I DON’T EVEN FEEL THAT IT MATTERS HOW I GAVE BIRTH
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I know that women put on the robe of guilt as soon as they become mothers and find it very difficult to get rid of it. And it’s a shame, because some things don’t really matter that much. For example, birth. It is important to have a healthy mother and a healthy baby at the end. That’s about it in the long run, in the great equation of life. And I’m writing this to you ten years after an emergency caesarean section that I DIDN’T want and for which I felt very guilty for a long time. Yes, it is ideal for most people to give birth naturally, but look, I couldn’t. Hasty medical decisions, too little power to insist on sticking to the original plan, fear of something terrible and irreversible. I chose how best I could then. I chose out of love. Could’ve been better? May be. Does it matter? Now I’m pretty sure not and that all the time I spent crying about it would have been so much better used in love with my little girl instead of guilt. Ten years have passed and I can honestly say that the place where my little girl was born is absolutely irrelevant compared to all the other things we have lived together. It seems to me the exact moment when I weaned her and the food with which I began to diversify. And how much I was stressed then with all this, with every step, decision, how much stress and how much guilt… I no longer have any emotions related to the birth, other than the joy that I became a mother after her. No more frustration, no more suffering, no more regret. Nothing. I vaguely remember some details. But nothing hurts anymore. I feel like laughing and crying when I think about how much I struggled to give birth properly. To breastfeed properly, like in movies. To put her to sleep like in a movie. To diversify it cleanly and beautifully, like in movies. Nothing went like in the movies and on the blogs. It went to me like a living thing. With caesarean section instead of vaginal orgasmic birth, milking three times a night and five times a day, one year, every day, with reflux and insomnia and despair and exhaustion, but also with discoveries and endless love, with increases and a newly discovered patience. Dear new mother, please believe me that after a while you will realize that you have wasted so much energy on topics that don’t matter too much… Don’t waste your time ruminating on what wasn’t. Look at what! What you have is the best thing in the world!
