The theme of violence in childbirth and traumatic experience of these birth and pregnancy is still being discussed - not only with us, but also abroad.
Women are accused of themselves that they themselves have brought themselves such fate that they exaggerate and that in general "the most important thing is that the baby is healthy!".
This motto easily devalues all the efforts and suffering of the mother, who understands that the child's health is incredibly important, but there is also a lot of other things that cannot be discounted too. Columnist Scary Mommy Katie Kloyd wrote a big and piercing text about why in an optimistic phrase about the "healthy baby" there is really nothing good. Translated it for you with small contractions.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I said at least once: "I just want me to have a healthy child." Perhaps I said it to someone in response to the question of how I plan to give birth. Maybe I answered the question about who I want more - a boy or a girl. I do not remember when I said it, but I am sure that I said exactly, because at that moment I believed it. I thought that as long as we were physically healthy, everything else does not matter.
This phrase turned into an arrow in my heart, after I suffered a hell of traumatic childbirth. When my son was born, I realized that you could have a healthy child at the same time, and a broken heart.When people heard about my childbirth experience, many of them tried to understand the horror through which I went, saying: "Well, the main thing is that the baby is healthy, it is most important."
But they were mistaken.
Yes, my traumatic experience could be even worse. I am very grateful for the fact that neither I nor my son received serious physical injury due to his traumatic appearance. If one of us was seriously damaged or something worse, I would have to face even greater injury. But the pain that I suffered is still very real, although my script has not been the worst of all.
When it comes to pregnancy and childbirth, much matters - and not just a "healthy child."
The feminine is worthy of feeling support. It is very scary in childbirth and know that no one listens to you. It doesn't matter how well you are preparing, but when something unexpected starts to happen, it is important for you to feel that doctors listen to your needs and desires. When you feel you ignore you, your fear and pain can last much longer than the birth.
After his traumatic childbirth, I felt nude, defenseless, raped and morally empty.My son did not become a panacea, which would help me get rid of all the horror and sadness, who flooded my heart after everything went wrong.
A healthy child does not help forget all those terrible things that I heard in the operating room when doctors thought I sleep. This little cute baby can not change the fact that the surgeon cut my uterus from above to donomis without any reason, depriving me of the opportunity to ever give birth as I would like.
With the child, in the end, everything turned out well, but I didn't know about it when I left one in the operating room - I was lying and felt like my tears become ice, staining in my face. I will never forget how my husband fled along the corridor, to find out why our child will be taken into intensive care. We had a healthy child, but it was not the most important.
I was also important, and when I was in childbirth, almost no one cared for me.
It took me five years to meet face to face with the surgeon, which injured me. He did not even remember me, but he forever changed my attitude to his own body and to childbirth.
Not only traumatic childbirth contradict the idea that "the most important thing is a healthy child." Sometimes children are not healthy.
And children who are born with serious diseases are also important. Like their parents.
I talked with Amanda Pitts, the mother of five children from Nashville, Tennessee, how her child received a life threatening diagnosis immediately after delivery. Amanda told me that when she saw her daughter for the first time - Calley - she immediately understood everything.
"I barely looked at my beautiful baby and immediately realized that she had Down Syndrome," recalls Amanda. - I told about this my husband only four hours later. He did not believe me. He said: "But we are too young to be born a child with Down syndrome." But I knew that it was not. "
Doctors confirmed the suspicions of Amanda. And when she and her husband Robert just started to get used to the thought that the life of their child would not look as much as they imagined themselves, something else happened.
The doctor told Amanda and Robert that the girl was a defect of the interventricular partition. Their baby had a hole in the heart. It is about half of children with Down syndrome. And Calley she was rather big. Amanda overwhelmed fear per daughter and love for her.
She was only 22 years old. During pregnancy, nothing hints that Calley Down Syndrome - or the heart disease, which threatens her life and makes the first seven years in difficult and sometimes quite frightening.
In 2018, Calley successfully moved the operation on the open heart, as a result of which the hole in it was closed forever. Despite the fact that then Amanda gave birth to four sons with healthy hearts and soon awaits one more, she is no longer able to calm down before she sees her child, and the doctor will confirm that his heart is in perfect order.
"When I was pregnant Calley, I dreamed most of all that she was healthy. But everything went wrong. She was born with a heart defect, she was taken into intensive care because of the respiratory stop, for her short life she managed to face a lot of health problems, "explains Amanda.
"I still pray that my children are born completely healthy," she says. "I am familiar to me that your child will be born with a defect threatening his life, and I would never want to go through it." But even if I knew in advance that Calley would be born with a hole in the heart and several concomitant problems due to Down syndrome, I would still wait for it no less. I would never want to get rid of it or change it to a child with an ideal heart. When I hear people say that "the most important thing is that the child was healthy," I smell a little. My child is still important, despite the fact that he was born in patients. "
Hoping that the child will be born healthy - this is absolutely normal expectation that future parents can be in relation to his child. There is nothing wrong with saying that you are hoping that your child will be healthy. It can simply be a standard phrase, which, for example, can be used to hint to someone that you do not have a fundamentally, as your child.
But we should all be careful when you talk to someone who suffered traumatic childbirth that they should feel fine and not worry, since their child was born healthy.We should also understand that this phrase may cause pain to parents who are waiting for a child with health problems already known to them. They should not smile politely in response to the assumption that they are "the most important thing is to give birth to a healthy baby."
True here is that they are very, very much like and waiting for their child - healthy or not.
This does not mean that we must stop wishing a child of good health and other goods regardless of the circumstances. It is just important to remember that a healthy child is not the only "most important thing", which can only be, and to realize how our words affect other people.
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