To still beat myself up about when DS was born?

[Writerwannabe83]

I don't know what I'm after really - maybe just some reassurance that how I'm feeling is normal.

DS is 7m/o and sometimes I look back on the first few days of his life and I hate myself because I feel like I let him down.

I go over it a lot in my mind and it usually brings me to tears. I was thinking about it earlier when I was taking DS for a walk and I just welled up.

He came via ELCS and I didn't hold him when he was delivered. He was given straight to DH (put down his top) and I feel so disappointed in myself for not asking to hold him. I didn't hold him for 45 minutes until I got into recovery and even then I was very detached from it all, I just remember feeling hungry and asking for some toast.

I didn't feel that "rush of love" for him that most mothers talk of. I did feel happy though, I remember being wheeled back to the ward with DS in my arms and I remember feeling like my little baby was here safely. I have got a photo of myself holding DS as soon as we get back to the ward, I'm smiling and look genuinely happy so I must have felt it, but my actual memories surrounding the days around his birth just make me feel sad.

BF didn't go well at that start and I look back and wish I had tried harder for him. He lost a lot of weight and had jaundice and I feel like it's my fault.

I remember my first night on the ward and I was still pretty numb and DS was being sick in his crib (mucousy) and he couldn't roll and I couldn't get to him and I felt petrified for him. I shouted for help and another mother came and turned him on his side for me. In those few seconds of me feeling helpless I was so fearful he was going to choke and die so I know I felt love towards him and I was protective of him but I just can't shake the feeling that I didn't love him properly enough.

I'm never going to get those days back, they should have been the most amazing days of my life and I hate myself because I don't feel that way. Surely I should? It upsets me that the one chance I got to enjoy and embrace the arrival of DS (and love him with my whole heart) I wasted it, I feel like I let him down by not feeling like the days surrounding his arrival were the happiest days of my life. There were external factors which led to me feeling down for a few days after his birth, but surely his birth should have been enough to make any other bad stuff seem insignificant?

I am rambling.

How do I just let the guilt go?

You know Writer, there's no law you have to tell him the unvarnished truth if he does ask! You don't have to lie, but you could easily talk about how you and your husband had thought for a long time about having children, talk about your health (in child appropriate terms- do I remember rightly you have a long term condition which complicated things), how thrilled you were to be becoming parents, and then talk about how he was as a baby. I mean, the first three days seem a big thing to you now, but honestly kids are not that specific. When my 5 year old asks about this stuff, she wants to hear tales of eating yoghurt with two hands whilst we collapsed in hysterical laughter, refusing a bottle and screaming for two hours straight when I went out, etc. She's not that bothered about a specific window of time.

What Penguins said. My DCs' favourite story of all their babyhoods is the one where I recount how DD3 peed all over me in the minutes after she was born, and the MW said 'Well, there's no need to worry about those kidneys!' as she got a towel to clean it up. Or the one where I gave DD1 cauliflower cheese when I was weaning her, and she cried all night in between very smelly farts, poor little love.

One if the most amazing things about having DD is that I now love her in a way I never knew existed and it has astonished me to realise that my parents love me like that.

It has never occurred to me to ask my mother whether she loved me instantly when I was born. It is more that enough to know that she loves me in the way that I love my DD now.

My DD is 4 and knows that I was 'poorly' after she was born. But she also knows that she is adored now and has a sense of security from that. I think that means that she is unlikely to question whether she was loved instantly and for it not to really matter that it wasn't like that.

I haven't had the same birth experience, but I have some of the same emotions. You aren't alone x

You have a right to grieve for what you didn't have in those first few hours with your child.

I feel the same about my first labour - forceps birth, epidural, no skin to skin at all - dd was dressed quite quickly. I just felt strange and numb.

I don't feel guilty, just angry that it was taken from us, because the midwives weren't bothered about it.

So much could be done to improve the experience of our first few hours and days with our babies - why isn't it happening?

Please nobody say 'it's not important' - it is! We all deserve better, and so do our babies.

I felt nothing at all for my son when he was born, and I had a straightforward labour and birth. I held him and did all the right things you hear so much about, but all I wanted was for somebody else to take him so I could have a cup of tea and rest. Things didn't improve, and I developed very bad PND. I had treatment and made a full recovery.

I'm fine now and I have a wonderful bond with my son, but I haven't the energy to analyse his first days and weeks. I did all the right things, he was always very well cared for. My heart was dead to him but he didn't know that, and he never will. He is loved and adored, as I'm sure your wee one is too. These kids are the lucky ones.

mini, I'm not saying it's not important, and there are lots of things to be angry about in how new mums are sometimes treated - but as we saw upthread, a lot of people who had the "perfect" birth experience still didn't feel a huge rush of love for their child at first, or have what they felt were the "right" feelings about them. My own birth experience first time round wasn't particularly terrible and I still ended up with severe PND.

I think it's a little dangerous to equate "good/perfect birth experience" with "good bonding" or "good postnatal mental health" - a bad birth experience can obviously have a bad impact on your mental health, but that's that's a long way from "if they had just done things differently in the hospital you wouldn't be feeling this way". Not to mention the fact that sometimes complicated, medicalized births or separation from baby are just unavoidable, not just a result of nasty/callous HCPs who don't care about you (though obviously they should try to do as much as possible to improve the experience, eg skin to skin after c section). My second birth was extremely medicalized because otherwise I would be dead (emergency C-section for pre-eclampsia), and I know in my hospital sometimes section mums couldn't have baby in recovery because the two theatres shared a recovery room and often the other patient was having a D&C for miscarriage.

A lot of things in the 3 days that happened I was in hospital make me feel bad about the experience but the skin to skin issue is the worst. If I could turn back the clock I would and I would ask to hold him. When they pulled him out of me it seemed so surreal, one minute I was lying calmly on a table and the next minute someone is showing me a baby and telling me it was mine. My DH had tears in his eyes and I wanted to feel that emotion but I just felt so detached. When my DH had DS down his top I was looking at them both and although I wanted him on me and I so desperately wanted to tell them I wanted to hold my baby, I didn't. Those few moments after DS was born, in my eyes, was the time he most needed his mom (skin to skin) but instead he was shoved down the tshirt of my DH, but to DS it would have been a stranger. I can't help wondering whether DS was scared and if I let him down by not reassuring him that everything was ok. I know that's an absolutely utterly ridiculous thing to think and say, but I can't help feeling it.

There were some complications after my CS regarding my womb not contracting and there being some bleeding they couldn't control so they had to ask DH to leave so they could go whatever it was they did, and I remember feeling scared. I even feel bad for that, like me being scared about what was happening to me shouldn't have been a stronger emotion than the feelings I had towards DS.

It's just a minefield.

Me and DH always said we'd only ever have one child (I have 2 chronic health conditions, well find for remembering penguin) and it upsets me to think that I will never have those 'first minutes' ever again. I will never know gets it's like to have skin to skin and to feel immediate love for my baby.

I sound so ridiculously self indulgent but the whole experience just saddens me.

I think it's a little dangerous to equate "good/perfect birth experience" with "good bonding" or "good postnatal mental health"

I agree very much. I wonder how often women have idealised birth experiences in their head and then suffer afterwards because things outside their control mean that ideal didn't happen.

So much can and should be done to improve those first few hours, and it is a regular topic on MN, especially the understaffing of maternity wards where post-cs women are left alone, unable to move, with a baby they can't reach or help, just as the OP is describing.

However, I agree very much with the general opinion of "it's not important" - because nothing anyone can do can go back and change the past.

If you are upset or traumatised by your birth experience then it is important to seek support and help for this. But looking back constantly and wishing it could be done better - sadly, that isn't going to change anything. That's what people mean by "it isn't important". Use the experience to feed into any future births and say what you want to do differently; use to experience to campaign for changes to maternity care.

But in general, it doesn't have to affect how you have bonded with your baby and there is no right or wrong way of giving birth and spending the first few hours with your baby.

minifingers Tue 11-Nov-14 13:50:17
You have a right to grieve for what you didn't have in those first few hours with your child.

I feel the same about my first labour - forceps birth, epidural, no skin to skin at all - dd was dressed quite quickly. I just felt strange and numb.

I don't feel guilty, just angry that it was taken from us, because the midwives weren't bothered about it.

So much could be done to improve the experience of our first few hours and days with our babies - why isn't it happening?

Please nobody say 'it's not important' - it is! We all deserve better, and so do our babies.

I actually take great exception to that comment about the midwives not being bothered. The midwives and consultant I had were all utterly amazing and went out of their way to accommodate my issues and to ensure my experience wasn't damaging.

I don't blame them for me not holding my baby sooner. I was in theatre and just totally out of it. I wasn't in a state to hold my baby. DS's birth was very uneventful and everything went to plan but I still felt rough as sin and just detached from everything. I genuinely don't think holding DS sooner would have made any difference. I was having surgery and its harder than you actually realise. I don't think everyone is quite as out of it during an ELCS as me but I can well believe that many women are less together than they realise at the time and retrospectively don't understand when they look back and say "why didn't I ask for x, y or z". I was fully conscious but my alertness and awareness was definitely reduced - by enough to know about it - but I suspect there will be a lot of women where that reduction may not be as much so they don't notice but others around them will.

I think its a shock to the system that's the issue and not being prepared for it no matter what you do. Hormones might not give you a rush of love, but they might make you react in other ways you might not normally do. I think its impossible to be aware of it yourself; its other people who will pick up on it as you are lost inside it and can't see it objectively.

The night DS was given formula in hospital, I was quite frankly crackers. The staff were amazing, I had DH with me and I had a private room and STILL I had this sense of failure for struggling with feeding and feelings of how and what I should do or feel as a mother. Prior to having DS I was really not bothered about breast feeding him. The second he arrived all rational went out the window. I'm usually pretty militant about the bullshit of 'doing it right' in terms of the method of giving birth or feeding (I believe you should do what suits and to hell with what anyone else thinks). Yet at the time, what was going on in my head was pure emotions rather than any logic at all.

There really was nothing more that anyone could have done to make my experience better. It wasn't a negative experience, but it certainly wasn't a euphoric positive experience either. Like I say, it was more one to survive.

Realistically I believe the OP probably could have had the same support as me, but still feel the same, because a lot of this is about expectation and social and cultural beliefs and misconceptions.

I do think a hell of a lot more could be done to improve women's experiences, but reading writers posts, I question just how much more the hospital themselves could have done in this particular case. The fact that her husband had skin to skin for 45 mins shows they clearly do care about it, which is better than a lot of other hospitals. The hospital couldn't do a lot more about the situation where her son was vomiting. Its just one of those things.

This one is definitely more about mental health, expectations and women having different underlying abilities to cope with the experience. There is no blame to be attached here imho. Its just one of those that we need to be more aware of the fact of how we put pressure on ourselves, how we measure our worth as individuals and what our beliefs are. And just how crazy our hormones can send us.

leedy - medicalised births are more likely to end up with a mum in poor health and this can make the first few hours after birth much more challenging. Of course it's unavoidable for some - but you've got to remember that the majority of births now involve forceps/ventouse/syntocinon/c-section/drips/episiotomy. For first time mums only a small number don't have any interventions. If there are epic and unprecedented levels of interference in birth - and there are - then more thought needs to put into how these mums and babies are cared for afterwards, given that so many women will be feeling fragile/be post operative. For example the issue of skin to skin - it's really, really not that hard to encourage and support this for most mums, and yet it seems to go by the by often for no better reason than thoughtlessness on the part of the midwife. Ditto with postnatal care, which is often just POOR.

Of course many mothers will still take their time to fall in love and to recover from the birth. The point is that shit postnatal care creates more barriers to bonding.

I will never know gets it's like to have skin to skin and to feel immediate love for my baby.

I had skin to skin (inc after the emergency section) and still didn't feel immediate love for my baby, I really don't think the two are necessarily related. Also it sounds from your experience like being temporarily separated from baby was unavoidable while they stopped your bleeding, is there any way you can frame it in your head as "thank goodness the doctors were able to treat me so I could go on and be a healthy mum for DS, and his dad was there to look after him"?

"I actually take great exception to that comment about the midwives not being bothered."

I didn't think I needed to point out that this is not true of all midwives, that some women have great care.

But there's always someone....

If it helps - many midwives provide compassionate care before, during and after the birth.

But there is also lots of evidence that postnatal care in the NHS can be very lacking.

"I think it's a little dangerous to equate "good/perfect birth experience" with "good bonding" or "good postnatal mental health"

It's not 'dangerous' to equate a straightforward birth with a lower likelihood of trauma and postnatal depression. Women who have complicated births are more likely to struggle in the first few weeks. And more women than ever are having complicated births.

I agree redtooth - all these issues are completely my own. Apart from a few minor things the staff on the Maternity Ward were amazing and very caring towards me. The day after my CS when I was on my own as DH couldn't be with me I had a student midwife by my side all day, she never left me. She could see I was struggling physically and emotionally and she was a great support for me, I font know if I would have coped without her. It was only her 2nd day on the unit and I will always remember her.

"It's not 'dangerous' to equate a straightforward birth with a lower likelihood of trauma and postnatal depression."

It's just risk, though, and it doesn't mean that any given person who has PND/other mental health issues and had a complicated birth, has the PND because they had the complicated birth, or that if they hadn't had the complicated birth they wouldn't have PND (in fact often thinking about "what if... what if..." can make mental health worse). Sometimes mental health shit just happens.

As Writer herself points out she feels she had good care, so coming in telling her about how her bad feelings are understandable and she should be angry about her birth seems a bit unhelpful. Obviously there are people (a few friends of mine included) who are rightly angry about some terrible experiences on maternity/labour wards, but that doesn't seem to be the case here: just a case of not having the birth experience she expected.

It's not 'dangerous' to equate a straightforward birth with a lower likelihood of trauma and postnatal depression. Women who have complicated births are more likely to struggle in the first few weeks. And more women than ever are having complicated births.

I always find comments like this interesting as they tend to assume that all women want the same sort of birth.

Not all women want a straightforward, drug and intervention free vaginal birth.

I'd have been a damned sight more traumatised if I'd ended up with a drug (i.e. pain relief free) vaginal delivery that happened within a few hours of contractions starting

Genuinely not joking there. Each women is an individual. For some women, an epidural will be their ideal birth, and not having any pain relief will be traumatic. For some women, having an elcs will be their ideal birth, and having a vaginal birth will be traumatic.

I agree all women should be encouraged to try and have the birth and post-birth experience that they want. I just don't agree that all women want the same thing.

Writer, I feel so sad for you that you are giving yourself such a hard time for events that were out of your control.

You can't control or predict your reactions to new events - you weren't to know how you would react during and after your C-section. If you were losing blood and needing intervention then your emotions would highly likely be coloured by your physical state. Your blood pressure was probably dropping, which can cause a kind of distancing which is similar to what you described. It is also completely reasonable to feel scared for yourself, that isn't something to feel guilty about - your baby was in the care of your DH and the hospital staff, so you didn't have to be solely focussed on your baby at that precise moment. Also, your DH was not a stranger to your baby. His voice would have been completely familiar to your baby as he would have heard his voice all the time whilst in utero.

I understand your emotions around this as your (probable) only birth experience, but I really strongly believe that the "immediate rush of love" thing only happens to a handful of women. I think it's completely normal for it to grow and strengthen over time, as yours has with your baby.

Berating yourself for things that you couldn't control and can't be changed now is only going to make you miserable. It might be an idea to seek some counselling to help you fight off these negative and punishing thought processes.

writer, I seem to remember at the time that you were very anxious prior to the birth of your son for various reasons. I do wonder whether its part of a wider picture about you with the birth being a real focal point of that anxiety.

Not all women want a straightforward, drug and intervention free vaginal birth.

I'd have been a damned sight more traumatised if I'd ended up with a drug (i.e. pain relief free) vaginal delivery that happened within a few hours of contractions starting grin

Genuinely not joking there. Each women is an individual. For some women, an epidural will be their ideal birth, and not having any pain relief will be traumatic. For some women, having an elcs will be their ideal birth, and having a vaginal birth will be traumatic.

There is research that suggests that women who plan an ELCS are less likely to end up with trauma than women who plan a VB (remembering that a planned vb includes the outcomes of an instrumental delivery and an EMCS). The difference is not about how they give birth though. Its about whether the birth experience meets their expectations and how in control of the situation they felt. The closer a woman's experience was to her preconceptions the more satisfied she was with her birth experience.

In this case, writer actually had an ELCS, but her preconceptions don't match her experience.

Its quite thought provoking research, with many implications.

I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted them to pull DS out of me, he'd start crying (which he didn't) and I would have him curled up on my chest and my DH would be hugging me and we'd both have tears in our eyes because out baby was finally here.

I think that's what is fed into us about how a baby's arrival should be and because my experience wasn't like that I feel like I've missed out on something magical.

A friend of mine had a CS and she has a photo of her doing skin to skin straight after delivery and it upsets me to see it because it's something so important to me and I couldn't have it because I was too detached to ask for it.

We (me and dp) had decided we wanted 2 children if possible but one of the things I'm now struggling with is how unfair it will be on ds if my next baby's birth isn't affected in the same way or if I do things that I didn't with ds. The logical part of my brain tells me that it doesn't matter because I will love them both the same but the other part of me really hurts that I will never get those first moments/days/weeks back. I really understand about the formula thing too - ds had some formula after he was born when he wasn't quite latching properly but then had to have formula when he was 4 days old for 24 hours due to the scans/tests I was having making me radioactive. I couldn't even hold him or change his nappy I could only watch dp or the mw do it. I was gutted about not being able to feed him because I didn't want him to have formula (that was the only time I have ever had to wake him up to feed him!) but I felt strangely detached like you described watching him being cared for by everyone else. And that makes me feel guilty. And the fact that the next day he screamed for hours and had problems latching again.

As for skin to skin - I had that but I don't remember how it felt :( I do remember that he was inside my top having skin to skin when they wheeled my bed onto the ward the next day. But there's lots I don't remember and what I do remember feels like its fading and the other day when I saw photos I didn’t know dp had taken in the delivery room of ds and him I cried. I asked him why he never took any of me and he said he didn't know :(

Btw your ds wouldn't have been scared - he would've known who your dh was and would've known he wasn't a stranger as he would've heard his voice when you were pregnant. :)

I can empathise so much with you auntmaggie. When I think back to when the midwife was giving DS a bottle of formula my heart was breaking. I wanted to scream that he was my baby, not hers, and I should be the one caring for him, but I didn't. I sat there with tears in my eyes and just watched it happen. I felt like as a mother I couldn't even look after my own baby and that he was better off with the midwife than with me. I felt like she was trying to take my baby off me. It was such a strange feeling, it was horrible.

You have nothing to feel guilty about. It is not easy bringing another life into the world! It's not the most amazing time of life for everyone - for lots, myself included, it's traumatic, overwhelming and involves major surgery. I didn't hold either of mine properly for ages, as I react badly to anaesthestic. However, DH was able to do so and this is something he has happy memories of (not me being poorly obviously, but having the first hour or so with his babies). It took me a long time to recover from the DS1's birth, not so much with DS2 because I knew it didn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

Others have already given a great deal of very useful help and advice on this thread but I dodn't want to read & run. My first son was born via forceps after a very long & difficult labour. I felt exactly the same as you, very tired, emotional and shell shocked. I was happy that he had arrived safely & I did love him but didn't feel a "rush" of love for him. To be honest I was more relieved that the birth was over!

After going home I really struggled for the first few weeks & was almost "afraid" of being on my own with him, I struggled with bf & he wasn't an easy baby to settle sleepwise.

With my second baby it was so very different & I almost felt on a high when I went onto the Post Natal ward with him, looking back I can see that first time round I was exhausted & almost in shock after the birth.

You do sound as though you would benefit from talking to someone about PND or perhaps some counselling to work through your feelings about your delivery/ your son. Please look into getting some help & support with this outside MN.

Good luck OP.

Writer- I think you are beating yourself up TBH. As I mentioned, DD1 was a long birth and I had forceps. I don't think I had skin to skin, but I might have done. I literally do not remember the moments of her birth. I gave birth on the Tuesday and had last slept on the Friday night. I was basically delirious. I remember being prepped for forceps, I remember holding her as I was wheeled to the ward. I remember the 1 minute APGAR seeming to take forever and wanting to yell "give me my damn baby" (though I didn't) but it's all very blurry.

In no other sphere of life than blooming motherhood would we expect our bodies to go something so traumatic (whether surgical or vaginal) and have our end focus be immediately on another human being and creating the perfect soft focus fuzzy moment. It's like Instagram - supposedly reality, but nothing like most people's reality.

She doesn't seem scarred by it at 5 .