My body had already been shaking for a while by the time I noticed it. This is normal, I thought, you’re not panicking. It’s the epidural. It’s fine.

But it wasn’t fine. As I was wheeled from the delivery room to the OR, I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to move from the room that housed the bed I felt so strong in. The room where we played Dutch Blitz in the small hours while we waited for things to move along. The room with my birthing binder with just a single page on caesarian sections. The room where I couldn’t stop throwing up from the pain, but where my husband pushed on my knees and managed to make it go away. The room where I thought I’d finally meet our little baby.

I didn’t want to be cut open. I didn’t want to give up. 

As we entered the OR, the shift in energy shocked me. Moments ago, I was crouched over a birthing bar, groaning into my abdomen, feeling the strength of what felt like every woman before me. Here, the lights were blinding, the medical team had multiplied, and I felt helpless on the stiff operating table. 

“Make sure they give me one last chance to push,” I said to my husband, the strength gone from my voice. “Please.”

The plan was to try forceps, and if that failed, move to an emergency c-section. We had already been pushing for hours, and had been at the IWK since the night before. But despite the time lapsed, the induction, and slow progression, everything felt great, perhaps naively. I felt invincible, and I knew without a doubt that I would be able to do it—that I’d deliver our baby and feel exhausted and powerful and the rush of motherhood when they were placed on my chest. I could smell their little head already. It felt so close.

But now in the OR, the shivering was shaking, and my quiet tears had shifted to sobs. I pushed with everything I had, but the forceps had not worked. My husband’s ask for one more push was denied. The slowing beep of the fetal heart rate monitor and the rush of voices I could no longer decipher meant it was time to shift gears to a caesarian. 

“It’s okay,” someone said, my anesthesiologist, I think—a delicate but comforting voice perched behind my right ear. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. These are common. You’re in great hands.”

“I’m not scared!” I screamed, “I’m sad!” 

And then this moment—this moment that I remember a certain way and never want to be corrected. Because it’s this moment, this break in time when the buzz and beeps and chatter and everything stopped, or seemed to, that I have come back to countless times since and has served the same purpose each time: to reassure me, to quell my disappointment.

What felt like every member of my medical team stopped, looked at me over the blue curtain that had been pinned up between us, and told me that I had done everything I could. I should be proud of all I had done. I did not give up. It was time for our baby to come out, now, and this is how it had to happen. 

I’d love to share that it was easy from there, but it wasn’t. Our little guy gave us a scare after he arrived, and so did I, and while it has felt good to share those parts of the story in the past, they don’t serve me to visit anymore. I’d also love to say that that moment in the OR relieved me of my disappointment for good, but it didn’t. I cried when I called my mother and shared my birth story with her. I cried in the shower when I washed my scar for the first time. 

My birth plan didn’t say much except that I trusted the staff at the IWK to guide us through the delivery and help us make whatever choices were necessary. But there between the lines in invisible ink was that I didn’t want a c-section. Like so many, I wanted to give birth the way I felt my body had been designed to do. A false story about birth had been sewn into my psyche that said this was a detour that made you miss the finish line. 

It took time—months—for me to extend the instant of strength my care team helped me feel in the OR to a more lasting feeling of forgiveness. And like most things in parenting, it took a village. It took many revisits of the moment when the medical staff shifted their care to my mental health mid-operation, for which I’ll forever be grateful. It took my OB’s candid words about how I should be thankful the forceps didn’t work. It took sharing my story with a lactation consultant, poor thing, who prompted me when she realized I’d yet to tell it. It took a friend who confessed her own disappointment, and another whose experience, though different, left her shattered. It took my husband’s awe of both me and my body. And of all things, it took a social media post on Caesarean Section Day, where a stranger called her scar her child’s “door to the world.” 

Since, I’ve had a scheduled c-section for my second, a different experience, but a trying one, nonetheless. I’m almost there, almost okay with having shifted the finish line to a new place along the path. And when I look in the mirror, I’m proud of my son and daughter’s door to this world. 

— N.L.