Grieving my labor experience
How can I heal and not be so hurt that this happened to me and also god.
Three months later, and I’m still grieving the day my daughter was born.
I went into preterm labor at just 34 weeks. My entire labor lasted about an hour. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life. I begged for an epidural, but it took too long. I was even begging for a C-section because I couldn’t handle the pain anymore.
When my daughter was born, she wasn’t breathing. She had to be flown to a NICU two hours away, in another state. I was a first-time mom, and I had to spend the first two days of her life away from her. And never got to hold my baby in the hospital that day No mother should have to go through that.
There are things that still haunt me. I wasn’t told right away that her heart rate had dropped. I also wasn’t told that a vacuum had been used during delivery until hours later. Finding those things out afterward left me feeling shocked, confused, and like I had no voice during one of the most important moments of my life.
Now my baby has Grade III brain bleeds and HIE. Every single day I live with the fear of not knowing what her future will look like. She’s only 3 months old, and this waiting game is one of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced.
People tell me to be positive, and I try. But they don’t see the grief I carry every day. They don’t see the anger. They don’t see how traumatic her birth was or how deeply it changed me.
I love my daughter more than anything in this world, and I will fight for her every single day. But I also want people to know that birth trauma is real. The fear, the heartbreak, the guilt, the anger—they don’t just disappear because time passes.
Some days, I’m still trying to survive the day she was born. I feel like I have been stuck in the same day sense she has got here
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