in the gaps

*trigger warning: birth trauma

Sometimes trauma sneaks into the gaps – the moments of what isn’t happening instead of what is. I find myself spending a decent amount of time these days looking at birth photos. I scan through my first birth, noticing and remembering the lips that looked like a shedding snake and my skin so swollen from the pre-eclampsia that I could see the lines from the nasal cannula on my cheeks. I look at the time stamp on the photos and remember when I began to panic as I struggled to breathe while awaiting the diagnosis of pulmonary edema. There was some chaos there. The figures are etched into my mind – mostly of heroic nurses and physicians who made me feel safe(r) and of my family and friends surrounding me with love.

Then I scroll to my second birth and a whole new set of feelings emerge. I want to warn the girl on the screen to buckle up – that there is more to come after you make it home with you ten pound giant of a baby. I want to reassure her that there would be more chaos, but that it would be ok. I remember that as the time before. The time before spending a year with an undiagnosable brain lesion or my anxiety disorder growing wings and taking to the sky, and the time before the painful, hard, and empowering choice to say goodbye to a community that had, for the most part, loved us so well. I remember sitting and crying in the parking lot of Nashville West listening to Rob Bell’s soothing voice reminding me that “this is only a wave” as I ate my fourth chocolate chip cookie of the afternoon. This was before I knew that I would soon find myself in Indiana, meeting Rob Bell in person at a school I’d never heard of and ugly crying at him while he hugged us and reassured us that we were going to be ok…all of this, of course, in the room where I will be graduating in a few months.

I looked at these pictures often after I received my twenty eight week diagnosis of preeclampsia with El. They got me through long afternoons of laying around because I felt like passing out every time I stood, or evenings when I would lay awake and wonder what the chaos might look like this time around. They got me through evenings of tears in her pink prepped nursery crying about ultrasounds and MRIs and so many unanswered questions. I would look at those pictures and remember it was all worth it. Those moments after your baby is born and you hold this little person in your arms and suddenly everything else disappears.

I don’t have any of those pictures with El – there is just this big time gap in my phone. After a very prompt admission and decision to go ahead with the c-section due to dangerous and rapidly increasing protein and blood pressure readings, I walked my trembling back-side-exposed self to the operating room. I walked barefoot down the hall where I had run in my oh-so-carefully selected chaplain’s shoes just a few months prior. I climbed on the table and went through all of the preparation, meanwhile my jaw was chattering so hard I thought it might break. Ryan came and sat with me and repeatedly kept moving the surgical hair cover out of my eyes. There was the waiting and then the tiniest little squeaky cry. And then nothing. No panic, no words of concern, just quiet while the doctors worked on El far away and out of sight. I saw a quick glimpse before they rolled her incubator out the door and to the NICU, and then I didn’t see her for twelve hours. They stitched me up and glued me back together, and my momma stayed with me so that Ryan could be with the baby. I tried to sleep – I tried so hard so that I could be rested to meet her, but I did not know that the reason I couldn’t sleep was severe anemia or that I was about to need a blood transfusion. I did not know that I would only see her a couple hours per day at the most for the five we still had ahead of us in the hospital. And I didn’t know that my brain was encoding this as trauma. I did not know that I would spend time grieving the first five days of her life (though she was mostly sleeping) where I sat in a hospital bed feeling much more like a recovering sick person than a woman who had just delivered a baby.

I tried SO hard to not have a traumatic birth. I know too much now. I was prepared. I was strong. I had resources. It didn’t matter. And because I was muscling through so much trying to be brave and to be ok, because I have watched so many beautiful mothers leave the hospital without their babies, or stay in the NICU for months – and because I knew that every time I was in the NICU that we were the lucky ones. I knew we wouldn’t be there for very long. Because of all this, it took me ten months to realize that I never stopped armoring up. I never stopped forcing “ok.”

Y’all, trauma is not so much about what happens to us. It’s not about the “worst possible things” and it certainly isn’t about comparison. Trauma is about the way our brain encodes the experience. It’s about the way the experience fits into our unique chemistry and set of core beliefs as well our other life experiences thus far. And trauma is nothing to be ashamed of.

As Dan Siegel says, you have to name it to tame it. Well here goes. I have three beautiful, healthy children and I had three traumatic births. People have had worse experiences – way worse. And also, I’ve had three traumatic births.