"But what if the baby thinks I don't love him as much as I love his sister?" I squealed, white-knuckled and in tears through another contraction.
It didn't make sense, but pain and panic will do that. In that moment, I honestly thought that, if I got an epidural with one child and had a natural labor with the other, it would somehow mean that I loved one child less than the other. Fearing a C-section, I ended up consenting to an epidural-- though, as fate would have it, my scoliosis prevented it from working. My son was born a few minutes later, perfect and beautiful. The needle in my back didn't make any difference in the immediate feelings of love that I felt for my son.
Of course, now that the pain and anxiety are behind me, I realize how silly it was that I ever thought that the amount of pain I experienced during labor was somehow a reflection of how much I loved my children. But I can also understand why that thought was there. I had gotten caught up in the culture of birth-shaming that tells women that their willingness to endure unnecessary pain (or not) makes them better or worse mothers. And, though I wouldn't have held anyone else to the same standard, I told myself that I could only be a good mom if I went through unmedicated labor with both of my nine-pound posterior babies.
The feeling followed me through my first few months with my son. I endured an extraordinarily painful surgery to correct trauma from childbirth, and took as low of a dose of pain medication as possible to avoid passing medication to him through breast milk... Even though that meant spending hours of every day for two weeks curled into a ball, sobbing my eyes out and sometimes even involuntarily screaming. Surgical recovery hurt as much as transition-stage labor (something I've experienced twice without medication), yet I endured it because I thought that I would be a bad mother if I exposed my son to pain medication-- or, Sanctimommy forbid, formula.
It didn't end there, and here's where my dangerous commitment to unnecessary pain nearly cost me my life. As I wrote in another article, my doctor repeatedly urged me to wean my son so that I could take the high-dose central nervous system depressants that she said were necessary for controlling my extreme case of postpartum anxiety. But I believed that doing so would make me less of a mother. I felt like breastfeeding was the one thing that I still "had" of my identity as a crunchy martyr of a mom. Even when I became so sick that my lips were blue and I was fainting a dozen times a day, I refused to wean my son because I didn't want to be selfish. As a result, my two children nearly lost me.
Two days ago, my daughter brought up natural childbirth for the first time in her seven years. She asked me why it hurts to have babies. I explained to her that the pain is because a mommy's uterus needs to squeeze very hard to push the baby out, and because the mommy's vagina has to go very quickly from being the size of a nickel to being the size of a watermelon. Here was the convesation that I had once, in my juvenile naivete, somehow expected to be my opportunity to prove my worth as a mother to my kids.
"Can't they give you medicine so it doesn't hurt as bad?" she asked.
"They can," I explained, "But I chose not to. I wanted to be able to experience everything and I didn't want you to be exposed to any medicine that might hurt you."
Somehow, all these years later, it seemed like a pretty pathetic reason to go through that kind of pain when there's an alternativce. She paused for a long time. Where was the applause, the gratitude, that I had somehow expected? And why had I expected it?
"I think I would have taken medicine, if I were you," she said plainly, with a shrug.
Seven years ago, I had expected this conversation to be one about what an amazing mother I was. Seven years ago, I had expected to be able to say, "It was twenty-three hours of labor, and you were backwards, and it hurt so bad that I cried, but I loved you so much that I went through it." Seven years ago, I had thought that this made me an amazing mother. But this was a completely different conversation, and hindsight is 20/20.
"When you have children of your own, that's a completely okay choice for you to make," I said, "Now that I think about it, it's kind of funny that I thought I had to go through a lot of pain just to make myself a good mom."
"I think you'd be a good mom even if you'd taken medicine," she agreed.
And she was right. My value as a mother isn't in how much pain I went through, or how many hours of labor I endured, or how long I breastfed them. My value as a mother is in how many hugs I give, how many stories we read, and how hard I'm willing to fight to keep my kids happy, healthy, and comfortable. I didn't have to go through as much pain as I did. I could have accepted the interventions that could have made labor less stressful and traumatic to me. If I had wanted to, I could have even had a C-section, and it wouldn't have made me less of a mother.
Ultimately, I don't regret my unmedicated births-- my daughter's, which was planned, and my son's, which happened because of a failed but medically indicated epidural. I don't regret them, because my daughter's made me feel empowered and accomplished. It gave me the ability to say that, as young and vulnerable and unprepared for parenthood as I was, I was able to do something that many women can't do. And I don't regret my son's because it taught me that addressing pain can be a medical necessity and that I wasn't selfish for accepting it-- even though, in my unfortunate case, it didn't work anyway. But I am glad that I learned what just might be my most important lesson as a mother: that we can't judge our worth as parents based on how much pain we endure.
