Pregnancy and Instagram.

[WonderfulWorldBeautifulPeople]

I only have one social media account (bar mn if that counts) - instagram.

I'm pregnant after 3 miscarriages and am 23 weeks and counting. It's been a pretty rough pregnancy, and most of my friends who have given birth in the last few years have had some significant issues (3rd degree tears, a prolapse, issues with meconium, emergency c sections etc), and those are just the problems with the birth, let alone with the pregnancy.

My friend send me a few sites to follow on Instagram that document pregnancies and childbirth. Each have followers of up to 300000 people.

I've had a stressful, anxiety inducing, terrifying pregnancy so far and nothing at all prepared me for it. Whilst I had experience of miscarriage, I had absolutely no idea of the other things that could go wrong.

My question. AIBU to think that pregnancy and childbirth very rarely goes the way you want it to 100%? That social media is sort of trivialising it a little, with people documenting every second of their wonderful pregnancies, but rarely mentioning any sort of complications?

I guess this is just the way that social media goes, people only document the best bits, and maybe my naivety is a factor too. It however seems as though pregnancy has become a bit of a glamourised game for some, when for others it is mental agony...

The other thing that also concerned me is a site I was made aware of that takes lots of pregnancy photos from random women online and posts them on to a fetish site. I would be mortified if I found my photo on one of these...

YANBU to think pregnancy and birth rarely go 100% how you want them to.

No one is going to go on instagram and talk about how much their piles are hurting or how they actually pissed themselves at trampolining. I suppose you can either understand that they're not representative of real life, shrug and move on or stop using them/only use them sparingly?

YANBU! At all.

But I talk about my birth injuries on instagram and have actually found loads of helpful resources for managing my prolapse through it - the honest voices are out there, you just have to be a bit selective.

You’re right that birth rarely goes ‘to plan’ - best to note down preferences eg ‘I’m using hypnobirthing so don’t offer pain relief - I will ask if I feel I’d like to try it’ ‘I’m keen to breastfeed and would like help to express colostrum if baby needs to be away from me early on’ ‘I’d prefer a managed/physiological third stage’ or whatever matters most to you, and go in open minded about the precise details.

For reassurance, I had a ‘tough’ labour (induction, back-to-back forehead presentation baby, attempted manual rotation which didn’t work followed by emergency forceps with extended episiotomy, tears, and pp haemorrhage) and despite all this my main feeling afterwards (apart from delighted amazement at my actual baby being alive and well in my actual arms) was a feeling that I’d wasted my time worrying about ‘what if I end up with lots of interventions?!’ because as long as you’re treated with compassion and respect, it really is fine.

Good luck with your (not-plastic-frilly-oversimplified-instagram ) pregnancy!