This is a beautiful and important post by Heather Armstrong, presented on The Unncessarean. I know many women will relate to it. Unfortunately. Read the rest at the link. Thank you, Heather. Every time this is articulated, another woman comes in from the cold and realises her feelings are valid and important, that she’s not alone and that how she feels really does matter.
Woman Who Didn’t Have a Healthy Baby Reflects on the “Healthy Baby” Trope
Tweet“All that matters is a healthy baby.”
Thank goodness someone said that, otherwise I might have been consumed with the worry that I did not perform my birth correctly. Mothers who know that, in the end, their baby is the only real part of birth, don’t need to feel sad if things didn’t go as planned, right?
No one said that to me when I experienced a horrific “birth” experience because I didn’t have a healthy baby. I became the example, I was the living proof of “what if”. You should be grateful you’re not her; your baby could be her baby. I had notes on Jericho’s birth story that read, “I’m so glad my baby is okay/healthy/alive”. If your baby is any healthier than mine was, then you should be grateful. Experience and hopes be damned.
Telling someone they should be grateful they have a healthy baby is like telling a rape victim she should be grateful she’s still alive; she could have been killed. While that may be true, her experiences and her trauma have been swept under a rug. Does she not matter at all because she wasn’t the worst case scenario? So long as she’s alive, she needn’t grieve her losses?
