Over the several years that I’ve been a Mommy I have had several friends find themselves with child which has led to inevitable labor & birth questions.  I feel like I am doing fellow pregnant women a diservice to share my birth story with them because while it isn’t unique in a way that it’s never happened to anyone before, it is gruesome and traumatizing.  I quite literally had PTSD for awhile after my birth, it was that long, that painful and that terrifying.  I warn people that while their labor might be very painful, it probably will not be anything like what I went through.  I also tell them be prepared for your plan to fail, maybe even plan B or C because, as I learned, it’s just NOT something you can plan.  You can have ideas of how you want things to be and thoughts of what you will do but ultimately, baby decides what happens.

My labor lasted 36 hours ending in a semi emergency cesarean because Nathaniel was stuck in my pelvis.  Check out that cone…

*the photo date is wrong, crappy camera then*

But after time to recover and reflect I realized, it had to happen that way.  That is how Nate had to come into the world because I NEEDED to learn those lessons.  I needed to be completely out of control, which was quite a battle all the way through the labor.  I had to be put at the mercy of my labor.  All throughout my pregnancy and really my pre-mommy life, I knew better.  I had a plan, I had read everything and I knew what would and would not happen.  I was the obnoxious pregnant woman and before pregnancy I was a sort of cold, unemotional and uninterested person.  I know now that I had to go through that so that I could grow become the person that I am now.  It was complete torture and completely necessary because I don’t think I would have learned what I learned from that birth, in any other way, ever.

What has me concerned with Abigail is that with my Mom, the girls were the hard ones.  I already had a hard one!  Listen, Abby, I don’t have any lessons to learn little girl, I get it, I got it, let’s just make this easy on mommy and come out nicely and not before January 20th!