To me, my son’s birth was not just a “good birth.”
The medical community thinks of births as either “good” or not good based on the physical health of the mother and the baby. Yes, my son was healthy within a day of his delivery. But for a mother, there’s so much more to it than that.
Since reading Kate Hopper’s gripping memoir Ready for Air: A Journey through Premature Motherhood
Yes, the book did break my heart. But it was worth every tear and every difficult emotion. I cried for Kate, for her baby, and for her husband. But in truth I cried for myself as well.
Like Kate, and every first-time mother, I had dreams and plans for how motherhood and parenthood should and would be. The birth process terrified me so I approached it like the doctoral student that I was. I researched, and I wanted as much control over the outcome as possible. Ever the perfectionistic, I was striving for the perfect natural birth. I had stacks of pregnancy books, took several prenatal classes, and hired a team of birth doulas, with whom I wrote a birth plan.
Yet in the final stages of pushing during a fast, intense labor, the doctors rushed me into the operating room for an emergency c-section because my baby’s heart rate had fallen dramatically and would not rebound. There was rushing, shouting, shoving releases in my face. An intern yelling at me that I was not responding to his questions about anesthesia fast enough. The c-section was happening so fast that at first it seemed that my husband would not be able to join me. No time to put me under general anesthesia. The operating room was like a war zone, birth as a combat operation, armies of doctors and nurses rushing in and out, shouting orders to each other.
Once my son was born, he wasn’t breathing and there was more chaos. It turns out that he had an umbilical cord that was too short to make it out of the birth canal.
Yet by the end of the day my son was fine. I was fine. After a rough c-section, my recovery was long and painful, but I was fine. In the eyes of the doctors, this was a successful birth — everyone was physically healthy — and I didn’t want to listen when my doula, who was also a clinical social worker and therapist, told me that I might want to consider therapy at some point to process the emotions that I might feel. She said that mine was one of the most traumatic births she had witnessed, and it was okay to feel emotional pain and a sense of loss from that experience.
But the weeks went by and I was consumed with my own physical recovery, my son’s all-consuming colic and digestive issues (severe allergies and reflux) and our move from Cambridge to western New York.
In the two years since my son’s birth, I had never thought about motherhood from the perspective that Ready For Air helped me to see. This book is about Kate Hopper’s battle with severe preeclampsia during the final part of her pregnancy and the premature delivery of her daughter, Stella, at 32 weeks gestation. But about so much more.
When I taught writing and memoir to middle school students, I would always tell them that it’s not enough to tell a story, a sequence of events and collection of characters; you need to have a “so what?” Why should a reader care about these events? What is it that you want your reader to understand about you and about life from this story?
From the book, I learned a lot about medical conditions, such as preeclampsia, that I had always wondered about, and about the isolation, difficulties, and day-to-day joy and pain of caring for a premature infant. The events in the book are told simply and compellingly.
Yet Kate’s “so what?” is that life can be full of challenges that you don’t expect. At a moment’s notice, the direction of your life can change forever. And our job is to accept our lives for what they are. There are no perfect stories — no perfect marriages, no perfect children, no perfect parents.
For years now, I’ve been carrying a lot of baggage about my early months of motherhood, and I felt that I didn’t have a mental shelf to put that baggage. That baggage was my own feelings as failure as a mother. Why couldn’t have I have had a “normal” birth? What had I done to cause my son’s cord issues? (One doctor actually asked me why I didn’t tell my ob/gyn that my son had decreased levels of movement during the last months of pregnancy… I felt guilty, even though I knew that — as a first-time mom — I had no basis for comparison about what were “normal” levels of fetal movement.) Why didn’t I try harder to breastfeed longer? Why was I so weak that I stopped after two months? Why wasn’t I able to stop my son’s constant crying for the first several months of life?
This is a beautifully written book that may help women see that those are the wrong questions. Instead, we could ask: What am I grateful for today? What’s the best that I can do today? This book can help mothers understand that there is no perfect experience of motherhood. Tragedy can happen in the blink of an eye, and we should be grateful for our own paths and for our own set of coping skills.
To read more about Ready for Air: A Journey through Premature Motherhood
To read more about another terrific book, She Matters: A Life in Friendships
, and to enter a giveaway, go to our new HerStories Project website. Visit our HerStories Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. Our anthology of friendship stories, including a foreword by Scary Mommy’s Jill Smokler, will be released next month!
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Nice post, Jessica! I’m part of a parenting after infertility group and our theme for last month was the birth story. It was fascinating to read the variety of experiences and feelings about birth stories, including whether one actually had a birth story: http://pailbloggers.com/2013/10/31/october-2013-monthly-theme-post-listing-birth-story/
That’s fascinating! Thanks for sharing that, KeAnne!
You have really made me interested in reading this book for all kinds of reasons. First, I love reading memoirs, especially because I’ve written one myself. Second, I too had an unplanned c-section and although it wasn’t considered an “emergency”, I was still upset that I hadn’t experienced a “Normal” birth. Third, I have also experienced those “blink of an eye” scenarios with my children more than once and our life changed with no notice. Thank you for sharing your experience with us too…
Thanks, Emily. Have you ever read Use Your Words before? I’m pretty sure, Emily, that you would love Kate Hopper’s writing. And this memoir might be helpful to you right now, with all that you’re going through. XO Jessica
I love how this book changed your perspective. What a powerful thing!!
My son (my firstborn) was born at 33 weeks and immediately whisked away after birth to the NICU. It wasn’t even close to my idea about how things should have been. I was working full time practicing medicine and I was absolutely sure that the stress of doing that and working 80+ hours a week contributed to his early birth. It didn’t, but I carried a lot of guilt with me about that for a long time.
But the truth is…he is a healthy and happy 13 year old now. It’s all okay. I’ve come to realize as you have, that there is no “perfect” anything when it comes to parenthood…or life for that matter. Having that mindset will only set you up for unhappiness. –Lisa
So true, Lisa! Thanks for your perspective. You would probably love the book!
Oh, you and your Amazon conspiracy again!! 🙂 Seriously, though, this is a beautiful review!! This is on my Amazon wish list right now…. I had a rough experience with my daughter’s birth – 24 hours of labor before finally having a c-section. So I know what it’s like to recover both from the physical pains of labor, and the c-section surgery. I also remember the doctors telling me about every 2 hours after my daughter was born that I was at a heightened risk for PPD because of having a c-section, and just thinking that ‘I was tough’ and I would be okay… and then trying to deny the PPD when it happened. You are so right that there is nothing perfect about any of this, and we need to do the best we can. And so my reading list grows….
This book made me think so much about how a woman’s perception of her birth experience might influence her later emotional state. For me, I think that the circumstances of my son’s birth did not directly cause any emotional or anxiety problems that I had later on, but they did contribute. This one is definitely worth being on your Amazon list!
What a glorious, honest, beautiful review. As you know I too loved Kate’s book. I think this sentence, about her “so what,” is one of the most succinct summaries of what I consider my life’s central task: “And our job is to accept our lives for what they are.” Amen. xox
Thanks, Lindsey. This book made me think about so much, far beyond just the physical experience of pregnancy, labor, and early infancy. That’s why I would recommend this book to anyone as a story for understanding how one woman reached this task of acceptance.
Thank you so much for this beautiful review, Jessica. I love the “So what?” that you got from the book and I’m honored and humbled that it helped you change the questions you were asking. Thank you so much for sharing your story.
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