My last month of pregnancy I was wondering where my friends were. Busy with their business and not inviting me their fun. I guess due to my ‘circumstance’.
Nobody asked how I was doing.
Nobody knew how I cried, how was scared, about the nightmares of my baby dying inside me. Everyone just assumed I was happily waddling through life I guess.
Until my due date. Then the text came. ‘Are you having contractions?’
Some days the answer was no. In which case they responded. ‘What’s up? Are they going to induce you?’
Sometimes the answer was yes. I’m which they celebrated my pain.
Confused the days went on. I waited wondering in my own anxiety and anticipation if anyone would ask, ‘how are you??’
Than one fateful day it started. It was Agony and terrible. Like a train wreck inside my body. It brought up repressed memories of my labor of son #1. As different as it was.
I pushed so hard for two hours my nose bleed and I puked with every contraction, my body shook as my temperature drop. My baby’s heart began to race. But finally with one final push he was here!
And then people I haven’t heard from for months began to text. ‘When can I hold your baby?’ ‘What day can I come ?’
What day is it I thought? As I hobbled around too sore and swollen to move or pee.
‘Who will hold me?’ I wondered. Thinking of traditional times of families and villages that would care for the mother. A sisterhood of red tent understanding of 6 weeks of bleeding and crying.
My partner was wonderful in all the ways a man can be wonderful. But, although he was there he would never understand where I was, What had happened to me, what I had lost in those hours.
I so desperately wanted a friend to ask how I was knowing the trauma and not just the outcome.
I have come to realize many of my friends, These beautiful and strong women, never had a chance or allowance to process their births other than reciting a story from the outside perspective.
And that I wasn’t alone. There was a moment when puking, bleeding and grunting and pushing that I had felt my grandmothers there. Where I was connected to every woman and mother that has ever been.”
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