Guest post – my birth story: Kate Carter, Life & Style editor of guardian.co.uk
With our resident blogger away on maternity leave (our founder Jules!) and enjoying being Mummy to new baby Sacha, we’ve invited a few “guests” to share their birth stories with us.
Introducing Kate Carter, Life & Style editor of guardian.co.uk, currently on maternity leave.
Despite having two children – two little girls – I have never given a huge amount of thought to any birth plan or idea of how I wanted it to go.
Other than avoiding a c-section if at all possible (I’ve never had surgery and the idea terrifies me) I was pretty happy to go with the flow. I believed, and still do, that people fixate too much on the birth and not enough on what happens after.
And my two experiences were very, very different. Lily, my eldest, was born in 2008. My waters broke first and I soon had contractions only 90 seconds apart but after 40 hours I was still a pathetic 1 cm dilated. Bring on the synoticin drip, IV antibiotics, an epidural which took 4 attempts to work and she finally arrived into the world 4 hours later. But what happened next will always overshadow any memories of the labour itself. Lily wouldn’t feed, and after a few fraught days was diagnosed with acute renal failure. She was transferred to the neo-natal intensive care unit. I will never ever forget the moment they wheeled her in there, the scary high tech equipment everywhere, the incubators, the tiny premature babies.. I have never been so utterly terrified in my life and I hope never to be again.
It has a very happy ending though, this story, as Lily somehow managed to cure herself (she’s something of a medical mystery as they have no idea what caused it and no idea why it stopped) and after a week of expressing so I could bottle feed her breastmilk, on Christmas Day morning (does this story get any more sentimental?) she suddenly decided she could do this herself and started feeding properly. And didn’t stop for 2 and a half years.
Rosalie, who was born last October, was a far easier labour – in fact the trickiest bit as I recall was installing Lily’s car seat in my Dad’s car between contractions so he could take her to nursery… My waters broke at 3am, I was in a hospital birthing pool at 9am and she was born just after 11am. With no pain relief whatsoever. Not even a paracatemol. She was soon feeding nicely and still is.
Nothing anyone writes or tells you can prepare you for childbirth, and as Wendy said you can’t plan how it goes. But really, it’s at worst a couple of days of pain – looking after this new little being you created is the really tricky bit! For me, feeding is of course about the best start for your child, it’s about bonding etc – but more, because it was the moment at which Lily started feeding properly that coincided with her health improving, it’s something that is utterly vital for my girls.
Thank you Kate, for sharing your story with us, and welcome to the world baby Rosalie (and of course Lily)!
Amoralia x
You can follow Kate on twitter @KateHelenCarter and also would love to say hello to us @AmoraliaLondon
If you would like a chance to win some Mama Tea for pregnant or breastfeeding mamas, pop over to our facebook page here.
Oh! And we’d love you to vote for Amoralia in the Prima Baby Fashion Awards too, we are toooo excited for words to be nominated for Best maternity swimwear, Best maternity lingerie and Best maternity sleepwear.
click here to vote http://www.babyexpert.com/Prima-Baby-fashion-awards-2012
Tags: guest post, labour story