To feel robbed of a delivery experience

[callmehannahbaker]

I was in labour for 2 hours, I pushed for 14 minutes. I had 20 people in ready to rush me for a c section but I pushed against their wishes.

I only have that from notes-I remember none of it.

I watch OBEM and wish I had an experience of birth.

Aibu to wish I had a birth I remembered?

Haribo I can remember almost laughing at the HV and mat team when they suggested I could have PTSD. I think I said I’ve had a baby not been to Afghanistan. Took me years to finally admit that the weeks in intensive care (me) and NICU (ds) and near death labour experience had had an impact. In the early stages of coming to terms with it I prob said similar to the op, “ I feel robbed of my birth experience” when actually I really meant I just want to scream and run away from life and the pain my actual experience of my birth caused me. But that was,at the time too painful to deal with. Spent years trying to get on with it, but the buried pain seeped through and nearly destroyed my life.

Then consider yourself lucky Haribols, that such an approach does work for you, because it is unlikely to for the majority, and angry posts that come across as unsympathetic and lacking in empathy may well be hurtful and damaging to others who are seeking/need a different strategy from yours.

I JFGOWI for 5 years before breaking down completely with undiagnosed PND and PTSD. I felt ashamed of my "weakness" and hid it from everyone. Until I couldn't anymore

That's 5 years of my life with my kids that I won't get back.

by 5 years that I won't get back - I mean managing the symptoms and stress of hiding the symptoms on top of the normal parenting load.

Be careful what you wish for

Louise sorry you had a very similar experience to mine. I think PTSD resulting from child birth needs a lot more publicity to make it easier for people to talk about it. No one nowadays would say “ I don’t know why you’re depressed you’ve just had a lovely baby” to someone suffering pnd (well without everyone shouting them down). The comments on this thread show there’s still a long way to go with ptsd

Nope not at unreasonable at all. I had to have a GA when I had DD. 6 years later it still breaks my heart myself and DH missed the moment she was brought into the world. I woke up and was handed a baby that in mynhead could have been absolutely anyone's.

@Lifeontheoceanwave

Thanks for that - I agree that we need to talk more about these issues.

It's Maternal Mental Health Awareness week this week, oh the irony.

I did go and talk about it - but despite the event having a creche hardly any mothers turned up - it was HCP's and others with a professional interest, plus people talking about their personal experiences.

Well, following your logic Haribo, many women would have died in childbirth in the past and therefore trauma wouldn't have been an issue for them.

And it's not like those who survived were so grateful for it they didn't suffer. Look at the historical records of women committed to asylums.

Haribo, just as a thought would you say to a soldier suffering PTSD - stop wallowing in it? Or don’t you believe mental health issues exit,

It's Maternal Mental Health Awareness week this week, oh the irony

Quite.

These days many people don't seem mentally equipped to handle very much at all

So you think telling them to shut up, stop 'wallowing' and deal with it will help?

Haribo you've been exceptionally frank about everyone else's state of mind, so I'll reply in a similar fashion; I don't think you're half as emotionally evolved as you seem to think you are as you hand out your judgments on others.

While you're accusing all these 'wallowing' women of 'naval-gazing,' you'd probably benefit from a bit of self-examination yourself. Your 'Works for me!' attitude isn't exactly enlightened.

That is what helped me and (obviously) that is what I would also advise others (including the OP) to do.

Doesn't always work so well. It's what I've tried to do, but it didn't stop me being in tears last night after reading this thread as I relived the moment when DS was taken away to SCBU.

And yes, 100 years ago we'd probably both be dead - though I was a forceps delivery and needed an incubator so chances are I'd have died being born anyway. Doesn't mean we can't try and improve things further, especially those things that are really simple and cheap to do, or even free -knowing the name of the consultant I was under would have been a good start, or being told if he had decided things should be done differently - or just having staff understand that I was scared and not treat me like an inconvenience and a silly girl.

I thought this thread was about couriers before I opened it

I know very few people who look back on the delivery of their child cheerfully. Everyone I know has some kind of regret, or anxiety, or fear, or trauma. Maybe because this is the Shit bit of having a baby that you really don't need to get hung up on. Plan and enjoy spending time with and getting to know your dc and if necessary talk through the birth so you can move past it onto better things.

Analyzing and revisiting traumatic experiences is not voluntary. I have black shapes that sit in the front of my brain - these are amnesiac voids, breakdowns in what should be a continuous memory stream. To me, these shapes are very real - if I could cut open my forehead and slice the front of my brain I would see them there and could pick them up. I did crack on' and raise my child, while being haunted by these dead but not dead' periods that settled in my brain. Having these memory voids, and being scared of them, and thinking about them, is no more voluntary than having a broken leg is.

So many people are jumping into attack mode without reading the fucking OP properly.

She's not saying her birth was more traumatic than anyone else's, that she's upset because she didn't have the perfect magical birth experience or that she's envious of women who got to labour for longer. And she's certainly not saying that she's not grateful to have a healthy baby so fuck knows why posters keep telling her to be.

The OP is asking if she's unreasonable to wish she could remember the birth of her child.

No, OP, YANBU. I was in labour for over 48 hours with DD1 and vividly remember every agonising, frightening minute of it. But I can still see how a fast and furious labour and delivery, one that races by in a blur and afterwards when you read your notes you don't even recognise it as having happened to you, could easily be just as disturbing. It's called empathy, people.

Why does everything have to be a fucking competition.

Negative thoughts are different from invasive thoughts. Negative thoughts - yes, there is an element of control over those that could be learned. Invasive thoughts are just that - invasive. Women perhaps would be more realistic about childbirth if we weren't fed such crap by the media/tv/magazines/nct.

There is an interesting parallel here with the ageing process. We are, generally speaking, living longer with improved life expectancy. But we're not necessarily living those years in good health - we get more years of poor health, rather than death. We are getting less women dying in childbirth, as they are surviving what would previously have killed them, but they are consequently living with the psychologically traumatic aftermath.

HariboIsMyCrack
This thread (for me at least) begs the question why we as a species are becoming so bloody bad at coping mentally with what, at some level, are normal vicissitudes of life.

Because in many cases medicine has advanced to save those who would have died and now we need to find ways to deal with the trauma. By saying people are "bloody bad at coping" you're making yourself feel good at the expense of others.

It may not be "enlightened" (whatever the bloody fuck that means in this context) but it's a damn sight more constructive than giving it a meaningless acronym and spending hours kvetching about it to strangers on the internet

Do you talk like this in real life, or do you save your shouty swearing for people on Internet forums? You say you have a 'snippy posting style,' but again, I don't think you really have much insight into how it comes across. It's rather more than that, in my view.

MN is 80% people 'kvetching' to strangers on the internet. Are you intolerant with all of it, or just the part of it where women need help working through their post-birth sad feelings?

You sound a little ill-equipped to deal with anyone's emotions that aren't exactly the same as yours.

Incidentally, I have a very similar way of dealing with stuff to you. I definitely belong to the school of 'get on with it.' The big difference, however, is that I don't consider people who deal with things differently to me, or have different emotional coping strategies to somehow be inferior or doing it 'wrong.' In fact, often I think it's quite the opposite.