This story is part of The Wall of Wombs, our 2024 exhibition sharing honest, deeply personal journeys of motherhood.
What you’re reading is a direct transcription of a spoken story — shared bravely, in the speaker’s own words.
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I thankfully had a very successful and easy caesarean. It was a planned caesarean, so I knew the date, I knew the time. I was very, very prepared, which seems odd considering a lot of people go into labour unexpectedly, so there’s a lot of anxiety around that, which I didn’t have to experience, which was really lovely.
The only thing that was anxious or nerve-wracking was thinking like, within two seconds, a baby’s gonna be cut out of my stomach. So that was a bit interesting and definitely a sensation I don’t really want to relive. But I would do it again as my delivery method.
It doesn’t hurt anywhere near as much as I think you make it out to be because our brains are really good at tricking us and making us feel like this is gonna be the worst pain of our life. But I think as long as you take it slow, eat really well…. I definitely exercised throughout my whole pregnancy, which I’ve found really helped with my pelvic floor muscles, just helping with all muscles around the scarring. It’s a lot easier to just do than to fear it. I think making sure I was educated with a lot of information helped me plan for the scheduled c-section as well as consider the vaginal birth.
The biggest help or push that I got for choosing which delivery for my birth was reaching out to other mothers who had already had children and talking with them about their concerns and seeing if they matched mine. And then having an in-depth discussion with a mother that I guess reflected the same concerns I had because it felt like then I was talking to myself and figuring out what path I really wanted to do.
And also, I think we’re so fortunate with social media and all the platforms that we have that you get to see a lot of visual aids to help you really understand what goes on in these processes. So I think just watching things and seeing how your body reacts and how you feel about it really helped me cement the fact that I wanted to do the c-section over vaginal birth.
Look, it was probably one of the most surreal feelings I’ve ever had. And I’m saying that while I’m getting bandaged across my boobs. It was feeling like you had no control over your body, but you could feel everything that was happening. So yes, it may feel very invasive, but I had the most wonderful doctors who kept me laughing, who kept me entertained, who noticed when I was having minor anxiety just due to the feeling of everything moving, but not feeling pain or sensations.
There’s such a big misconception that because it’s such a traumatic experience going into any surgery, I think it does freak people out. But I think childbirth in general is freaky. I’m pretty sure if men had to do it, they wouldn’t. So glad that women have a different emotional capacity for it.
When I decided I was going to have a C-section, a lot of people put in the fear of God that it was going to be the most painful situation. Like my mother was even one of the people who told me, “You’re gonna find it difficult walking, you’ll sneeze and it feels like your whole stomach falls out.”
There were a lot of misconceptions around the concept that doing a C-section was either not a true birth or it was painful. And so I wanted to reassure those people or mothers that it’s still considered a birth and it’s still very much achievable, no matter how you do it. Because yeah, there’s a bit of pain, but the joy of your child outweighs the pain.