I can’t help it, I hold grudges. It’s just my personality to seethe over things when I feel like I’ve been dumped on, and it just stews inside my bones, boiling under the surface for months, weeks, years, decades… until I find a way to resolve my anger.
I have a lot of unresolved rage over things that happened in my first two birth experiences. My first was an induction-turned-unnecessary cesarean, and my second was a hard, hard, hard-fought VBAC that nearly resulted in a second unnecessary cesarean about a dozen times before my labor finally finished.
Having my VBAC, and my then my Home VBAC, ultimately healed the way I felt about my body after those traumatic births. It was empowering and liberating. But it didn’t shake the anger over the way I was treated in the hospital because I know so many other women are experiencing the same mistreatment every day, and in some weird ways it makes it feel like it’s still happening to me.
In both of my first two births, there were some things that the hospital staff did that I may never forget, and certainly have not yet forgiven. And I’m not alone here, either. Jessie Peters of Roanoke Birth Services, a doula and midwife in training says,
“I believe that we as women never forget how we felt, and were made to feel during the births of our children, and that the way we are treated during this vulnerable time impacts our future.”
Many highly trained birth and psychology professionals agree that birth imprints memories on us in a way that can’t be shaken, which can be especially hard to process if they are negative feelings. But I’m going to try to process them how, in hopes that it will relieve some of the internalized anger that nags at me. I also hope that if labor & delivery professionals stumble upon this, it will make them rethink the little things they’re doing that will forever impact how a woman remembers her birth experience.
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