my birth experience

It has taken me a year to realize that I cheated myself out of a birth experience I wanted.

Though I wrote a long post about B's birth, I realize now that the way I brought my daughter into the world wasn't what I wanted. At that time I thought it was but I've done some soul searching and discovered that I had been lying to myself. I thought, at the time, I was making an educated choice but I realize now, I was selfish and had no idea what I was doing.

My ignorance was because I felt overwhemled during that pregnancy. I was half way across the country away from family, a newlywed,  in graduate school, and I was overwhelmed by the amount of information on the Internet. So overwhelmed that I gathered what information I could and then stopped. I stopped researching, stopped educating myself, and probably stopped caring because I thought I knew enough.

I'm not sure if we ever know enough about anything, but I am sure now that I didn't know anything then.

I do have regrets about the way Bean was born and the majority of those regrets are because I did not give birth to my child the way I wanted to. I didn't know how I wanted to give birth to her but a year later I feel empty. I don't blame the doctor who delivered our daughter or the hospital. I blame myself. After obtaining two degrees that promote self advocacy and education, I'm ashamed that I didn't do it.

Once a woman has a c-section, she will always have to give birth this way- That is a myth and unfortunately I was letting my ignorance threaten another delivery. I was told by two practices (the one I left because of their horrible service and my current practice) that having a vaginal birth after c-section (VBAC) wasn't an option for me. At first I blindly accepted that fact. It seemed like the choices I made a year ago were going to leave me empty again if I didn't educate myself.

You have the right to experience your feminity and bring our child into the world as natural as possible- TP

After doing research that debunked many reasons why women supposedly aren't able to have VBACs I called my husband and broke down crying. I couldn't believe that I was doing it again. I was allowing my birth experience to be stolen. I was letting a group of people make decisions about my body and my baby without taking a moment to question that.

But something in me screamed. In a country that is supposed to be free, why was I being pigeon holed into a false choice? Not anymore and never again.

Yesterday we decided that we were going to have our cake and eat it too.

My name is Meg and I'm going to give birth to my son vaginally.