This is not the first time I have seen homebirth advocates nonchalantly talk about being prepared and thinking about their babies potential death when planning their ultimate birth.
Let me say that you can NEVER, EVER, concoct a scenario in your head that comes close to the reality of actually losing your baby. Even parents who carry a baby they know will not survive don't know what it would be like nor are they prepared for losing their child. You can think life and death are beautifully interwoven, but there is nothing beautiful about death that happens before life.
Try out this exercise here. Grab a few friends and a knife set. Ask one to plunge the biggest one into your heart. Ask another to plunge one into your back, probably a bread knife because those are long enough to puncture a lung. have another friend grab two more knives and drive them into your feet so you cannot move. Ask someone to give you some kind of psychedelic drug so reality is incredibly altered. Have them punch you in the eyes until your eyes are red and swollen and you look about double your age. This is nowhere close but it allows you feel some of the physical symptoms that losing your child causes.
How about just sit online and look at infant funeral photos. Look at photos of stillborn babies. Watch videos of funerals for infants. Watch memorial videos. Write up an obituary for one of your living kids and place their photo next to it. Still doesn't come close! Reach out to grieving parents and watch them in their grief. Help plan a baby's funeral. Attend an infant funeral and watch the parents. Watch how they tenderly touch their baby. Then watch as they have to say goodbye forever. Yeah, you still have no idea.
There is nothing I can say that can remotely give you any inkling into what it is like to lose your baby. If you think for one second that you can imagine what it is like, you are an idiot who is dead wrong. The day you go through it is the day you know what it's like. So, plan your birth, but don't say some stupid thing about preparing to lose your baby or imagining what it would be like or anything like that. Please. And let's not wax on poetically about life or birth being part of death. Death doesn't go hand in hand with birth like it does in homebirth circles. Death isn't beautiful or something good that happens to a baby. There are no positive ways to see the death of a baby. It's a horrible thing to experience, the worst that could ever happen to a person.
Course, you could surprise everyone and be one of the homebirth loss parents who don't care about their child. They normally bury their baby and forget about it. Parents who really love their children don't behave that way!
5 comments:
I wish you didn't know how it felt.
Thanks for sharing, I hope others read this and choose not to have a HB.
I can't even imagine how insulting it is to read stuff like how death is a beautiful part of life ... blah blah blah ... when you've actually experienced it with your own child. I shudder just thinking about thinking about losing my daughter. In fact I remember one day when she was a newborn after the scare during her birth, crying for the whole day because "she would die - someday." And just knowing she would die someday - even in ninety years was heartbreaking to me. Still is actually.
The only thing I have to come close to that experience is when my very close friend, Terrel died of a brain tumor two years ago. She was a devout Christian and had the most amazing positive attitude and tons people praying for her, and she died anyway. But another one of my (now ex) friends was into that movie "The Secret" and told me that if she'd just had the right attitude and her family had had the right attitude she would've survived the brain tumor. I would think what you went through was like that only a hundred times worse.
These women can only nonchalantly claim they accept the possibility of losing their babies, because they actually don't believe for a second that it will happen to them.
I think these type of comments prove how much these women are in it mainly for the pregnancy and birth experience.
I feel like I need to say something, but I just don't know what to say. I have never ever in my life heard someone say they were prepared to loose their baby. I have a friend who's daughter had luekemia and the fact that it was very possible her baby could die did not mean she was prepared to say goodbye. The fact that dozens of children that she had meant while her daughter was going through Chemo and that died was not an easy thing for her. She still has her daughter. She's less than a year away from being officially in remission. I don't understand how anyone could think of death as a part of birth. Yes we all are eventually going to die, but a baby and a child dying is not something that any normal person thinks about when they get pregnant. You are too busy thinking about the life of your child and the life you are going to have. The only time I thought about the death of my baby was when I was pregnant with my last daughter because I had lost a baby before her when I was 20 weeks pregnant. I just wanted to get past the 20 weeks. I wanted to get to a point where if anything happened she would be okay. I made it to that point and I deal with the loss of my daughter still every single day. It never goes away. It's always with you. Everytime my daughter smiles at seemingly nothing I wonder if it's her big sister she sees. It's helpful to think of her as sort of a guardian angel for us, but the fact is a piece of my heart is missing. A piece of my heart that can't be filled by anyone or anything else. And you are so right, there is no preparing for that. No normal person is prepared to say goodbye to their child at any age. What a selfish, sad, and idiotic thing for anyone to say. When I first heard that my baby girl didn't have a hearbeat I was fine. I was surprised at how fine I was. It was like I was justifying it. It was meant to be kind of thing. I spent the entire night bawling my eyes out. I went to the hospital the next day planning and being totally removed from the whole thing. I had worse contraction pains than I had ever felt with any of my children. I delivered my 20 week stillborn baby girl into the toilet. I felt a huge sigh of relief that it was over. I went to sleep and I dreamed of my baby girl. I woke up the next morning and had to hold her. I held her very tiny fragile bruised little body. I left her there at the hospital. I went home and planned a memorial service. And then spent the next weeks and maybe even months in a daze. Emotions all over the place. There is no way to prepare for that ever. No one plans to plan their child's funeral.
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