Pillows, playlists and a gentle push… My birth plan was a joke

We all start our journey into motherhood with a Plan A for the birth, but wouldn’t it be helpful if we had a Plan B or C or even D?

Oh God, I mean, I laugh about it now. Which is funny in itself really, the idea that 10 years later I’d be laughing about the day, the dawn, where, white-faced in a room with blood up the walls, I would hand our new raw blinking baby to my boyfriend in order to frantically find, in my Notes app, the document I had grandly named Birth Plan. What was I hoping to find there, I wonder now. It’s funny, it is funny, how I scoured it – “I want a mobile epidural”, “I want gentle guidance rather as opposed to being forced to push” – this plan, written as if ticking off boxes on a dim sum menu, written in the voice of the person I was before. It seemed crucial, in that moment, to see if perhaps I’d given them the wrong piece of paper. Had it been an admin error? The forceps, the lack of drugs, the breast milk not coming in, the blood, was it my fault? I remember reading it again and again, I hadn’t slept for some time, of course, and the baby was crying, but I felt, I think I felt, that even though I had tried to do everything right, something had gone terribly wrong.

It turned out, despite my shock, despite the horrors and their ripples that followed me for years, my experience of giving birth was almost comically pedestrian. It reminded me of the time I got my ears pierced, I must have been about 12, going home on the bus looking at other women’s earrings and thinking, “OK, you’ve felt that same agony” – now I traipsed around London with the baby strapped to me looking at other mothers, thinking, “and yet, you are walking, you are smiling, you are putting on red lipstick in the reflection of a phone?” As the years have passed I’ve talked to other people about their births with a kind of hunger – these are stories of babies almost dying and mothers almost dying, and worse, of course – so when last week’s report on birth trauma was published, no part of me was surprised at the findings. I can’t imagine many parents were.

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