After 3 weeks of vacation by the sea more than half the pregnancy has passed.
I did prenatal yoga a couple of times. But mostly just alternated between the beach, the pool and the spa. Letting toddler J set the agenda for each day. Mommies tagging along while he ran, swam and dug his way through our days.
Lovely times.
I did read Orgasmic Birth
and Bountiful, beautiful, blissful.
Wifey and I talked about giving birth and all that happened last time. Each time I read of normal births I feel so cheated out of mine. Because mine WAS normal. But the made us think otherwise to get their way.
They took my and my babys birth from us and I can never get that back. I will never know why. Perhaps just because they were short on rooms. I go crazy thinking about it. I have to accept that it happened but I don't know how I can do that.I think the biggest obstacle is that I can't guarantee I won't end up in the hospital this time. I have no control over what will happen by the end of pregnancy. And IF we do, how can I survive another trauma like that?
How can I ever trust these people ever again after all they did to us the first time?
Other than that, vacation was a time to rest from all the preparations and work involved in preparing for a home birth.
I still need to write down my birth story for the hypnobirthing class we're taking. I've started so many times but get caught in the trauma and can't go on. I feel like I did when I was giving birth; like I'm on trial. Like I have to defend myself, explain myself, fight against people w all the power an no empathy.
Next week we're meeting the homebirth midwife. I feel really nervous. I'm scared I won't click w her and then we have to go on trying to find others. It's very uncommon w home births in Swe, so it's not exactly a big market to choose from.
Maybe I'm just oversensitive. BUT I promised myself I would listen to my intuition this time when it comes to who's allowed to participate in the birth of my next child.
We will see I guess. It is a tricky business trying to rely on your insticts and intuition when you are also traumatized and get anxious by very little.
My goal is to do yoga atleast every other day to keep myself grounded and centered.
I am atleast happy w the hypnobirth woman we found, she seems to be on the same wavelenght as us. I'm excited both to try hypnosis for the trauma and to get the hypnobirthing tools for wifey and me to use at the next birth.
RMDR and hypnosis, and to certain extent CBT, has great track records for working w trauma. Though I believe, as I read in orgasmic birth, that birth trauma - like rape - is such a physical trauma it is difficult to heal with "talk therapy". I'm also thinking since cortex is (at least primed to be if the mother is not too disturbed and interrupted) dormant during birth, the trauma becomes so primal, so ingrained in our most basic functions it is difficult to reach through reason.
Yes, trauma is always this way.
But when giving birth a woman is so vulnerable and receptive. You have to be to stay in touch with your baby and the birht process. All the information you have of your baby and your body and it needs. All that information that gets completely ignored by the so called professionals.
I was so vulnerable. Unable to express myself. To my big surprise, my defense was not fight, nor flight. When they coerced their medications on me under the threath that my baby would not live other wise my mind chose 2 things.
To stay calm in the face of panic and to chose the last defence; freeze.
Perhaps I did the best I could. I knew staying calm was the only thing I could do to help my baby. And I did that to the best of my ability. Even if that meant I didn't object out loud to all the things I screamed NO!!! at on the inside. Even if that meant I was apologetic and polite to the people that hurt me and my child.
I realised I had no support, no one on my side. And I decided to go into myself and do the best I could to support myself and my child through the nightmare.
Now that I know this could be the way I react in childbirth, it feels even more vital that I surround myself ONLY w support. Only w people who believe in me and my birth. That I surround myself only with love.
The thing that makes me so sure that what I experienced was real is that the few ones I did NOT experience as a stressful, pessimistic influence was; the narcotic doctor who laid the epidural. There is no way what so ever that this person who was 1, a man (which I specifically asked not to have present at my birth) and 2. did something I was not willing to do (have an epidural), would in any way be calming. But. There was something in his demenor, his energy, his way of interacting that made me feel calm and safe. He was not a stressed and pessimistic person waiting for disaster.
Which makes me even more certain that my reading of all the other people involved in my first birth were correct and not imagined out of my own fear.
The second person was the midwife who was present when baby J was born.
When I later spoke to her on the phone, she said; when I walked into the room I saw a mother who was beyond exhausted and who was going to give birth to her baby.
She saw me.
And I felt it.
She knew I was going to give birth to my baby. And I felt her faith in me. And that faith was what I needed after all the negative people, all the threats, all the depressing and suffocating, stressful and nervous energy that told me bascially everyone was just waiting for the doctor to call it quits and to do a cesarian.
I just needed someone to see me. And someone to believe in me. As I desperately tried to continue to do despite all they said and did to undermine my birth.
She did. And I remember that. I remember how it felt. Though it was never anything she uttered with words.
And that kind of faith, or love if you will, is what I need to surround myself with in my second birth.
For just as birth is a sensitive window where you can be damaged beyond understanding, so it is a window for healing without words. And that is what I'm hoping for this second time.
