Redeeming Your Story....

I had a friend who recently gave birth to an amazing and miraculously wonderful little girl. For her it was a totally redemptive birth story. Others may look at it and not see that because it was not a “non-medical birth”. But here is the question for today’s blog...

What does it mean to redeem your story and to change the mark that previous births have made? Watching my friend journey through her pregnancy, walking along side her as she needed it, and seeing the look of redemption on her face the day after her birth was all I needed to confirm what I already felt in my gut.

For anyone who has had a traumatic birth experience, redemption of that experience has to include: informed knowledge of what you want/need and feeling that you have the engaged and intentional inclusion by those around you in that birth. Birth in not just a “physical event”. It is a deeply emotional journey that is impacted by what happens physically and mentally. And each woman’s emotional response is unique to her heart for her birth. The trauma of one woman’s birth can be entirely different for another.

I have another dear friend whose first birth would be considered by many to be without an excuse for trauma. Her’s was a homebirth without any form of medical intervention. Yet, because of the duration of her labor and the feelings that were stirred in her emotionally and mentally, she had a need to redeem her story for her second homebirth. She was able to do that because she looked at her first birth and found the ways that she could “change her story”. Her second homebirth was an amazing and profoundly different experience.

Redeeming begins with the ability to retell your story and how that story marked you. What is important in that process is for a Mother to feel that she is being heard. That the space where she is telling her story is safe, nonjudgmental and uninterrupted. Those present MUST understand that this is HER story. Any residue of their own experiences needs to be put aside as they listen and support her. As a Postpartum Doula I have had the honor of listening to women tell their stories. I consider it a sacred space and have never taken it lightly when a Mom has given me that kind of trust.

I have also had the opportunity to attend “Birth Circles”. This is an event where several women come together and tell their stories. A birth circle can look different depending on who is sponsoring and what the goals are for the women attending. I know a Doula and her husband who worked together to create a birth circle where the couple can come and tell their stories. The women go with her and the men go with him. It’s amazing to see the effect it has on both parents. Remember, men can also experience trauma in birth and often that trauma gets put to the side as they support their wives and growing family.

My goal as a Doula is that my clients have no feelings of regret about their birth journey.

That is at times a difficult thing to achieve with much of today’s medical intervention in what is really a non-medical event. Granted sometimes a medical “tool” is useful and can even be life-saving. However, they should be considered a tool, not a policy requirement for each birth. When a medical tool becomes policy and standard procedure that leaves no room for informed consent, it can leave a mark in a woman’s birth experience that causes trauma. It leaves a woman/couple feeling that they are being managed instead of intentionally supported.

For both of my friends, they changed their stories and got their redemptive birth because they had a team around them that listened to them, supported them and gave them the ability to make a different choice that was right for each of them. One a cesarean the other a homebirth, but both are redeemed.

I highly recommend that anyone who has given birth in the last 3 years go to The Birth Survey Project website. This site is full of resources not only to tell your story, but to see other data from births in your area and around the country. This is a project that can cause change in the way women are engaged in their journeys by both providers and hospitals, but they need women to take the survey in order to do this. They need women to be honest and open about how their care. There is a growing tide of consumer driven change toward Mother-Friendly Maternity care. This is survey is one source of that change. Change that can potentially reduce birth trauma and create a different climate for women to birth.