What we tell our daughters

What We Tell Our Daughters

by Atara Pardini

When I was young I remember swearing that I would never have kids and if I ever did I would NOT want an epidural. No, no, not that! That was too…awake! What I would want was a full knock out. Put a mask over my head, let me drift off to sleep, and then BOOM! When I wake up, there would be baby in hand!

Stories about how baby came out horrified me. I have no idea what my birth story was. My mother didn’t tell stories so much as a series of victimhood. She tore “front to back” with my brother. I was ENORMOUS (a whopping 7 pounds 10 ounces!). Then there was the fact that we not only had the audacity of making her boobs smaller, but they lost their perkiness as well! In fact breastfeeding itself was excruciating as soon as we made the mistake of growing teeth, and that mean, mean doctor who told her she had to keep breastfeeding because we were allergic to milk.

All together, motherhood didn’t look like the plan to me! My mother was not unloving, she was just a victim, and our infant selves were the perpetrators. I’m not saying that birth cannot be painful. I’m not saying breastfeeding cannot be difficult. But what to we teach ourselves much less our children by playing up the pain in expense of all that we gain? My mother didn’t look at birth as a gift through which she could empower herself but as a necessary evil of procreation. Breastfeeding was not a bonding experience but a burden. Through her victimhood she gartered attention and sympathy. The problem is that by finding solace in this role she lost out on a lot of the beauty and transformative power of birth and babyhood. And by loosing this she taught me only fear and distrust.

How many other women perpetuate that picture? When my husband and I first told my mother in law that we were planning to give birth at home she asked me, “ Do you have a high pain tolerance?” “No.” I responded. “Then you won’t be able to do it!” she told me. She said that with her first child she planed to give birth “naturally”. The pain, she told me, was too much, and so she took the epidural. With my husband, her second and last child, she didn’t wait but had the epi delivered ASAP, and boy was she happy for it!

I should explain that I am willful. I should explain that when someone tells me that I can’t do something my toes curl up under me and all my middle fingers, toes, and even my nose tries to shout out a good…well… “I’m not going to take the crap!” I am also an exception. I am also a survivor who did a lot a LOT of soul searching before I got pregnant. I learned that what people say sometimes are their issues, not mine, and that the attitude we take towards things changes our experience of them. Of course if you go into labor thinking “this is going to hurt like hell!” it’s going to hurt like hell. If you go into labor thinking “I can’t do it!” well… it’s not going to be easy, that’s for sure. And, if you tell your daughter that it’s the most painful thing in the world, they won’t be able to do without painkillers, and it’ll wreck their body and depress them. I can tell you, they’ll have to work like hell to find their way to the wonderful birth experience they deserve.

Birth is not easy. Baby doesn’t usually slip out like a little jelly role, latch onto the boob, and happily make cooing noises while they poo flowers and sunshine once a day. Pain is a part of life, it can be beautiful, it can clear your vision and help you see what’s really amazing in life. My two children’s births were the most transformative moments of my life. And, yes they hurt. But that’s not what I most remember about them. I remember how my little shack-studio-rinky-dink home felt like a mansion the moment my son was born. I remember that my daughter’s birth was so powerful it felt like my feat were on fire and I was going to blast out the rooftop. I remember that she was born eyes open looking out at the world for full minute before coming the rest of the way out. I remember feeling like if I could go through those two beautiful births, I could do anything, and I that I was, am, the most powerful person I will ever meet! And that is what birth is to me. That is what women like my mother, like my mother in law, like every woman who has ever told another women that it was “too painful” or “too much” have missed out on. This is the story I plan on telling my daughter, my son, and every other person who will ever ask me what birth is like. Birth is one of the most beautiful, most empowering, life changing moments of a persons life.