Competative childbirth

[FrameyMcFrame]

All my births have been horrendous, back to back and lots of things went wrong. I won't bore you with the details and it's all a long time ago now. I'm over it now, apart from the permanent physical damage that was a side effect. :(
Friend has just had her 1st baby and it all went perfectly and according to plan, all great and I'm so happy for her.

Apart from she has been keen to tell me that if I had done X,Y and Z then I also could have had a perfect birth too. I don't think it's as easy as that, everyone is different and each birth is different. Just because all that worked for her doesn't mean it would have helped at all in my circumstances...

I'm glad she had a good birth but I don't want to feel like my traumatic births were my fault because I didn't do my homework or watch the right DVDs...
Birth is only the start of parenthood, it's not that important, why do some people want to make such a big deal of it?

Am I being a jealous cow? AIBU to feel sad about this?

I think that a back to back birth can be avoided with the right research/posture habits.

Or its just luck of the drawer and even with the right habits it will happens if it's going to happen. DS turned himself back-to-back during labour, DD was breech my entire third trimester not picked up until early labour (because no one would believe me). No amount of positioning, posture or research would budge either of them.

Please don't take it personally but comments like that contribute to the overall problem being discussed in the thread. "Back to back baby? Meh, you must have slouched too much and read the wrong articles"

I've been watching this thread all night, and getting more and more disappointed that the naysayers haven't turned up to say "actually it is your fault in your control" and finally Yfronts turns up.

My faith in mumsnet, and indeed mankind, has been restored.

I have had 3 easy births - but it was sheer luck and not anything that I did. I didn't even have a birth plan- I can't see the point.

It's all bollocks. I did everything I could - yoga/hypnotherapy/read all the books/NCT classes and had a massively shit and traumatic time which I could never had predicted.

I did everything I could to ensure a smooth birth. Yet I didn't get one. Why is that?

Ach

I've had 3 CS

Never experienced childbirth (apart from 36 hrs of induced labour 1 st time)

Couldn't give a stuff about the 'right way' to give birth TBH

We are so used to having control and planning events, childbirth doesn't allow you to. You can do all the 'right' things and have a traumatic birth and you can do all the 'wrong' things and it can be like shelling peas!

I worked in a very active job until 37-38 weeks, only ever sat on a birthing ball, laboured in water, covered about 10 miles when on land. I spent a fair bit of dd1 pregancy teaching active labour. The only thing that turned dd1 was a load of syntocinon drip and (maybe) the total relaxation of a 100% effective epidural.
DD2 was transverse and went the long way round (naturally) and I stood for nearly the entire labour. DD2 was pretty traumatic due to the pain. And I still think about the pain )She was a 3 hour active labour with entonox. Perfect on paper.

I suspect my pelvis is either fully android or android in the cavity. It would match my shape. Nothing I can hope to do about it.

I think that a back to back birth can be avoided with the right research/posture habits.

Comments like that show a real misunderstanding of the advice on posture, etc. What the research appears to show is that you can reduce the statistical likelihood of malpositions by adopting certain techniques. That is not the same as an individual woman being able to prevent a malposition in her personal case, at best it is just giving the odds a kick in the right direction. And there are all sorts of issues like pelvis shape which can affect a woman without being obvious in advance.

YANBU. I don't know anyone like this. It's highlighting your friend's utter lack of insight and intelligence imo.

I had a very traumatic birth, I sobbed about it for months afterwards and almost a year on I still go cold when I remember parts of it. I feel for you OP.

There was nothing I could have done differently. I went to the bollocks NCT, bounced on the ball, breathed like they told me to etc but it still ended in a theatre full of doctors.

You could be incredibly childish and return her insensitivity in kind by saying 'well you must have a massive vagina'.

Agree with property - some people are just good at it. Friend has seven kids, no pain relief with the first six, number seven was planned c-section due to age. She's the the sort who could've probably given birth in a barn and then gone out to milk the cows at dawn.

She's never smug about it though, and has had labour scares.

I remember reading an email from a friend, who gave birth about 6 months after I did. She said 'I was thinking, I don't know what all the fuss is about' with regard to the contractions. I was jealous that she hadn't been so overwhelmed by pain like me, forgetting the actual giving birth part. I had a big blank in my memory for ages because of the pain.

I gave birth to an 11lb 'lump' (thanks Grinkly - nice!) after a 10 hour labour, but thanks to g&a, pethadine, an epidural and a fantastic midwife. Nothing really to do with anything wonderful I did and I thank my lucky stars I had the experience I did - I know it could have been very different and would not dream of belittling another woman for her birth experience. As others have said, it's pure luck if it goes well.

Wow so not unreasonable, none of us ever will share the exact same birthing story, it is just luck if it goes well, i had 11 hours then a CS.

Some women wont have pain, some women will have, it annoys me when women get competitive over labour, its sad really.

Thanks again
She has a gorgeous new baby and I have my gorgeous DC. We are very lucky and the rest is in the past and unimportant.
Thanks

Some people just have a superiority complex. She sounds rather stupid and lacking in the social grace to realise you don't offer advice after it can do any good.

It wasn't your fault about how your births went. If she dares raise it again Put her down by telling her she is being insensitive & tactless.

I realised about half way through labour that the reason that some people seem to cope better with pain is not that they are better prepared or better people etc. but that THEY ARE IN LESS PAIN.

Anyone who experienced what I did would make the same decisions that I did. That's it really...there are some small things that might change your chances of various outcomes by a few percent here or there but the big numbers are decided by the specific baby, the specific mother and the specific circumstances which are not the same for anyone else.

You did the best you could possibly have done with the cards you were dealt and noone could have done better.

She's an idiot. I had an 'easy' birth. As in it was quick. It was also so incredibly painful during the contractions that I wanted to throw myself off the hospital roof. And during crowning I screamed like someone was kicking a boiling hot kettle between my legs, because that's what it felt like.

I had pain relief and I also consider myself to have a high pain threshold, but that birth kicked the shit out of me.

Who boasts about this stuff? The day my vag got stretched big enough to release eight pounds. It's a bad time! Not a trip to the cinema to see Care Bears The Movie.

Perhaps say something like 'Wow - you must have really had a good birth if there was time and space for the professionals to share their expertise on my birth experience. I'm amazed you could even share the details of my labour while you were doing it yourself, but asking for advice on my behalf and remembering it all is really testimony to how good your techniques are. I must get the details if I ever have another....'
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it pisses me right off that people who have squeezed out a baby then consider themselves experts on the matter. No - you just did what the midwives told you, like the rest of us do, and the fact that it all went according to plan is good fortune rather than good planning.

Well wasn't she lucky eh!

I wonder if it's to do with the whole 'birthing plan' business? I could never quite get my head around that - I never wrote one, and the midwife on duty when I went in actually said she didn't understand why people write them either as you can never really plan what's going to happen, and so many women feel let down, or upset it didn't happen the way they'd planned it!

Ignore her. Definitely not worth loosing sleep over.

I didn't write a birth plan either Illistrationaddict, all I wanted was the baby delivered safely - I didn't care how.
OP, YADNBU

I had a textbook birth twice. Gas and air.
The first one was like the midwife reading memorised passages from a text book and me complying (I think that's what caused the damage, I pushed when I was told to, rather when I needed to)
The second was "please try to hold on for a few hours we're busy" resulting in my waters "exploding" in the midwife's face and DS2 being born in 60 seconds!
Thing is, I had a load of damage afterwards I needed corrective surgery. I was told I should of massaged olive oil into my nether reigions prior to giving birth practiced pelvic floor and and various things like that... But after 8 years I have stopped beating myself up over it.
DS3 and 4 were planned CS. DS3 was a textbook CS whilst DS4... I was given a bit too much morphine and started to hallucinate! Saw ghosts! Completely disinterested in the baby, I was as high as a kite!
I've stopped analysing.

What an utter twonk. Your birth experience it totally a matter of luck. You can subscribe to all the woo rubbish you want but if you could actually do anything that changes the way you give birth in more than a minor way, everyone would do it. Does she think you CHOSE to have an awful time?

People have different shapes, different pain thresholds all sorts of things which affect birth and which aren't up to them. FWIW, I had a hb without pain relief and I don't feel "proud" of doing that (what rubbish!), I feel LUCKY that I had the opportunity to do it and that it went well.

I do feel proud to have produced the cutest, snuggliest little babies EVER, but that is a totally different thing

I'm not sure if I think yabu or not, I think she was mean and wrong to say every birth could be easy with preparation but I think she has just as much right to talk about her birth experience as someone with a traumatic birth.

I had a lovely birth experience, it was not planned I give credit to the amazing midwife and chance. I feel that for me staying mobile allowed me to have a fantastic birth I am almost convinced that if I had been on my back ds would not have been born vaginally at least not without intervention. Ds was 10 pounds and his head took a long time to defend after I was 10cms dilated, the only way to get him to move slowly down was for me to be in a funny position. I would never say other women should stay mobile but I know for me it helped.

when I was pregnant I was told so many scary stories about birth, I think it is a positive thing for women to say actually it wasn't that bad so long as they don't blame women who had bad labours.

I wanted to talk about my birth experience like other women, I didn't see it as competitive I just loved talking about what for me was an amazing empowering experience.

I had a 2nd degree tear an oxytocin drip and lots of invasive monitoring so it wasn't a fairytale waterbirth at sunset to whale song situation but I brought a person into tge world which to me felt like the most amazing thing I have ever done.

honeytea I think the point the OP was making is that her 'friend' was implying that she had difficult births becuase she had not done X,Y,Z and therefore it was her fault.
It is great that you and other women have lovely birth experiences, and of course you should be able to talk about them, if (as you pointed out in your post) they aren't insinuating that people who've had a more traumatic time have failed, or not done enough preparation etc.

The great thing about your birth story is you've talked about what worked for you, without saying that is what everyone should do.

Yanbu. I came home from pregnancy yoga in tears while pregnant with my second because one of the women there started preaching at me and another woman who were discussing our planned vbacs about how mental attitude made a huge difference to whether interventions were required and how she only was in hospital for 2 hours and delivered without pain relief. So my 77 hours of labour, failed epidural at about 70 hours and emcs were because I didn't have the right mental attitude? Nothing to do with the brow presentation then? Fuck off. Interventions save lives - without c-sections we would both have died. Insensitive and deluded woman, but still managed to really upset me when heavily pregnant and hormonal. 2nd birth was 6.5 hrs, totally different, not because my attitude was different but because dc2 wasn't in a crazy position. Nowt to do with me.

After I had my first child by EMCS, someone cheerfully told me that next time I really should do a vaginal birth, so I know what it's like.