I was born via emergency c-section. After a long and unsuccessful labor, my mom remembers watching the monitor as my heart rate slowed with each of her fruitless contractions. Back in those days (or at least in my mom’s case) the OBGYN went whole-hog knock the mama unconscious for c-section. Upon administering the medication to do this, my mom’s blood pressure dropped through the floor. The last thing she remembers about my birth is someone yelling, “GET THE CRASH CART.”
I entered the world blue from oxygen deprivation, with a wildly elongated cone head and a 15 inch circumference skull, making it quite obvious I was not built for vaginal delivery.
During our more surreal fights in my teenage years, my mother accused me of hating her because of some primitive pre-birth memories in which I remembered her body had tried to kill me.* This was also the reason she thought I smoked — my first breath was associated with escaping certain death, and inhaling the burn reassured me of my own survival. She also once suggested that since I had never been able to save myself from the womb, I had learned helplessness and was always waiting for someone to cut open my misery and rescue me.
For the record, these three accusations are on my Top Ten List of crazy assed mean shit my mom has ever said to me. There’s only like ten, and about a million awesome, supportive, insightful things she’s said over the course of my life. But the primary purpose of this blog is not to tell you about my mother, good or bad. It’s to confess embarrassing stuff. So here we go.
Despite my top-of-my-brain understanding that pre-birth memories are basically horseshit, the lizard-part-of-my-brain believes it Bible-style. When I get stressed, I stop breathing. Each sip of breath gets shallower and shallower. I take huge breaths, and the oxygen is useless. I am on Mount Everest, and the air is hardly air at all. Top-of-my-brain spends lots of energy insisting I not freak out: no matter what it feels like, I’m certainly not going to die of oxygen deprivation, living my life at sea level as I do.
I broke our family. Top-of-my-brain knows it was not only the right thing, but the only option I could live with. Lizard-brain keeps holding my breath, waiting for an adult to tell me what I did was OK, that I’m OK and loved and forgiven.
In those DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY DYNAMIC flow charts, I am perennially the child needing protection. Which is laughable, since in reality I am the 38-year-old-grown-assed-woman. In reality, I am the person who can say if I’m OK or not. If I seek approval for what I’ve done, that is me voluntarily putting myself back in a helpless, dysfunctional place, where my safety and rightness with the world are dependant on someone else. Screw that, Jack, etc. It has to be me who says if I’m OK or not — this is the requirement if I am going to approach normal.
The need for someone to tell me I’m OK is overfuckingwhelming. I can hardly breathe, I need someone to tell me it’s OK so bad. My own stamp of approval is so newly minted, it has zero weight. The pull to go back to the way things were is like gravity — normal and comforting and disturbingly seductive. I’m breathing all the time, telling myself I’m OK. I can’t get any air.
*It didn’t occur to me until writing that sentence, she might have been harboring deep-seated anger at me, since my birth basically tried to kill her.
#
I spoke to my dad on the phone yesterday. He sticks mostly to concrete thoughts now, perhaps because they are easier to articulate. We talk about golf, although technically he ‘went to the place…. and hit the thing,’ and I know, since the only thing my dad hits are golf balls, that this must be what we are discussing. He did tease my mom while on the phone, so it’s not like he’s totally lost his ability to discuss abstract thoughts. But I am starting to understand his request for me to be myself is his last wish, if only because it’s probably the last one he’s able to articulate.
And so, I am planning on BlogHer this summer. There are three options.
1. I can go Thursday in a small group (50 people per class or whatever). This is the cheapest, smallest, and least aggressive out-there behavior. Upside is I won’t be a freak-on-a-leash from three days of social interactions. Downside is it might be quite sad to leave before the real party starts.
2. I can go to the Friday/Saturday bonanza. This seems dangerous — two days of floating through a massive convention center with my paltry socialization skills and no buddies. There is no deodorant in the world that will save me from stinky pits in this scenario. At least the Thursday thing is smaller and I’m bound to corner some poor soul and make them be my friend.
3. I could do both and FUCK YEAH OUT THERE. This kind of seems like deciding to lose your virginity by signing up for a gang bang. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have to worry that maybe I was being a bit of a chicken.
Suggestions?
I’m sorry about your mom.
I didn’t do the Thursday, but I heard it was very good. If you did it, you might find it provided you with a ready-made group of friends to stick to for the next couple of days, which would be lovely.
The idea of doing just the Thursday seems a bit sad. I think you’d be really sorry you were missing out on the main event if you did that.
Even if you don’t do Thursday, you’re bound to find some buddies on Friday morning – there’ll be other people who don’t know a soul. Especially if you look for them on the BlogHer chat threads or FB groups or whatever they are in advance. Even if they don’t end up being Your Kind Of People, it’s nice to have an arrangement to meet up with someone on the first morning. Or a roomie.
“Losing your virginity by signing up for a gang bang”
One of those sentences I’m jealous I didn’t write.
xo
Meredith badsandy.com
Blogher? Do it all.
But the rest? You don’t need advice because, scared as you are, you are already doing everything right. You didn’t break your family, it was already broken, you just refused not to shine your torch on the broken bits, to prevent more hurt. And while some people will be heartbroken because it’s only now they realise that something they once loved is a jagged dangerous mess, you will have stopped others from walking onto it barefoot.
You can live with that.
Hxxx
I was struck by how much these lines truly apply to your mom’s voice as well: “…always waiting for someone to cut open my misery and rescue me” and “my body had tried to kill her.” Literally and figuratively, is growing a baby not the most helpless feeling ever? We’re hopeful harbors, safe havens, but we are not in control of how the cells divide and multiply or the physicality, for example, of a big-headed baby and a maxed-out birth canal. And yet we blame ourselves, not science, when things go wrong, even when we know better (unless we conducted heinous experiments by pumping toxic substances through the bloodstream and into them). Clearly a traumatic birth experience for both of you but she held the actual memories, fragility and trauma from day one, while you learned about it much later on.
I was probably thirteen or so when I learned that they almost lost me because her breastmilk didn’t contain any colostrum and I was slowly wasting away (quietest baby ever! she said). This information fit perfectly with the vagaries of teen angst. My sense of “never getting enough” and being troublesome was finally validated by this dramatic example of “I nearly died and you didn’t even know it!”
I’ve heard that birth re-enactment is a truly powerful therapeutic process. I’d probably dissolve in really inappropriate laughter and then sob through the rest but I’m curious whether or not you’ve considered doing this.
By the way, these “embarrassing confessions” are fundamental and powerful vulnerabilities in which we are all six year olds struggling to grow towards the sunlight while desperate for a safe and loving lap. I still feel like the nearly-blind cross-eyed buck-toothed and anemic trouble-maker dervish. It continually amazes me that this is not how I am perceived by others (which, ha, fooled them once but never twice – bound to be revealed as wholly lacking and fundamentally flawed).
I’d go to the conference with you in a minute but not a blogger so … . However, we could set up a secret meeting place for a quick escape to “a really important appointment, so sorry!” if you needed one.
As I read this, I finally recognized that this is, ultimately, the same thing for which I wish most of all — someone to tell me I’m OK. I know that I’m a grownup now, and that the age for me to have someone else to look after me and to validate me is far past; all the same, that longing lingers in all the dark corners. I am relieved to know I’m not alone in feeling this way.
I wish I could reassure you that you ARE OK, and I wish I could be there at BlogHer specifically to be a ‘go-to’ person for you, so you’d never have to be alone unless you so chose. I know that in your own time, you will finally feel that you actually ARE OK, and that you will do fabulously at BlogHer whether you go for just a bit or for the whole shebang. I have tremendous faith in you. 🙂
Ah, I have some probably not very helpful waffly thoughts???
You are an adult. Certainly. This is incontrovertible! But I think it doesn’t have to be as binary as all that.
I think ideally all your approval should come from yourself. That’d be wonderful.
But I also think it’s quite normal to want some approval from others, too. To want that reassurance. It’s not good if one is 100% dependent on external validation, but I think it’s quite good and quite normal to need SOME external validation.
And while there might be pings in one’s head which make one feel a bit like one is a child wanting parental approval, I think it’s also possible for approval to feel like a friend’s approval, like an older or younger sibling’s approval, like a boss’ approval, and so forth. Maybe simultaneously.
(Wow, it’s really awkward using ‘one’ but I kind of don’t want to make it all about you – because I’m rambling generally and I empathise from my own experiences. But then again I don’t want to make it all about me – because this is your blog and your story and I don’t actually want to ramble on about me and only handwave relating it back to you!)
I think it is definitely good that you don’t need others’ approval for your course of action. That you didn’t seek permission before doing it. Go you!!! But I think it is quite okay if you kind of need support, encouragement, and validation *now*.
I have entirely lost my point. Um.
HEY ANNE YOU’RE LOOKING ESPECIALLY PRETTY TODAY
I LOVE WHAT YOU’VE DONE WITH YOUR HAIR
(phew, now surely you won’t notice I lost the point of my comment)
I feel all these feels you’ve mentioned, as well as Susans mentions. My moms delivery was textbook. Does that mean im f@cked up for no reason other than being f@cked up?
I like to think it means us f@ckfeelers are just normal. No matter what those other people want us to think.
PS. You’re okay.
Also, ive been slacking on my blog following, and feel like a total douche for all ive missed here.
Not really a blogger anymore so I just cannot wrap my head around BlogHer, except that I am pretty sure that I would implode if I had to attend the thing without having friends to buddy up with, someone I knew I could count on hanging out with me. Good luck with that!
All I know is that motherhood and the whole physio/psycho/social things involved with coming into mortality and bringing into mortality… well it is FRAUGHT. LADEN. ENBUED. And that we better fucking well forgive ourselves and each other, as women especially. Was hard for me, learning as an adult that my mother was eating a serious calorie restriction diet all during my gestation. My birth came hard on the heels of my big brother (17 months apart), and she was still determined to lose all the baby weight she’d gained with him, new pregnancy or not. Thank heavens she was one of those women who exclusively bottle fed, or I might have starved to death. I wondered, as a twenty something, how much of my feelings of fear in regards to getting “enough” were started in the womb? Now, after having children of my own, I wonder how much of her body was destroyed by the fact that a gestating infant will pretty much take what it needs. I wonder how much I took from her, that she didn’t have to give. I know my own children took my bombproof teeth, and I WAS eating enough, and the “right” foods.
I considered editing out the eff-word… and then I just didn’t. Tah dah!
Anne,
Let me reassure you *all* babies are born blue. The umbilical cord gets so tightly squeezed during the path down the vaginal canal that blood – and the oxygen it carries – that the newborns are all traumatized. Nothing easy about the “natural” process.
Studying up on the stages of Alzheimer’s might be helpful to you…..the GEMS classification is a quick read. Your father is in the stage where automatic social responses come easily……
Anne, I dreamt that I was googling, saw a photograph of you, and thought, what a gorgeous person! I’m not dreaming, right, you’re not actually “out there” yet? You must know, that having serious sleep disorders, I take lots of tryptophan and melatonin, which can produce colorful dreams. That said, I still take this as a good omen.
Your birth trauma is unusual, and I would not suggest that it has not affected you. I think, however, that many of our mothers had a lot of baggage before, during, and after pregnancy. You are not alone, even in your generation. (Women who came of age in the 40s and 50s had an especially hard time and passed along their frustration to us, their daughters.)
Take care! I send you long distance Reiki!
Anne,
Another piece of the puzzle: the crash cart may have been called for you, not your mother. Placing a laboring mother flat on her back causes the fetal child to rest on the vena cava…..the major blood pathway from the legs and lower trunk to the heart. Cut off the blood return and there goes the blood pressure. That automatically means an oxygen-deprived baby…..no pressure for Mom means NO oxygen or glucose for baby. And the fetal heart monitor was already showing late decelerations: Classic showing for oxygen deprivation. Moreover, the anesthesia lowers blood pressure too. Yeah, you were a “crash” baby – far closer to death than your mother. None of this is your fault. No matter how your Mom spins it.
Such lovely, well written words in this post and in the comments, too. I love it when vulnerable words create vulnerable response. Thank you all for that.
I am certain without any reservations that you are OK. And I wish for you to hear the ‘you are OK’ from whomever you wish to hear it from. You might have to ask them to tell you. Then you just have to believe it.