On birth stories.

I’ve often wondered what men talk about when women aren’t in the room. Apparently I’m in good company here, as Jane Austen famously never wrote male-only dialogue as she only had experience of conversation with female participants (although, to be fair, she had six brothers, so I'd imagine she'd overheard a lot). But I also kind of fear the answer would be disappointing, or dull.

And perhaps men would like to know what we women really talk about when we get together? Well, in my experience, we talk a lot, and about a lot of things, but there is something about getting a bunch of mums together which means that sooner or later we will exchange birth stories.

I wonder what drives this compulsion to share our experiences of birth? There’s a sort of shared understanding that it can be kind of therapeutic, or at least intimate and sensitive. There’s a bond created in telling of what for most of us is presumably one of our most vulnerable and life-changing moments.

I love a good birth story. "Call the midwife" is my favourite TV show, and I also love watching “One born every minute” or reading sensational stories which pop up on my social media feed about women who didn’t know they were pregnant until the head came out.

And I have had the privilege of hearing some absolute corkers from friends. My most recent favourite was a new friend, a qualified doctor, who was having a planned home birth and distracting herself by making brownies, which she put in the oven, then she went and gave birth in the downstairs loo, and was done in time to hear the ding to get the brownies out. (As I insisted she reiterated this - “But- but brownies only take a few minutes!” – a mutual friend told her, “She’ll probably write a blog about this now!” so there you go!)

At the opposite extreme there was a poor dear brave friend who nearly lost her baby and nearly died herself, and it was literally only thanks to the pandemic (roaming ambulances close at hand and empty roads for a speedy journey to hospital) that they both made it through. She told me it took her a while to get to the position to be able to talk about it, but then share it she did. It's like a compulsion.

Another friend’s baby was delivered by her husband on the kitchen floor. (Fortunately, her husband is a doctor). Another friend had seven failed epidurals during labour, and was left needing to self-catheterise for weeks post birth. Yet another had a failed forceps delivery which turned into a C-section, and a twin mum had a forceps birth and then a C-section birth within minutes.

I could go on and on…

And happily we all lived to tell our stories, which is not something which can be taken for granted, certainly globally and historically. Praise the Lord for the NHS, and modern medicines.

Neither can giving birth even be taken for granted. I was once at a mums’ gathering when we got onto our favourite topic, rehashing our stories and hearing from our newer members, when the penny sort of dropped that one mum had adopted her daughter and so did not have a story to share in the same way (happily, she was a doctor, and so could chime in with the births with which she had assisted, but still it was a warning for me to be more sensitive).

And of course neither can we expect stories to end with a healthy baby. On the back of a previous blog I wrote about miscarriage, a friend has shared the pain of going through labour knowing she was birthing a stillborn child. I can hardly imagine the heartache involved.

And still these stories are our stories, and we feel compelled to share them. So here, in brief, are my experiences, which are seemingly middle-of-the-road and would never make a great headline to tempt me to click onto on Facebook.

Pre-childbirth I’d attended yoga birth classes and read hypnobirthing books but of course as soon as we got into proper labour all of that went out of the window. Baby one had an irregular heartbeat and I had a temperature, and so we ended up attached to monitors and doing none of the movements or waterbirth planned, and I had an epidural and then he got stuck, and then after the midwives had done a lot of button pressing and wavering and weighing up options, I realised the room was full of people and they were asking consent to do an emergency C-section which was all a bit of a relief. I still felt like a failure though (failed to stay off the epidural, failed to give birth naturally, then once I’d given birth I failed to produce milk properly). More on breastfeeding here: https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-appreciation-of-dairy-cows

This meant son two was a VBAC which meant more monitors but things went slightly better this time, perhaps until it came to the pushing part, which ended up involving forceps, and one doctor with his arms around the waist of the other doctor, who had his foot braced on the bed, both pulling with all their might. This obviously did a bit of damage and needed stitching, and then got infected, and in all honesty recovering from that felt more scary than recovering from the C-section, even though logically I get that the C-section is a major surgery. And having given birth the ‘normal’ way brought a lot of emotional healing from my feelings of having ‘failed’ the first time, and did mean I could lift my toddler and drive, which wouldn’t have been possible if it had ended in another C-section.

And son three was a bit better again, and this time only needed ventouse.

So I might not be built for being physically good at giving birth, but I did get to experience a pretty good range of birth experiences, a bit like collecting stamps in a book to say I’ve tried everything. Maybe if I’d had another the trend of improvement would have continued and I’d have managed to sneeze him out and then fetch the freshly baked brownies from the oven, but, alas, I’ll never know.

I feel I should credit my brave husband who witnessed all of the protracted and messy birthing (apparently there was a very impressive amount of blood with son two, and the doctor conga line was slipping in it) and was extremely valiant and encouraging through it all, especially impressive given that even the shortest one was sixteen hours. Perhaps his only ‘even better if’ would be that when I asked for calming music he put on “Eye of the tiger” because he thought it would be motivational, but we all got a laugh out of that.

But somehow I doubt that when he and his dad friends get together, they routinely start to share their wives’ birth horror stories.

But that’s my birth experiences, and I'd love to hear yours.