When you have a C-Section with your first and get pregnant again, there is this term tossed around by your Gynecologist: VBAC, which stands for Vaginal Birth after C Section. It’s offered to you like a tack on experience when you book a trip. Do you want to try for a VBAC this time, is it in your birth plan? For me it has been a HARD PASS, even tho this girl is not breech like her brother was, A SOLID NO THANK YOU NEXT PLEASE. Even though I’m starting to get the shudders remembering how much it hurts to have my abdomen sliced open, and how I was scared to be around anyone funny in the weeks after because it hurt so bad to laugh (I am constantly surrounded by funny people) and how weird it is to be strapped to the table while your insides are removed, and how terrifying it was when Joe came out coughing and had to go to the NICU for fluid in his lungs (common with C Sections) it is STILL THE HARDEST OF PASSES. I have zero, less than zero? I have negative interest. I know it’s supposed to be a beautiful and cathartic experience. Am I still a woman, a mother? Why am I so averse to one of the most natural of things? To double down, here’s a short list of things I’d rather do than push a human out through my vagina.
- Sit on the tarmac in a packed airplane in a back row seat by the bathroom for ten hours with only half a bottle of water
- Clean an entire spilled bag of quinoa off a kitchen floor that has just been peed on
- Eat a piece of moldy bread
- BE JUDGED FOR THIS LIST