That's what matters

[ailbhe]

After the difficult birth of my daughter in April 2004, I was often told "Well, you have a healthy baby, and that's what matters." The people telling me this were well-meaning, otherwise intelligent people. They didn't realise that they'd just told me that I didn't matter. They'd have been horrified to think that they had. But... well.

So I went to the internet for support, and found the ladies in Babycentre's "Difficult Birth Debriefing" forum, and the various Livejournal communities, and, of course, the women reading my own online journal who had had difficult birth experiences. And many, many of them reported that they, too, had been told "You have a healthy baby, and that's what matters." And they, too, felt discounted, as though they had been told to shut up and stop complaining. Which we all had been, in fact. In a birth, the most important person is the baby, and that frequently turns into "the only important person is the baby".

This is about us, the women who had a perfectly healthy baby - but who were traumatised by the birth of their loved, wanted children, and who were unable to find the support they needed in their own families and communities to recover, because their families and communities had no idea that this could happen.

Listening to the radio while my daughter napped one afternoon, I heard an item about a charity which sends surgeons to Africa to repair women who tore badly during childbirth. These women are left doubly incontinent, in constant pain, ostracised by their communities and their families because of the shame of fecal incontinence, unable to work effectively because of their condition - their lives are in ruins. The charity spokesperson described it, and the Radio 4 presenter was, appropriately, appalled. "Would this happen in the UK or the US?" she asked. "No," the charity spokesperson replied, "It would never happen in countries like this because we can offer c-sections."

I cried all afternoon, after shouting, hopelessly, at the radio: "It happened to me! It happened to me!"

I know women who were told that they had postnatal depression - women with extensive experience of depression, who knew that the fear and flashbacks they were experiencing were not depression, who did not feel depressed, who felt a normal range of emotions except for panic attacks, anxiety attacks, vivid flashbacks which often included physical memories, literally reliving the pain of a traumatic childbirth, nightmares, day-dreams so vivid they were almost hallucinations. My mother was the first to suggest I might have PTSD. I brought this home diagnosis to my sympathetic GP, who was pleased and relieved to have it - in spite of specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology it had never occurred to her that a woman could suffer post-traumatic stress disorder as a direct result of childbirth.

Women wrote to me after I told my journal that I'd had this diagnosis accepted and why. One person commented, "I am not post-natally depressed, I am post-natally freaked out!"

Women wrote to me saying "Thank goodness you've written this - can I find out more about it? I thought I was crazy."

In hospital for repair surgery, my bed was next to that of a woman who had suffered a traumatic birth 23 years previously. She had never been able to get over her fear of pregnancy and childbirth enough to have sex again. Her marriage had broken up over it. She had been unable to visit her only child, a daughter, in hospital when her grandchildren were born. For 23 years, she thought that there was something wrong with her that was her fault, that was unfixable unless she could fix it alone.

I was lucky - I have enough personal experience of being slightly mad that I knew when there was something seriously wrong that required outside help.

What about everyone else?

(If you have experience of this, I'd really appreciate your input, because I want to write about this a lot more than I have, and a lot more coherently, and a little more impersonally, though obviously I can only be authoritative about my own experience).

Comments

[richtermom.livejournal.com]

I think it's that people don't like to leave things open ended with just, "I'm so sorry." We want to say or do something to make you feel better. And unfortunately, we rarely hit our mark.