Transforming our birth stories
Posted by Gaby Donnell on Tue, March 25th 2008 in Birth
Counselor Gaby Donnell shares a touching story of how her birth story changed after 12 years.
Mothers today face many expectations about birthing and parenting. This pressure can come from themselves or outside sources such as other moms, healthcare professionals, family members, clergy, literature, and the media. In my practice as a therapist, I have heard many postpartum moms say that they feel like every other mother seems to know how to parent with ease and joy and they fall short. Sometimes these feelings of tentativeness and shame begin during the birth process.
Many women feel like a failure if their birth doesn’t meet their expectations or does not go just as they imagined it would. Over the years I have listened to hundreds of birth stories from my clients. And I have witnessed many mothers experiencing the realization that their birth stories can evolve and change as they make peace with their birth experiences.
Yesterday was my son Isaac’s 12th birthday. He knows the story of his birth well. After 36 hours of labor, I pushed for several hours to no avail. He didn’t want to budge and was born by cesarean.
This year on his birthday, Isaac said to me, “You didn’t birth me, you had surgery.” For a moment my heart stopped and then I remembered what was true. “I carried you in my belly for 9 months and was in labor for many hours; you didn’t want to come out,” I told him. Did he forget the game we used to play over and over?
When Isaac was a toddler, he and his sister Zoe would climb under a blanket together on my lap and play, “Born baby.” Touching the large lump on my belly, I would say, ”Twins!” My large belly would squeal with laughter when I “accidentally” incorrectly identified a body part. “This is a foot,” I would say, touching their heads. The game would go on, mislabeling many parts, until finally after much giggling they would be born. My babies loved it in my belly so much that they didn’t want to come out the traditional way. Rather they came out the imaginary “zipper.”
Last night, after a fun sushi making party with his friends, Isaac lay in bed ready to fall asleep. He called me into his room and said with incredible tenderness, “Mom… thank you for giving birth to me.”
After 12 years my birth story changed again to include the words of my young son. The opportunity for birthing, for bringing ourselves and our children into the world, happens many times over.
Gaby Donnell
Motheroots
