How about just some damn honesty about how freaking hard my C-Section recovery is...mentally.

No one ever told me to the depths of what an emergency c-section recovery actually was like. And honestly that wasn’t and hasn’t been the hardest part. If you’ve read my birth story of Rees you probably got the point that I went from labouring hard to a c-section in an extremely short period of time. My one hint that I was going into a surgery that I didn’t pick up on was Joe coming out of the bathrooms in scrubs on and me just thinking how sexy he was.

I lost multiple chunks of time that day that my brain has been working very hard at trying to get back.  In the small amounts of quiet time I have in my days, I replay her birthday over and over in my head just trying to comprehend how scared I was, to try so hard to remember the times my head really doesn’t want me to remember.

I’ve been denying to myself and others that the blessings of that day outweighed all the fear and trauma I endured in my head. I am SO grateful we are both safe and ok, but the entire events have traumatized my core and that... is not easy to admit. The ease I once had seems so far away these days and I could cough that up to a lot of what my life is. But knowing that in every silent evening my head dozes to the same place each time. There is something I haven’t been accepting, that I’m still very much not ok with the unfolding series of events.

I always told people I would have many babies if my pregnancies weren’t so hard and if all I had to do was labour. I love the not knowingness of labour, I love that you can prove how strong you really are after enduring so much pain. I love the after adrenaline and release of hormones. The bliss that is having your baby in your arms right after you screamed your face off for how ever long. The tears, the way your partner looks at you. How you are some how in complete control yet not. It is a surreal experience that I was lucky enough to have twice.

I knew Rees would be my last baby, I was so excited to see the tears roll down Joe’s face and see his reaction to meeting his daughter for the first time. And I missed it, I missed a lot. I was put under and he wasn’t even able to be in the room, I did not meet her for almost 2 hours after. I woke up scared, alone in a dark room with no baby in my numb empty tummy. With a lady near by but non the less alone. The last words that came out of my mouth before I went under were yells, multiple yells of “YOU’RE TORTURING ME” “IS MY DAUGHTER GOING TO BE OK?” “IS SHE ALIVE?”  “STOPPP” as they held me down during extreme contractions, inserting a cathador, holding oxygen over my face. My midwife said it was very sad for her to see and she had never experienced what she experienced with me. This has made us pretty close.

They call it an “E0” the most emergency c-section there is, multiple nurses came in during the following days mentioning what I had been through that had made its way through the maternity ward, yet I didn’t remember most of it. And for good reason I try to tell myself, my subconscious was there.. I was not. I see the same 6 flashes over and over again with nothing in between. I can bring myself back to that fear with a single thought, I well up with tears when I tell her birth story and that is not how I want to remember it. So I fight myself a lot. My midwife has offered to walk me through the hospital and the hallways and the OR telling me what has happened and I want and think I need that, but not yet. I am far from healed, and this may seem like a small problem in many big schemes because we are both safe and ok which I am so eternally grateful. It is my big problem right now because I need to bring calmness back to my quiet times, to be the best mama to my beautiful babies.

I have skipped appointments to avoid reliving it with the people who were there out of fear, I can’t make sense why..but here I announce I am going to be taking every step forward from here on out. I bought a journal, to try and flip the flashes I have into positives, to see if I can remember anymore as Joe has been encouraging me to seek out someone, or take a tiny step in the right direction. So here I try.