A friend of mine recently gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, after an emergency C-section. Without that procedure, mother and daughter would not have survived.
And yet, all my friend could think about was how much of a failure she was as a mother. She was so disappointed in herself for not delivering vaginally, that she sank deeper and deeper into post-natal depression, until we wondered if we’d ever have her back again.
Fast forward a few years, and you find me in a hospital ward with my day-old daughter, crying my eyes out. I had no qualms about my C-section, although it wasn’t an emergency. But now I faced a dilemma: my daughter latched beautifully onto my breast, but she refused to suckle properly. She was getting hungrier and hungrier, and I was getting more and more worried.
There was another problem: I really, really hated breast feeding, but I was terrified to tell the ward sisters that I wanted to stop. That I just wanted them to give me a pill and warm up a bottle of formula for my daughter. I was terrified of their judgement, or of being forced to persevere with breastfeeding regardless.
I was lucky. When I plucked up the courage to tell them what I wanted, they were kind and understanding. But two years later I was still defending my decision to other mothers when they found out in casual conversation that my daughter had been bottle-fed. And if I mentioned I’d had a C-section too, even more questions were levelled at me.
Women’s bodies are still not their own. They are very much in the public domain. When it comes to childbirth and child-rearing, somehow the choices you make become public property. And instead of focusing on the richness of experience between mother and child, and their emotional communication, people fixate on the mechanics of childbirth or on breast versus bottle-feeding.
I agree that breastfeeding is best, and vaginal delivery is the way we were designed to give birth. But those options aren’t always available – and we have good alternatives. The problem for me is the moral high ground that often goes with those choices, and the judgement levelled at mothers who make different choices.
It doesn’t matter that they’ve tried every apparatus on the market on their bleeding, infected breasts, with no success. It doesn’t matter that without that C-section they most certainly would have died. They made the ‘wrong’ choices; the ‘unnatural’ choices, and for that they are judged and criticised.
Certainly when I was pregnant, there was so much emphasis on vaginal delivery and breastfeeding in antenatal classes, that I wasn’t prepared for plunge in blood pressure during my C-sections that had the anaesthetist scrambling for an oxygen mask for me. I wasn’t prepared for a scary moment in the shower when I nearly toppled over because my severed stomach muscles couldn’t offer the necessary support. My friend had been so intent on her vaginal delivery, that she couldn’t come to terms with her ‘failure’, even though she was still alive.
There’s an ad doing the rounds on the Internet about the “Sisterhood of Motherhood” (see above). It sends up the rivalry between mothers, and ends with a lovely scene of unity and solidarity. We’re all just mothers underneath it all, trying to do our best.
But I find myself watching it with a wry smile, and a deep sense of irony that for many mothers, the very people who should most understand what they’re going through and offer the necessary support – other mothers – are the most judgemental and critical of all.
* All images associated with this post have been sourced from The Mother ‘Hood Official video.
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