How do you ever know that a choice you’re making is the right choice? It would be helpful if a soothing tone played when you made it, or if you were suddenly illuminated by a beam of golden, ethereal light. Then you would be like: yesssss. I make the best choices. I’m such a good choice-maker!
I have been obsessively weighing having another c-section or trying for a VBAC since basically before I even got pregnant, and it turns out I’m a bad choice-maker because I still don’t know which one is right. I guess it would help if I felt strongly about one or the other, but I don’t. I have no instincts, here. No gut reactions. No… hints mailed to me anonymously, where all the words have been cut out of magazines. That strikes me as so 90s! An anonymous letter today would be, like, a text string of emoji from an unknown number, right? Like: “Oh my god, they used the screaming face, the thumbs up, the lipstick, the sushi, the butcher knife, and the donut, does that mean they want to kill me or they’re nervous about taking me out for a nice meal?? OR BOTH???”
The 90s were simpler times, guys! Not least because the medical standard was repeat c-sections. I mean doctors probably still smoked in the operating room, back then! Ashing right into your incision. Like I said: simpler times.
But now VBACs are the thing, and here I am, stuck in the middle between the two. Neither repeat cesareans nor VBACs, honestly, sound remotely appealing to me. On the one hand, you have abdominal surgery. On the other, you have: ????? vagina demons? I’m not entirely sure, since I skipped that whole thing the first time around.
The crazy part about all this is that with Vera, I really wanted the vaginal delivery. Oh man, I was even going to try to do it unmedicated. That’s right, I was aiming for the most natural, intervention-free birth I could manage. Which, I mean, based on the contractions I had when I miscarried last year, LOL. But at the time I was really sold on it. And when I found out I had to have a cesarean instead, I was devastated. Then I had it and my resulting experience, well, it wasn’t great but it wasn’t awful, and the recovery honestly wasn’t that bad. And I filed these little nuggets of information away for later. CESAREAN: NOT NECESSARILY THE END OF THE WORLD?
This time around, my doctor was very encouraging of a VBAC. She said I’d be a great candidate. But I just… didn’t know how I felt about it. At the top of my Favorable Outcomes list was an easy VBAC. In the middle was a scheduled c-section. And at the bottom, in worst-case scenario territory, was a labor plus an emergency c-section.
The VBAC could return the biggest reward, but it also could carry the biggest risk. So my birth answer, it would seem, lay in how lucky I was feeling.
Turns out I’m not much of a gambler. The familiarity, predictability, and moderate risk of a repeat surgery won out by the slightest of margins. I ended up choosing to schedule a c-section for June 21, which is like TOMORROW. Today, even, in some time zones, by the time I hit “send” on this.
Yet even the night before I go in and do this big thing, I still worry it’s not the “right” choice. Should I have gone with the VBAC instead? Am I denying myself the opportunity to… something???? Have a good birth experience, I guess? What is a “good” experience, anyway? I mean if we define it as not getting cigarette ash in my incision, then I am virtually guaranteed to be in for a real treat.
I saw that quote from Peter Pan on Instagram the other day, and it made me want to hurl my phone out the window. It was the one that goes: “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.” A different way of putting that is, if you failed, it’s because you didn’t believe hard enough. And I guess I’ve been worried that my lack of belief in my ability to VBAC is some kind of moral failing, despite acknowledging the ridiculousness of that statement even as I type it out.
Belief is mercurial. It loves some and wounds others. Belief alone cannot guarantee good, nor protect you from bad. Is how I tend to see things, but there’s still some subcurrent of thought in me that whispers, what if? What if I’d just tried to believe? Believe in myself; in my body; in Beyoncé; in the Dream of the 90s! Maybe I could have opened myself up to something really good!
Yesterday I texted the beau asking if we’d made the right choice to do this c-section, and he wrote back something like, there is no right answer, what we’re doing is the right answer that works best for us. And I was like, that’s cool. Because there’s been all this pressure on me to fly, and I understand why, because flying is the fucking shit. But maybe it’s okay to just walk, sometimes. Sometimes a good answer can be walking.
These last few days, I have to admit, have been a whirlwind of weird emotions. I was trying so hard to get myself to a place where I was feeling zen and relaxed before embarking on this new gig, but I had to give up on that, too. Zen and relaxed is maybe not in my genes, I think to myself nearing midnight, when I have to be up in four hours to go have my abs sliced open. I’d tried hard not to make this late night happen again, like it did before my first kid, and before my wedding, but it did, and I have to forgive myself for that, too.
Maybe walking was too high of a bar after all. Crawling? Lying on the floor, sighing heavily?
So here we are. I’ve ticked off almost all my “lasts.” I’ve had my last prenatal appointment ever, which I felt weirdly sad about. We’ve had our last night together as a family of three, which went fine but wasn’t anything special. I did my last morning of daycare drop off with just one kid. I did one last workout before being rendered incapacitated. I had, last weekend, my last night of halfway decent sleep. I gladly took my last hug from my first and favorite kid before she went off to her grandparents’ house, wearing a too-big backpack.
I’m not ready for this, necessarily, and I’m not particularly joyful. Maybe scheduling a c-section wasn’t the right answer, and maybe it’s not the good answer.
But I’m here. Let’s do this.
