and I was heartbroken doing it.
The drive to the hospital was agony. I was in active labour, strapped into a car seat, and every bump and every turn went straight through me.
Nobody was listening
I knew what I needed. As long as I could move and breathe, I could cope. That was the one thing I held on to.
And from the moment I arrived, it felt like a fight to keep it. I was in the zone, on all fours on the bed, breathing through every contraction, and I was being bombarded with things to do: drips, monitors, swabs, checks, lie on your back. I kept saying, I need to move. I need to be up.
At one point a big hospital dinner arrived in to me. My husband and I looked at each other. Am I meant to eat this? He gave me a bite, and I puked it everywhere. So there he was, kneeling on the floor eating the dinner himself while I breathed through my contractions.
It’s funny now, but it says a lot about how it felt. I was just going through the motions. Everything was on a checklist, the boxes were being ticked, and I was part of a system.
I lay down because I wanted to know my baby was okay. On my back, the pain was unbearable. I was crying, asking how much longer, and being told “just a few minutes”.
My veins are hard to find, and all through pregnancy I’d asked for someone experienced to take my bloods. Every time I’d hear “I’ll just give it a go”, and every time I’d be poked again and again. In labour it was no different. It sounds small, but it was a huge stress, and it overwhelmed me when I was already dealing with so much. So much of what women say in labour gets overlooked. Everyone is playing their part on the conveyor belt, and ticking the boxes seems to come first, before anything else.
I was still only 2cm. They wanted to start oxytocin to strengthen my contractions. Induction was on my no list. I asked why, when I’d already been in labour for over a day, and was told my contractions weren’t strong enough to open my cervix.
The pain I couldn’t breathe through
Up to then, I’d had no pain relief at all, and I was coping. I was breathing through my own contractions. My body and I were doing this together.
The oxytocin was something else entirely. All through labour I’d told myself my contractions couldn’t be stronger than me, because they were me. These weren’t me. I couldn’t breathe through them. I couldn’t get on top of them. I remember hanging out of my husband, completely unable to cope, shattered and exhausted after a day and a night of labour.
After over 50 hours, my cervix had never opened past 2cm. My baby’s heart rate was a worry. They told me I was going for a C-section.
And I was relieved. The thing at the very top of my no list, and I was relieved, because I would have done anything to make that pain stop.
Theatre
It all happened so fast. I was separated from my husband, still having contractions, signing forms I could barely read.
They needed me completely still for the spinal, and I couldn’t be. The pain had me thrashing. I grabbed the doctor’s hands and squeezed them with everything I had, just to hold myself still long enough.
Then I was lying on the table under bright lights, cold, being talked over by people I could only see as eyes above masks. Can you feel this? We need to hurry. I was petrified.
The anaesthetist held my hand the whole way through. You’re in safe hands. You’re doing great. I’ll always be grateful for that kindness.
My husband hadn’t been in the room for any of it. Then, right at the very end, just as they were about to take our baby out, he appeared beside my head. I cried just looking at him. I was so overwhelmed, and having him there was such a comfort. And then they held up our son.
“Pick a formula”
It was around 2am. In recovery, nobody told me what was happening or what to expect. I was alone after emergency surgery, and the staff around me chatted about their weekends as if I wasn’t there.
Then my husband came in with our baby, and I was told I had five minutes to feed him, or he’d need formula.
I had two drips in my hand. I couldn’t hold him properly. My body was still catching up with what had just happened to it, and he wasn’t latching.
The woman responsible for that first feed put the formula in front of me. I can’t let you starve your baby. You need to pick a formula now.
I’ll never forget how cold that felt. Every single thing on my list had already gone. Breastfeeding was the last thing I had left, and I was being asked to give it up within minutes of meeting my son.
Then the midwife from the labour ward walked through the door. She’d read our birth plan, even after I’d said it was out the window. “There’s still stuff we can salvage,” she said. She knew breastfeeding mattered to me. She helped him latch, she counted with me, and he fed. No formula.
She was my angel. Without her, I’m sure my baby would have been on a bottle that night.
The first night
I was brought to the ward sometime after 2am. My husband could stay another twenty minutes, and then he had to go home.
So there I was, alone, a few hours after major surgery, with a newborn in a cot beside me. There had been meconium in my waters, and his breathing sounded like there was fluid in it. I propped a towel behind his back, terrified he’d choke in the night, and I barely slept watching him.
I refused painkillers. I can see now what that was about. Somewhere in my head, taking them meant admitting I’d lost: that I couldn’t do any of this naturally, on my own.
Love, and the grief underneath
I was completely in love with my little boy. I remember crying just looking at him. Watching my husband hold him, I loved him more than ever. I was so grateful for our little family.
But underneath all that love, something else had started. Every part of the birth I’d planned had fallen apart, one piece at a time, and at almost every step I’d felt unheard. I was grieving. I felt like my body had let me down, and I couldn’t make sense of how everything I believed had led me here.
I thought the hardest part was over. It was only the beginning.
If your birth didn’t go the way you’d hoped, or you spent it feeling like nobody was listening, I want you to know it wasn’t because you didn’t prepare enough, or know enough, or want it enough. And whatever happened, your experience deserves to be heard.
That’s a big part of why I’m running Nourishing the Mother, a free online session for mothers on Monday 30 November at 10am. It’s the conversation I wish someone had sat down and had with me in those first months: about how you’re really doing, and how to look after yourself now. You can bring your baby, and if you can’t make it live, I’ll send you the replay. And if a mother you know comes to mind as you read this, please pass it on to her.
Part 2 is out next Thursday.
Rachael x
P.S. In January I’m opening Postpartum Circle, six months of nourishment and support for mothers. The waitlist is open if you’d like to hear first: join here. Know a mother who could do with this? Please share it with her too.