The landscape of who we are: how two births changed me
Hannah considers herself lucky enough to have two amazing children: her daughter is 4, and her son is 1. Their two births were so different and equally powerful. Labour wakens big emotions and though she’s still making sense of it all, her two labours have changed her. Follow Hannah’s journey from past trauma to healing and the awakening of a strong creative energy.
Robyn was born under the bright lights of the labour ward. Like many first babies, she took a while to arrive, around 40 hours, and she was eventually delivered via ventouse. Things had been relatively calm, but towards the end the room suddenly filled with staff and things felt urgent. Having had diamorphine and an epidural, as well as being exhausted, I was really out of it by the time she was born, but meeting and holding her was magical and euphoric. I was a mess but I felt an instant, cellular connection with her. Unfortunately I had a retained placenta and very soon after she was born I was taken to theatre for a manual removal: I found this very upsetting and disorientating. I signed consent forms having no idea what was really happening.
The facts of Robyn’s birth are clinically straightforward, and when I read other people’s stories, I doubt the validity of sharing my own as part of this blog. I also find it difficult to strike the balance between acknowledging the difficulties I experienced in that period alongside remembering the real joy of getting to know our daughter. However, when someone has experienced something traumatic in the past, a medically routine birth can dislodge memories. Labour felt like an internal earthquake: it isn’t surprising that it can trigger an avalanche of previous experiences.
“I believe that some of my perinatal experiences awoke dormant memories”
Catalyst
Eight months after Robyn’s birth I developed PTSD, not relating to the birth but to an incident from years ago. At the time, I had no idea where the symptoms came from, but having done a lot of work around it all, I believe that some of my perinatal experiences awoke dormant memories. Whilst I don’t blame my birth experience for the PTSD – perhaps I was finally ready to face past events – I do think it was the catalyst. Certainly the timing of facing them whilst caring for our first baby, and during the start of Covid, was awful. Looking back I am really proud of myself for doing a decent job as a mum throughout an incredibly tough time. Four years later I can finally see the courage and strength it took to tackle it.
Echoes
When I was 13, I was sexually assaulted by an adult I was very close to. It was a calculated move to demonstrate his power, a petrifying thing, and part of many years of abusive behaviours. I couldn’t speak about it and buried this incident deeply. It’s taken years of therapy to write those sentences. Instinctively, I reject there being any connection between it and the birth of my beautiful daughter. Truly, there is no connection between this man and my child, but there is a bridge of painful emotions between the two experiences. Maybe there is also a connection in that I should have received nothing but kindness and care but the supposed caregiver in some way failed to support me as I deserved. This was far more extreme in my childhood experience, but there were echoes of this in the perinatal care.
“The whole approach of consent was the antithesis of trauma-informed ”
Flashbacks
I think one of the triggers was my disconnection from reality during Robyn’s birth. The type of memory I had of the past event and parts of the birth were very similar to each other but unlike other memories: recollections were disjointed, fragmented, frightening. I had no continuous narrative to help me make sense and give the disparate images their place, so events appeared as film-like flashbacks: frozen, vivid shards of memory. I was intensely vulnerable, exposed, unable to move, the situation utterly out of my control. This was true of the final part of labour, but even more so the time spent in theatre, naked on the table, surrounded by strangers, incapable of speaking. The staff in theatre were kind but I felt dislocated and afraid. Afterwards, no one ever told me what actually happened. An invasive procedure took place, but no one explained what they had done. The morning after Robyn’s first night, I felt very much in love with her, but physically broken. If a midwife had spent some time with me to debrief whilst we were on the postnatal ward, this would have helped a lot. At the time I felt all over the place, and didn’t know to ask for it.
Invalid
I struggled with a few other things. Vaginal examinations were very upsetting. My hospital notes record these as done with consent, but when you’re told that you can’t be admitted to hospital without one, any notion of consent is invalid. There are ways of phrasing this procedure that enable it to be presented as consented to, but in reality there is virtually no choice, especially for a first-time mum or someone with barriers to asserting their rights: the whole approach is the antithesis of trauma-informed. For me, they were excruciatingly painful and performed with little compassion, but I wasn’t able to challenge the midwife, whose communication style was a bit aggressive.
“I knew my own body but I felt minimised and dismissed ”
Disempowered
After Robyn’s birth we spent a few days on the postnatal ward, aspects of which I found very disempowering and undermining of my dignity. There were several interactions with particular staff which minimised me as a person and a new mother. These were small moments in the bigger picture, but when you’ve just given birth, the details have huge impact. I vividly remember calling for help in the middle of the notorious third night, crying because I couldn’t feed our wailing daughter, and the healthcare assistant almost shouting at me “why are you crying?”. I really wanted to go home, but we were waiting on various test results and as I sat unshowered, bleeding and bra-less, I felt the male doctor inferred that leaving would make me a bad mother.
Extremely vulnerable
Once discharged, I found the community midwives emotionally cold and unsupportive. I felt extremely vulnerable, stupid for not knowing the basics, and humiliated by how they checked my stitches. I had painful physical problems which started immediately after birth and lasted for months. I spoke to midwives and went to the GP repeatedly, but was told it was normal, I was fine, nothing was wrong. I knew my own body but I felt minimised and dismissed.
I think it’s fair to say that my experiences of care were not terrible, but nor were they acceptable, and their emotional charge went deep: fear, humiliation, powerless, alone, invalidated. I am told that it is not unusual for someone with past trauma to find it returns to haunt them after birth, and recognising the activation of those emotions in myself, it doesn’t seem surprising.
“We had someone on our side who listened and respected my choices ”
Radically different
Three years later, I became pregnant again, and our son was born at home that December. We planned a birth at home as I increasingly wanted something radically different from my first experience. I wanted something a world away from the bright white lights, the stuffy heat and the restrictive medicalisation, for his arrival into the world.
In planning a home birth with a dedicated team, we had the same midwife throughout pregnancy, and she came to our flat for appointments. She was kind and funny and I felt a genuine connection, which made the whole experience much more human. I felt comfortable to share what had made the previous experience difficult and my fear that the PTSD symptoms could return. The culture of the home birth team was far more person-centred and holistic than my previous experience, and the continuity of care made all the difference. We had someone on our side who listened and respected my choices. I felt safe and not just a pinball bouncing in a huge system: I can’t say how much that matters.
Fast and ferocious
I prepared for labour a lot more thoroughly than the first time, but so much about birth seems to be luck, and although it was hard, we were really lucky. When it started, I said to myself, “this time will be different” – and it was. Although there were some early signs of labour starting, there were only 2 hours between contractions becoming regular and him being born. The whole labour felt explosive. I had imagined it being longer, calmer, in the pool. Instead, it was a big bang of a birth on our bedroom floor. We had two wonderful midwives, they arrived incredibly quickly, and calmly supported us with great care. Afterwards one of them described the labour as fast and ferocious. As we have come to know our son, I see parts of his personality embodied in his birth, and even when I was pregnant I felt he was full of life force before he’d even arrived.
Leo’s birth was wild, intense, primal. Immediately after he was born I think I said “thank God that’s over, never again” about a hundred times, but something really incredible took place in its process.
“I experienced an overpowering wave of energy: birth is creative”
Sacred
I experienced an overpowering wave of energy, and that energy ran through me for six months after he was born; I was buzzing! I don’t exactly mean physical energy – I was exhausted – but more something internal, a kind of seam of creative energy which lit me up and sustained me through tough parts of early babyhood. The connection felt obvious: birth is creative. During my year of maternity leave I met many interesting people, and those connections really fired that energy.
Being fully connected with my body, and 100% in the moment, took me to a place I’ve never been before. Contractions were so overpowering that when each one left, there was this concentrated sense of space. It felt restorative and this phrase kept coming back to me from a doula’s workshop (with Samantha Gadsden Caerphilly Doula), “rest and be thankful”*; it has echoed in my ears throughout that first year. I felt I was in a parallel world to my husband and the midwives, and for six months postpartum it felt like I hadn’t completely rejoined the world. Those months were definitely not all magical – at times I felt intense anxiety, and despite a lot of support from our family and friends, the year relentlessly stretched us beyond capacity – but that inner experience was a great gift, and I felt profoundly connected to my son. Watching videos of babies born en caul, I relate to that protective bubble around the baby. They are here, and yet still in this watery world inside the membrane. In some way our first few months together felt like that. Him being born at home in the midst of winter, days before Christmas, was part of this too. Things felt sacred, intimate. I remember Dan’s first words to Leo: “this is your home now”, and our daughter’s excitement, “my baby’s been born!”.
Heightened times
The postnatal care we received was much more compassionate and thorough than our previous experience; again, I think this was much to do with the culture of the home birth team as well as the individual midwives. They made me feel that I mattered as much as our baby, and because I recovered better, I felt free to experience his birth as the miracle it was.
I am still working out the meaning of our two births. Both brought beautiful human beings into the world. Both contained fear and pure joy, and triggered an internal journey reaching beyond the moment itself; the start of Robyn and Leo’s lives are also a profound part of my own story. In everything I’ve written, I’m aware how intense it sounds, and worry that it is “too much” to share. New parents are often measured against how “relaxed” they seem to other people, but birth and new parenthood are heightened times, emotional and physical experiences concentrated into extremes. I value so much the communities which enable women and birthing people to acknowledge our full experiences without filtering to something more anaemic and socially “acceptable”. Once a baby is born, our stories get a little forgotten, but they change the landscape of who we are, and that matters.
Healed
In the experience of Leo’s birth and the amazing energy that followed, I feel something has healed. I have spent a lot of time making sense of things and am grateful to Make Birth Better for the space to share my story, which I am now starting to own.
Please note: we’ve used a different name to protect the guest writer’s privacy.