Not Nice Spice
For about five years Stud and I had prayed for a mentor. Naturally we thought we would each have different mentors. It was frustrating when each year our lives went in a drastically different direction. We ended up feeling defeated with constant whiplash. And after so many years of professional changes and personal struggles rearing their ugly heads, Stud and I were at a point where we no longer enjoyed marriage or family.
Just thinking back to meeting Pastor Faith has me in blubbery tears. Stud was up for a relocation promotion at work and in less than 30 days we had found homes in three different cities. Finally, we heard that we’d be moving to Upstate NY. I was thrilled to be closer to my family after living away from home for 12 years. We took a break form church for a few weeks, then went unsuccessfully hopping about until we found a church with a phenomenal children’s program (we had never left Chickadee in a church nursery and she was nearing her first birthday). It was equally important to us to find solid counseling. It was a breath of fresh air to be connected with a spunky-vibrant counselor. She wasn’t what we expected and everything we needed. It was truly divine. Over a year later in a counseling session, I shared that one of the main reasons I felt we had moved here was to meet her. Pastor Faith has an essence that leaves you in complete peace. She exudes joy and freedom. Reading her birth stories left me speechless and beyond incredibly thankful that she didn’t let PPD win. She didn’t quit. She has strength—a mother’s strength. A fighter. There is an immense amount of beauty in her journey into motherhood. A mother should never be under-minded. Faith’s Birth Stories: On February 1, 1984, at the age of 17, I went into labor with a little leak of fluid and a bad backache. I woke my husband after 6 hours of walking around in the early morning hours longing to find relief and watching the clock. At 7 a.m. my contractions were intensifying and at 6 minutes apart. I headed to the hospital scared out of my mind. The pain was unreal and my husband was not at all prepared or even wanting to be a support to me. I found myself in a hospital room across from the nursery as the maternity floor was under construction. It seemed like everyone was unconcerned about what was happening to me. It didn’t take me long to realize my age, Medicaid card and disinterested husband had gotten me tagged as a teen mom. The nurses were unkind. My husband was hungry and sat and ate a sub while I waited for a doctor to come. Finally, a nurse hooked me up to a fetal monitor and told me to stop being so dramatic, as I was across from the nursery and shouldn’t make too much noise. I might wake the babies. I was never offered any meds, sat in wet sheets for hours as I continued to leak fluid and was generally miserable and afraid. My contractions were every 2-3 minutes by noon. At 3 p.m. I still had not seen a doctor but had been examined by an on call P.A. who told me not to push but just breath and relax. At 5 p.m. I was told that my doctor was on vacation and that I would continue to be covered by the on call P.A. until it was time to deliver. They told me I had not actually broken my water but had a second bag that was leaking and so they stuck a long pin in me and popped my water. The pain I was in was terrible. My legs hurt and one of them felt numb so I was having trouble standing. I have never been so scared. I remember throwing up from the pain and that caused them to change my bedding. I was only allowed ice chips after that for some reason. At 9 p.m. the nurse came to check my vitals. She became alarmed after looking at the fetal monitor and taking my blood pressure. Things became a bit of a blur as there was a lot of activity and checking my dilation status and the position of the baby. They told me that I was going to have an emergency C-Section and my husband signed a paper saying they could. I found myself in a very cold room with a large window to my left. I was rolled on my side and given something that put my body to sleep but left me awake and shaking so hard my teeth were rattling. I looked over at that large window and found it filled with people watching all of this take place. I asked what was happening that they were there and I was told it was a teaching hospital and therefore by choosing to be there I was giving them permission to watch my surgery. I remember feeling like nothing. Like an experiment. A teen mom whose life had been horribly diverted from the honor roll to a pile of flesh being manipulated for the sake of a baby I wasn’t even sure how to take care of. I cried and shook and they covered me with sheets. I felt pressure as the doctor literally leaned on the top of my stomach to push the baby down and out of the opening they cut into me. They told me that I had a girl and I could see her briefly from the side as they cleaned her. I wept so hard. I wanted to hold her at that moment more than anything and again I just felt so helpless and unseen. Where was the moment in movies where the baby was held to the mother’s chest? I began to feel sleepy and everything faded. I closed my eyes to that large window with all those people who seemed more interested in my tears than what was happening behind the curtain to the rest of me. Hours later I woke in a bed in a room. My baby was nowhere in sight. I was alone. I rang the bell and asked if I could see my baby. They told me she had been fed already and would be brought to me at her next feeding if I wanted to feed her myself. I asked if I could breastfeed her and they told me that I could try but more than likely my breast milk would not be fully developed enough to sustain her and I would need to use a bottle too. I did try breastfeeding once. It felt awkward. The nurse just watched me try. It felt like very little came out and she and my stepmother, who had arrived, convinced me that as a teen mom, bottle-feeding was a much better choice. My daughter weighed 8lbs and 15oz. She was 21.5 inches long with the tiniest little features and long lanky body. She was my everything from the moment I saw her. The days after her birth were filled with pain as I recovered from the trauma of the emergency C-section and the bleeding that happened from an internal issue that caused me to bleed during the surgery. I had very little training or preparation for how to care for her but I figured it out slowly. At my WIC appointments they would teach me little things. I am grateful for those women who cared and didn’t treat me like an imbecile or degenerate. They treated me like a mother. My relationship with my daughter saved my life. I suffered from post partum depression and considered suicide several times in the first year but couldn’t face leaving her behind. It made for a not entirely healthy bond to her but still in hindsight I look back and know that if I didn’t have that child to love me I would have given up. Being a teen mom meant that when I became pregnant with my second child at 18 I would face a new set of prejudices. In short, the doctor and my husband convinced me to have a tubal ligation at 18. I asked him in a later appointment if it could be undone later in life if I wanted to have more kids, and he said it could but I needed to think of now. I knew he thought my life was never going to change. I certainly didn’t feel that way then! I spent the entire pregnancy worrying about the birth. At 9 months, I weighed 10 pounds less than the start of it because I was so sick. I finally had the courage to ask about the C-section and the doctor said he would do a planned C-section if I agreed to a tubal ligation. He could do it at the same time he promised. I finally agreed. My son was born on December 18, 1985. The C-section was unremarkable and I was grateful. He was a quiet slender baby at 8lbs 3 oz and 22 inches long. He came home to a mom who was overwhelmed and headed into her second bout of post partum depression. Two weeks after his birth I was rushed to the hospital with what they thought was a burst appendix. I had an infection caused by material being left in my cavity during the tubal ligation. I was in the hospital for a week. Two weeks after returning home I had an attack of severe pain and faced more surgery after they discovered I had a gallbladder full of stones and my bile duct to my liver was blocked. That was another 5 days in the hospital. Yet, less then a month later I was hospitalized again with spinal meningitis. It nearly killed me before they found what was wrong with me. My poor little son was shuffled from place to place as his grandparents tried to take care of him and his sister. The first three months were hell but we made it through. He was my joy bug baby. At 30, I had survived a divorce and vicious custody case, graduated nursing school, had a career and very different life and even married again. I remembered what that doctor had said and went to have the tubal ligation reversed. I found out at age 31 that all that prejudice years before had a long lasting effect. The doctor had not done a tubal ligation but had actually removed my fallopian tube ends from my body so that there was never a chance that the tubal would fail and allow me to become pregnant again. I knew he had done it maliciously and why. You see, I worked later in that same hospital I gave birth at. I had heard a story about the doctor who made sure that white trash didn’t have the opportunity to spawn more trash into the earth. I just didn’t believe it. I was forced to as I sat with my husband in a different office, being treated kindly and compassionately by a doctor who had to tell me the terrible truth. A colleague who had sworn to do no harm had taken part of me out and there was nothing he could do naturally to help me give birth again. He no longer was alive - he died just a few years before. I had no recourse but to accept it. My husband could not and life changed again. Giving birth has always been about trauma for me. I didn’t tell you this in the beginning but my mother died giving birth to me. Her heart valve tore at the trauma of birthing and she died the next day. My own daughter has yet to give birth and has been told she may not be able to naturally. Still, I believe that birth is meant to be beautiful and not cursed. I pray I get to see her through that one day.
2 Comments
Mystika Armstrong
12/17/2018 05:08:53 am
This is an amazing story.
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Kate Frances
12/18/2018 09:10:00 pm
I couldn't agree more- she's truly an amazing person!
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Kate FrancesWhen you don't know what else to do, then it's time to write. Then write a little while longer for good measure. Archives
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