When Your Birth Plan Doesn't Go According to Plan

Tears began streaming down my face as I quickly grieved the birth plan I was giving up. The birth plan -- that, up until that point -- had been incredibly flexible.
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"Well, I'm so glad we did this ultrasound. He's breech," the midwife informed me nonchalantly, as if confirming that my baby did indeed have two feet.

I was 36 weeks pregnant with my first baby, and I had no clue what that even meant.

"You'll need a c-section," she continued, before giving me the brief rundown of risks and statistics.

Tears began streaming down my face as I quickly grieved the birth plan I was giving up. The birth plan -- that, up until that point -- had been incredibly flexible. It was so flexible, in fact, that I hadn't even bothered to write it down. My birth plan was simple:

Go as long as possible without drugs. Attempt a water birth. If I start saying the f-word, bring me the drugs.

See? Simple. There was no five-page plan, no birth playlist, no list of demands. And yet, upon hearing that my easy-breezy birth plan was not, indeed, going to be the plan, I was nothing short of devastated.

I took home a pamphlet titled, "How To Flip Your Baby" or something of that nature. It was a trifold full of safe home remedies a pregnant woman could attempt in hopes of turning her baby around. I hoisted myself into the car, big pregnant belly pushed up against the steering wheel, and let my tears fall all over the brochure while I called my husband and told him the news.

The next 24 hours looked like something out of a sitcom. Picture me: lying upside down on an ironing board propped up against the couch with a bag of frozen fried rice on the top of my belly, a heating pad on my pubic bone, and a pair of headphones streaming loud music tucked into my underwear. My husband shined a flashlight at my belly button and held an empty paper towel roll between his mouth and my lower stomach. His voice boomed into the paper towel horn, "Baby, it's your father. Come down here. Step into the liiiiiight!!"

The whole scene was equal parts hilarious and pathetic.

I cried on and off all night, but tried to keep my hormones in check and my optimism high. When I wasn't lying upside down on the ironing board, I was doing cat-cow exercises and various yoga poses. Before bed I decided to take a bath to help my body relax. I stepped into the tub and immediately burst out laughing. My husband had taped a picture above the faucet of a baby in the head down position with the caption, "C'mon baby! You can do it!!!"

The next day we returned to the birth center to see if our home tricks had worked. They hadn't. We met the doctor for an external cephalic version treatment, which is a fancy way of saying she tried to turn the baby manually with her hands.

It was just as painful as it sounds.

We were at the birth center for two and a half hours. The doctor, God bless her, pushed as hard as she could. I closed my eyes and breathed through the pain, saying turn baby turn in my head with each exhale. I watched the doctor's face and could tell it wasn't working. I started to ugly cry.

The doctor measured the baby's head size and quickly ruled out the option of a vaginal delivery. She apathetically recommended a scheduled c-section at 39 weeks, and that was that.

On May 7th, my son was born, cut straight from my body and immediately placed on my chest. I have never cried so hard in my life.

It was perfect.

***

When I got pregnant with my second baby, I opted for a repeat c-section. Nobody was more surprised about this decision than I was. Me, the girl who spent an entire night lying upside on an ironing board with headphones in her pants, all to avoid a c-section, was willingly asking for another one.

I did heaps and heaps of research about VBACs vs. repeat c-sections, and I spoke to friends who had done both. I talked to the doctors and midwives about all of my concerns, the biggest of which being my first child's head size, which was 98th percentile at 39 weeks. Could I even do a VBAC? What if my second baby went to 41 weeks and had an off-the-charts head size? Would I end up in a c-section anyways? Lots of people had lots of opinions, friends and strangers alike. Chances are, if you're reading this, you might have an opinion too.

After reading my fair share of statistics and speaking with the staff at the birth center, I had to combine logic with what was in my heart.

And in my heart, the shocking truth was: I had no desire to have a VBAC.

I longed for the same experience I had with my first birth: the oasis of that familiar operating room, a numb body that felt no pain, the magic moment of having a baby placed on my chest in the blue curtain cocoon. I wanted the controlled environment and the method that felt comfortable, safe, recognizable. I desperately wanted a repeat of the only birth experience I had ever known. All of a sudden, a VBAC seemed scary and terrifying; just thinking about it gave me anxiety.

So, we unabashedly decided on a c-section and announced the date to all our friends. Our second baby would be born on October 27th. I circled the date in my day planner and drew little hearts in the box. I scheduled a housecleaner to come the day before, and we arranged childcare for our older son. I made one last hair appointment, and we picked a day to go to Costco to stock up on things like toilet paper and laundry detergent.

I felt confident, peaceful, totally in control of my own life.

Which is why, three weeks before my scheduled c-section, when I started feeling "cramps" after a fun evening with friends, the possibility that I was going into labor hadn't even occurred to me.

(Insert laughter here)

Sure enough, those "cramps" were contractions. Pure chaos ensued. The birth center instructed us to come in, my friend scrambled over in her pajamas to watch our two year-old, I took a shower and we were out the door. My husband didn't bring so much as a change of clothes.

We arrived at the birth center at 1:00am looking like a couple of lost teenagers. Our nurse Antoinette took pity on us, and after checking me, gently informed me of the unthinkable: "You're a three. The baby is coming tonight."

I very quickly realized I had no clue what to do. This might as well have been a scene from that TV show I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant. We had signed up for birth classes with the first pregnancy, but only attended one class before receiving the breech diagnosis. It seemed like a waste of time to go to the other three, which took place on Sunday afternoons for four hours at a time.

Birth class dropouts, my husband and I had not even skimmed a single birthing book. The closest thing I had seen to a live birth was a couple of short YouTube videos.

My husband kept asking if I wanted music and while I had no idea what I actually wanted, I knew for sure that I did NOT want music. I walked around and groaned and almost hyperventilated a few times because I wasn't breathing properly, as our nurse kindly informed me.

Again, it was all so hilarious and pathetic.

Labor hurt, badly (#understatement). A couple of hours later, the nurse checked me again and told me it was time to push.

"WHAT?" I exclaimed. "Can I still get drugs?"

She assured me that I could, but they never came. Within the hour, my body writhed in unspeakable pain and did the thing I guess it was capable of doing all along. On October 4th, one whole month before my due date, my second baby was born the old fashioned way, and immediately placed on my chest. I have never screamed so loud in my life.

It was perfect.

***

I'm far enough removed from both experiences now to simply laugh at the irony: my planned water birth ended up being a c-section and my planned c-section ended up being an all-natural VBAC.

There seems to be a lot of focus and emphasis on the birth plan these days. You can hop on Pinterest and find everything from "What To Pack In Your Hospital Bag" to charts debating the Bradley Method vs. Hypnobirthing. Thanks to the Internet, you can easily learn how to write the perfect birth plan, how to create the perfect birth environment, and how to train the perfect birth coach.

And while I do believe in planning (Monica Geller is my spirit animal), sometimes I wonder: are we placing too much focus on planning the perfect birth? Is the pressure of birth empowerment consuming more of our time and energy than the actual transition of becoming a mother for the first or second or even fifth time?

It's kind of like your wedding. Hop on Pinterest and it's over. You could spend 400 hours searching for the perfect invitations, the homegrown bouquets, the DIY table numbers made out of distressed barn wood. You could drive all over town trying on dress after dress, shoe after shoe, lipstick shade after lipstick shade. You could easily spend an entire year of your life planning the perfect wedding, and of course there is nothing wrong with that. But is it possible, that sometimes, amid the mason jar candles and DIY dreamcatchers, that the whole point of the wedding, the actual marriage itself, gets a tiny bit.....lost in translation?

Just like a birth plan gone amiss, our perfect wedding plans often go off course. Maybe it rains, or maybe the food order gets mixed up, or maybe Uncle Bobby gets drunk and hits on all the bridesmaids.

But when all is said and done, no matter what happened, no matter what the weather looked like or who got the wrong meal or who had to deal with Uncle Bobby barfing in the potted plant, the endgame is the same: you got to marry your best friend. The wedding is only the first day of a life-long commitment to one another.

And giving birth? It's kind of like that. It's the very first day of a life-long commitment to raising a child. It is an important day, it is a special day, it is absolutely a day worthy of your best plans.

But if your plans go awry....if all the water tubs are full, if your baby is breech, if your baby is early, if your baby is late, if you need the drugs after you swore you wouldn't, I want you to know this: motherhood is so much more than the day your baby is born. Your birth experience does not define you; giving birth is not the endgame.

So make your plans, pack your bag, and get that playlist ready. It's okay to dream and strategize, to prepare and make lists. We can celebrate a birth gone according to plan, just like we can grieve a birth plan gone wrong.

After all, the only way our birth plan can truly fail is if we let the pressure of one day overshadow the miracle of an entire lifetime.

This is only the beginning.

***

A version of this post originally appeared on Coffee + Crumbs, a collaborative blog about motherhood. You can follow Ashlee on Instagram, and follow Coffee + Crumbs on Facebook.

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