With the past 13 days at home with Annabelle, my mother and I have had time to digest the fact that her baby is now a mom, and for me, that I am a mom. It's still very surreal.
Little pieces of my birth story started to come out and I realized the similarities to our stories as well as how different the outcomes were.
One of the things that the midwives ask you is how your mother's births were. I'm not sure how similar all mother daughter stories will be, but I guess the idea is that they could be similar and so that is how they get background on first time moms. I had no real details except that my mother hemorrhaged a lot and that i had the umbilical cord stuck around my neck. That was really all i knew.
Here is our stories side by side. Similarities and differences.
My Birth
| Annabelle's Birth
|
Aside from our due dates (which to me is pretty cool) and how we went into labor, our birth stories are polar opposites in our experience. However, I do think if i had gone to a hospital, my birth experience would have also been filled with interventions due to hospital policies/guidelines that require you to be in active labor within 12 hrs. I was 6 cm at 14 hrs, but 2 hrs prior i don't know if i was in active labor. And that policy single handedly could have dramatically changed the events of my birth experience.
When i called my mother that morning to tell her my bag of waters had broken, she had fear in her voice. I reassured her and she said she was just worried about getting to me on time, but the fear never left her voice. I figured she was just worried as all mothers would be. Even when i spoke to her later that night at about 10pm when she called to say she was at the condo in DC, I could still hear her fear. I didn't know why until this past week and now i totally understand why. She was scared for me. Her experience is still so fresh in her mind after 35 years, that she still shivers when telling me how awful it was for her. And her relief that Annabelle and I made it completely healthy and happy has given her a renewed faith in the birth experience.
I share this story only b/c i think its really neat that my mom and i do have similarities in our birth stories. Hopefully jotting this down here, Annabelle could always look back if she wanted to compare her birth story (when the time comes) to mine and her grandmothers.
I think it's great that you had such a positive birth experience, when so many women don't. I can only hope I'm as lucky.
ReplyDelete