You may remember I launched a newsletter last year called the Millennial Mama Club. I’ve been quite terrible at keeping up with it but I wrote some exclusive articles for subscribers that in retrospect I feel could be useful to other mums, so I’m sharing this one from the archives. This particular one is my post about Birth PTSD. I’ve edited it slightly as it was in two parts, but hopefully it helps some new mums out there.
Birth PTSD
I saw a thread on Twitter this week talking about how society plays down how awful childbirth is, otherwise nobody would have kids. I’m not sure if the last part is true, but let me tell you, I can relate.
Personally, I found my birth experience shocking. As in, it took me a long time to come to terms with what had happened. It wasn’t the worst birth story ever, but it was traumatic for me. I had a natural birth, 20 hour labour, gas & air and a shot of pethidine. The emergency button was pushed near the end and I had a rather large episiotomy. From talking to friends that have had kids, that’s fairly average. Some have it worse, some have it easier, but generally with first babies, it’s a long painful labour and some kind of intervention near the end.
But I didn’t know that going in.
Sure, people say childbirth is painful, but I spent my whole pregnancy reading hypnobirthing books and listening to NCT teachers say that birth doesn’t have to mean “pain”, it’s just “pressure”. So it all just felt like such a shock to me when that wasn’t the experience I got. And even people I knew in real life that had children, they would never mention anything about how horrific it can all be. They just said things like “it’s all worth it in the end” without giving details of their births.
(Now that I’m that mum, I make sure I ask pregnant pals if they want to hear the truth or not.)
I’m sure there are some of you out there that had a positive birth experience. I know they’re possible from following people on Instagram that rave about their empowering and life-changing births. But I’ve come to the conclusion that they were the lucky ones.
I think the thing that shocked me the most though was the part after the birth. The post-natal ward was hell on earth for me. I had to stay there for 3 days and hated every second. I felt like a failure because I couldn’t breastfeed and I lost all dignity being topless most of the time with strangers coming in every 5 minutes. I couldn’t even draw a line after the experience because my stitches were infected so I had 3 weeks of being an outpatient at the ADAU and going through three rounds of antibiotics.
But I’m not saying all that to elicit sympathy, I am not in the minority here. I will guarantee some of you reading this will be saying, hun, that’s nothing. At least you didn’t have to recover from a C-section. At least your baby was born healthy. At least your baby was born full-term. And yeah, I can’t imagine having to go through that side of it.
However, I think no matter your birth experience, if it wasn’t the dreamy water birth using breathing as pain relief that you wrote on your birth plan (ahem), then chances are you feel duped that you didn’t get what you wanted.
I realised I had PTSD about my birth when one of my best friends had a baby a few months later. She had a similarly long and traumatic birth, but was kept in the post-natal ward for a bit longer, so we decided to visit. Just being in that ward brought me out in a sweat. It was awful. All those feelings of being trapped, feeling helpless, not knowing what was happening, all came flooding back. Josh and I left the ward saying, yeah, maybe we’ll only have the one child.
But it really highlighted to me that childbirth can create mental health problems in mothers. Sure PTSD, but there are so many more issues that you can come away from birth with. We all know about post-natal depression because it’s the one the health visitors and midwives look out for, but no-one asks how you’re mentally dealing with the aftermath of giving birth. The stitches heal but the mental ramifications can last so much longer.
So yes, I think society does play down the pain of childbirth, but it also plays down how it can mentally affect you.
I’m grateful that my daughter was born safely and know that if I ever decide to have a second that I would deal with it all completely differently. I would advocate for myself, I would ask more questions, I would get discharged as soon as possible from the hospital, I would leave the tealights and lavendar spray at home and I would GET THE FUCKING EPIDURAL. But at the time of writing this, I definitely felt like I still had PTSD about my birth.
There was definitely still a bit of work to do…
Overcoming Birth PTSD with “Birth Afterthoughts”
I figured Birth PTSD just faded away. You just got over it. But a few friends told me about Birth Afterthoughts. It’s a service provided by the NHS that allows you to sit down with an experienced midwife and talk through your birth notes. It’s one of those things where it sounds so simple, so how could it be that effective, y’know?
Well I decided to give it a go.
I’d been thinking about it since my daughter was a few months old but a part of me felt guilty about booking an appointment. Because my birth wasn’t as traumatic as others I’d heard about, maybe this is just what birth is. I just needed to get over it. And then my girl turned 1. Something happened at her first birthday. I felt a massive wave of relief that we’d made it, that we had survived a year of parenthood. All those rules you have to follow before your kid turns one were abandoned. I could breathe again. But I realised I still had some ~feelings~ about my birth experience. So a few weeks later I booked an appointment.
Well then COVID happened, so by the time I got to see the midwife, it was 8 months later. And I admit I felt a bit self-conscious going in to discuss my birth, 20 months after it happened! But apparently some people come in years later, so it’s never too late.
I saw about 30 different midwives throughout my pregnancy, but the lady I met at Birth Afterthoughts was by far the nicest one I’ve ever met. So I instantly felt at ease talking to her. First she asked me why I was there and what I wanted to know, then went through all of the notes on the computer, from my 12 week booking appointment, through to the birth and then the postnatal appointments.
I went to the appointment with just one question I wanted answering. The emergency button was pushed during my birth and I had to have an emergency episiotomy to get the baby out, but I didn’t really understand why. And the lovely midwife showed me in my notes that 5 mins before she was born, they had lost my daughter’s heartbeat and had to get her out quick. A simple answer to a simple question after so long of not knowing why. Of course the notes say I was informed of all of this at the time, but if you’ve given birth too, I’m sure you understand that in the chaos you have no idea what’s going on.
And the weird thing is, as soon as I knew that, I realised why I needed this appointment so much. It wasn’t the simple answer I needed. It was someone to tell me I hadn’t failed. You see, up until now, I thought I had the episiotomy because I wasn’t pushing right. That I had done something wrong. It sounds so silly written down, but having a midwife tell me I had done well in my birth gave me some kind of validation I needed. To know that what happened wasn’t down to me at all, it’s just how births go sometimes.
Of course it sounds so obvious now. And there were a few other details that I’m glad I now know about. But the point is, the Birth Afterthoughts session 100% helped me get some closure on the whole experience.
I wanted to share this with you guys as I know a lot of you feel the same way. I definitely recommend getting an appointment if you think it could help you too. Apparently you can go through your GP, but not wanting to waste doctor’s time in the pandemic I just found the Birth Afterthoughts section on my hospital website and emailed them for an appointment. (I think it’s called “Reflections” in other parts of the UK just FYI.)
Let me know how you get on if you do, I found it so useful. I hope you do too.
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