Supriya wanted to have a natural vaginal delivery and it didn’t quite go that way. She was in labor for 27 hours, pushing for four or five hours. It seemed so long to her. She explains, “We kept going in all these different positions. Get in touch with your inner animal, growl, yell, all the coach things. Anyhow, nothing worked, and I remember looking at the clock at some point during all this and thinking, okay, let’s just do a c-section. Like I had made this decision inside myself to just do it rather than this whole natural delivery that I had planned. We didn’t go in for the c-section until a good couple of hours later. It was quite the neat experience, actually, when they reached into my belly. I could feel the hands inside me, and then the hands lifting the baby out, and I could feel my belly, my organs, sink down when they took the baby out. I didn’t feel any pain and I was completely numb, but I could feel the sensations. And I saw them carry the baby by me to clean him up. I was laying there just looking out of the corner of my eye, and I saw his legs go by. From just that glimpse, I thought: he’s so beautiful, look at those legs! And then he started crying, and I thought he had such a beautiful voice. Wow, what a beautiful voice. And then his Dad was holding him, and my Auntie Anne, and then eventually I got to hold him too. They had to sew me up first, take care of that. But it was really beautiful. There were only those few moments of realizing I wasn’t going to have the natural birth, and it was really beautiful after that. I gave birth to a healthy baby, a beautiful baby, and then when they brought him in to me, he latched on and breastfed immediately.”
I was struck by just how open Supriya was and how present to the miracle, however it was going to show up. It wasn’t exactly how she had planned, but she was still there, fully experiencing what she could experience during the cesarean. She caught just a glimpse of his legs, whatever she could see, and was ready to acknowledge and get his beauty. I asked her how she was able to not be resentful of not having her natural vaginal birth. She explained, “I think it’s just being able to go with the flow of things. I do tend to go with the flow of things, and honestly, by that point I was ready to have him come out, I guess, to have something happen other than what was happening. I saw myself on television, actually, because I was on a show after the fact, Childbirth Stories, I think. It was on the Life Network channel. So I saw myself on that afterwards, and when I saw myself, I thought, Oh my God. I felt bad for myself, because my face was all blue at some points, I was pushing so hard. They had to put the oxygen mask on me, and then they ended up declaring an emergency c-section and rushed me off to surgery.”
After the first moment of realizing that she wouldn’t experience what she had initially intended, she was able to appreciate what was beautiful about what she was experiencing.
Please join the conversation: When were you able to go with the flow? What does it take to be able to go with the flow? When is it NOT okay for you to go with the flow?
