It's been over a month since Olivia was born, and I have been struggling this whole time with the circumstances of her birth.  [if you haven't read her birth story.. now might be a good time to catch up before reading this blog further]

I had been so against a c-section, and the entire time from the moment they said that I was going to have to have one to the moment I heard Olivia's cries I was hysterical.  I have never been so upset in my life. 

I cried every night in the hospital (3 nights), and I am just now getting to the point where I can talk about the c-section & think about it without getting upset.  Everyone says, "You should be happy because you have a little girl that's healthy."  Of course I'm happy that Olivia is here & is healthy.  But I was still mourning on the inside for the birth experience I had hoped & prayed for.

I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.  That I could give birth to her naturally & without intervention.  Instead, I had a birth experience with every possible intervention.  I felt like a failure that my body could not give birth to the baby that had been growing inside me for nine months.  I have never felt so disappointed in myself.

I also still had doubts that the c-section was 100% necessary.  I felt like the evil doctors and nurses had forced it on me. 

I could not see what was going on from their end until the other night.  I finally summoned up the strength to watch the video of me trying to give birth.  My mom had been filming, and did a great job of getting really good up-close shots of my va-jay-jay as Dr. Kneesel was trying to pull Olivia out.

Watching the tape was hard, but not as hard as I thought it would be.  I choked up a little bit, but not too bad.  And it actually healed alot of the wound on my soul.  Seeing it from the other end, and actually SEEING that Olivia was not going to come out, helped alot.  She was stuck.  I could see the doctor pulling her damndest on the vaccuum, trying her best to get Olivia out.  When the seal broke, blood flew everywhere.  I have never seen so much blood.  Out of all the births I have seen on tv, I have never seen someone bleed like I was bleeding.  When the seal broke, Olivia went from being almost out to being right back where she was before we started pushing.  I know now that the c-section really was necessary.

Thank you to all of the women who have written to me with their stories of their birth experiences that were similar to mine.  I cannot tell you how much it helped to know that there were other women out there that had gone through what I had been through.  As another mom told me, "I hadn't even let the possibility of a c-section cross my mind, it was just unacceptable."  I felt that way too.  Another mom told me something that nobody else had said:  It was okay to grieve over the loss of the birth I had hoped for.  I needed someone to say that, for someone to understand that my being sad was okay.  Everyone just kept telling me to be happy, but I was traumatized on the inside.

Even though the c-section scar on the outside has been healed for weeks now, the emotional scar is just now starting to really feel healed.  Confronting the experience by watching the video last night really made a difference, and I'm glad I finally bit the bullet & watched it.

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