Human/Parents Interview: Amber Adrian and Birth Trauma
Human/Mother welcomes the Substack author of One Tired Mother!
Human/Parents is an interview series that explores and illuminates various mental health topics that some parents face while simultaneously performing the most important job on the planet: raising the next generation. Guests are Substack creatives who are also parents dealing with one or more of Human/Mother’s rotating monthly mental health topics.
This month’s topic is birth trauma.
So, pour yourself that third cup of coffee, snuggle in, get cozy, and get ready to meet our next guest:
from One Tired Mother!
Amber, tell us about yourself and your Substack. How did writing find you, or how did you find writing? What led you to start your newsletter? What is your ultimate goal with One Tired Mother?
I’m a former English teacher, current homeschooling mom/writer/part-time body literacy teacher. I’m married and have three daughters. I’m a proud Midwesterner, though I’ve lived in Europe and the West Coast, both of which I loved. Books and good conversation are my favorite things.
I love the question about how writing found me/how I found writing! So my “writing career” began with a small blog that I began after I left teaching and found myself with some less demanding jobs (nannying and SAT/ACT tutoring) and, therefore, some extra time and energy. We didn’t have kids yet either. On that blog, I wrote about all kinds of things, with sort of an overall theme of personal growth and mindfulness.
As I became a mother and as the years went by, my writing–on that little blog and then on Instagram–came to focus more on womanhood and motherhood. I felt I had a unique perspective and started sharing my thoughts and experiences. Much of it was frustration with both liberal feminist culture as well as Christian culture. On one hand, it felt like motherhood was seen as oppressive and small, and, on the other, it felt sentimentalized and put on a pedestal. Neither of those options suited me. Sometime in there I found a t-shirt at a thrift store that said “One Tired Mother” and knew that would be the name of a project in the future (podcast? I wasn’t sure). When I heard about Substack, I knew that was it, and here I am!
I love Substack. My goal is mostly just self-expression and a way for me to make sense of my motherhood experience. But, also, of course, I hope my perspective and words bring help and healing for other women too. The description of One Tired Mother is “Advocacy for women in a world that simultaneously devalues, pedestals, and ignores motherhood.” Mothers really lack true support and care in our culture, even as they support and care for the small people who are our literal future. It’s wild, and it’s not okay, and I hope to be a part of changing it. I also feel that women in general lack true support in our culture, no matter if/how they are mothers.
Let’s cut to the chase and get into your birth trauma experience. To the extent you’re comfortable, would you please share your story with us?
Yes. (Takes deep breath.) I actually was just at a women’s health conference and there was a panel on birth. Toward the end, during the Q and A, a woman was sharing how she was coerced by a provider and I had to leave the room. I proceeded to have a small panic attack. All to say, birth trauma deeply affects us, and though I’ve processed my traumatic birth as best I can (and had an incredible, super redemptive home birth experience with my third child), it still lives in my body. Birth trauma is no joke.
This was my second baby, and we had just moved to my hometown area where there were no practicing midwives. I was already halfway through my pregnancy and needed to establish care, so I went with an OB who was recommended as “really good.” I went in for a regular checkup, leaving my 20-month-old with my grandmother and telling her I’d be right back, “Just going to check on the baby!” I was about 41 weeks but feeling fine (my first came on her own at 41 and 5).
At the appointment, the OB didn’t like the baby’s heart rate. He took me into another room and strapped the fetal heart monitor onto my belly. I knew things weren’t going well by the energy in the room. The provider stepped out, leaving me with a nurse, and came back a few minutes later and said that because of what was happening with the heart rate, we needed to go to the OR for a cesarean. It wasn’t a conversation, more like a directive. I was obviously in shock, and I remember getting down off the table and trying to get my boots on (it was winter) while also trying to grab my phone. They didn’t seem to think I was moving fast enough, so they brought in a wheelchair to expedite the process.
This OB’s clinic is connected to the hospital, so I was soon being wheeled that direction while trying to frantically call and text people. They took me to a room to be prepped for surgery, and I basically dissociated, alone, while being poked and prodded and all the things by many different people.
My brother is a PA at this hospital and got there before my husband. It was great to see him, but it was a small comfort in what I was experiencing. After a bit, the doctor came over to read me the informed consent stuff, and I asked him flat out, “Do you really think this is necessary?” He told me he did.
My husband arrived shortly after—just a few minutes before I was wheeled into the OR. He isn’t a very confrontational person, but he did ask a nurse what the heart rate was now, and she said it was normal. He asked why we were doing this then, and the nurse told him he’d have to talk to the doctor. He had just arrived and didn’t feel he had enough information to challenge the doctor.
I got a spinal and soon my baby was born. I honestly hesitate to say born– “removed” feels like a more accurate word. I was still pretty much dissociated. They did bring her to my chest, and we attempted breastfeeding, but she wasn’t quite able to latch with me laying down. As I was being stitched up, still awake obviously, I heard the nurses casually talking and laughing with the doctor. One said, “I heard this is [my brother]’s sister. I didn’t know he had a sister!” (As I mentioned earlier, my brother worked as a PA in this hospital, but we had just moved to town, so we didn’t really know anyone and not many knew us.) To hear them talking about me like I wasn’t there, while stitching up layers of my body, was the frosting on the cake of an experience of total lack of respect and regard for me as a mother and as a human being.
I was separated from my baby except for that first ten minutes or so. My husband followed our daughter to the nursery. She was crying as she laid in “the plastic tub” (my husband’s words). My husband was in shock at what had just happened and horrified that no one seemed to be responding to our baby’s intense crying. He asked if he could hold her. She continued screaming, and a bit later a nurse said to him, “Ope, she has Dad wrapped around her finger already!” I found out later that that comment really pissed him off. He held her while I was in the post-op room for about an hour, and he said she screamed the whole time.
I got to the recovery room. My memory here turns hazy. I remember bursting into tears when my parents arrived and also feeling immediately more emotionally wounded as my mom tried to comfort me by reminding me that I’m okay and Clare was “fine and healthy.” My doula arrived at some point. I puked several times. It was all very surreal.
How did the traumatic experience affect your marriage, and how did you and your partner handle that?
It really affected it. We actually were in a pretty tough spot already; we were actively in counseling. Me being home full-time had brought up a lot of conflict, and we were both sort of overwhelmed, I think, by the experience of becoming parents.
My husband is notoriously hard to get a hold of; his brother, his best man at our wedding, even made a joke about it in his speech at the reception. But this experience made it not funny anymore. He had left his phone at his desk during lunch, and that’s why it took him so long to get to the hospital. This experience created, maybe reinforced, a narrative that I’m alone, that no one is there for me, that I can’t rely on anyone. This is rooted, I now realize, in childhood trauma, but my trust for him took a big hit.
Postpartum was awful. Although I had a good physical recovery (super thankful for that), emotionally, I was a wreck. We had just moved, as I mentioned, so we were living in an apartment. My parents were farmers and were in calving season, which is really intense, and they weren’t super available to help.
My husband and I were both out of sorts all around, and he thought he was doing what was needed by taking care of our toddler and basically just leaving me with the baby, who was fussy and not that easy to soothe, in addition to all the other things (like pain from the incision when moving, establishing breastfeeding, being exhausted, starving due to caloric depletion, etc.). He would bring me food, but it was tense between us, and I didn’t feel lovingly tended to as a woman should feel during the postpartum period, especially after such a traumatic birth.
There was one morning in particular when I had just gotten Clare back to sleep (it wasn’t easy) and was trying to sleep myself. My husband came into the bedroom with Alice (our oldest who was twenty-months-old at the time), just to say good morning, and I screamed, “GET OUT!!!” I don’t remember what happened next, but I remember feeling horrible for screaming at my family and at some point calling my mom, sobbing and screaming over and over: “Nobody cares about me!!” (Except I’m pretty sure the f-word was used.) My parents lived thirty minutes away, but she came in to help anyway, and my husband got some words from her about not taking good care of me.
Ugh, all of this is super painful to think about, still. I’m crying as I type this. We were just really not in tune with each other and were still adjusting to the realities of parenthood and our new roles and then moving to a different state. Three months after we relocated, this happened. It was an awful time— so, so difficult.
How did the traumatic experience affect your ability to mother and bond with your child immediately after giving birth? Does it still have an effect on the relationship you have with your child? How so? And, what do you do when it shows up (or, say, you feel triggered)?
I mean, I think that whenever someone has experienced something that is negative and disorienting, it’s going to affect how they show up to life. So yes, I’m sure it affected my ability to be present and attuned to her as a baby. She was also fussy. As I said, I remember she was really hard to get back to sleep in the middle of the night after nursing. (But I also hadn’t yet learned the magic of co-sleeping, so I don’t want to blame it all on her.) It takes a lot of bandwidth to attend lovingly to a fussy baby, even for a person who is in a good place. So yeah, I’m sure it affected things.
I don’t know to what extent it’s related to the birth (if at all), but she is definitely the child who triggers me the most. She’s extremely fiery but also very sensitive. Parenting her has honestly pushed me to my limits and beyond. But I see my daughter as an opportunity for re-parenting, to think of myself as a child (I was/am sensitive as well) and how I would have liked to have been treated.
Therapy has helped tremendously as well as somatic strategies and awareness (like EFT, Orienting, or Grounding). Also, reading books that affirm my values as a parent (Hold On to Your Kids is a fave!). But—oof!—this child has brought me to the end of myself many, many times.
Could you share with us some of the ways you’ve found to cope with the experience? How are you finding healing? Do you have any specific resources to share with our readers?
I requested my records from the clinic and hospital and read through them. I did a few therapy sessions, specifically focused on the birth. I processed it with various supportive people. I found an amazing provider for my third baby and gave birth in a tub in my living room (HBAC!).
There isn’t a specific resource that comes to mind really. I guess I’d just want people to know that birth trauma is very real, and its impact is, too. Being mistreated during such a sacred and vulnerable time affects a woman in many ways; some of which may not even be known to her. So I’d encourage people not to pass over the experience, try not to push it down, try not to forget about it, etc. but rather dig into it with someone who can hold space and mirror back the experience to you as you process. Creating an authentic and cohesive story about your birth(s) is a really valuable way to spend your time that will have ripple effects on you as a person (and you as a mother).
My daughter just turned 7 on March 7. (Golden birthday!) It’s been seven years since this happened, and it’s still with me. Obviously, I still haven’t healed totally, given the experience at the conference, but I think that’s okay. These things take time.
Is there a question that I haven’t asked that you wish I would have? (And, pretty please, answer it! 🙂)
The panel I referenced at the beginning focused on this question: “What is an ideal birth?” I think this is a great question and a very loaded one, too. There’s been a lot of birth activism in recent years, where things like home birth and even free birth are held up as the “best.” To me, an ideal birth is simply one where all involved respect the sacredness of what is unfolding and where the mother’s experience is a felt sense of agency and respect throughout the process, no matter how things actually go down.
Part of what made the birth of my second child so traumatic is the way I felt, which was so unbelievably invisible and disrespected. A birth that requires interventions isn’t necessarily traumatic (and one that doesn’t, can be). It’s all about the mother’s experience. I wrote an essay about this a while back, and so did my friend Jan and my friend Rachael. I think it’s so important that we advocate for respect for birth and respect for women—not for specific ways of giving birth, if that makes sense.
Thanks so much for having me, Katrina. Anytime space is held for me to talk about this I think I experience a little more healing.
If you’re interested in hearing a more in-depth telling of Amber’s birth trauma story, please check out this podcast episode:
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Thank you so much, Amber, for sharing a piece of your story with us here at Human/Mother! I appreciate your vulnerability and willingness to dive into such an important, not-talked-about-enough topic, and I highly recommend your Substack publication, One Tired Mother, to anyone who is looking for a supportive and thoughtful and real community of mothers. ❤️
If you or someone you know has experienced a traumatic birth, please consider sharing this post, commenting, or tapping that heart below. Tell us your story, offer any advice or wisdom gained through your own personal experience, and/or let us know which details of Amber’s story you found relatable, helpful, or hopeful.
Wherever you are in your journey, know that you deserve peace, hope, and love.
“To me, an ideal birth is simply one where all involved respect the sacredness of what is unfolding and where the mother’s experience is a felt sense of agency and respect throughout the process, no matter how things actually go down.”
I love this quote. All birth care providers should have to read some of these types of stores.
Really appreciated this read and Amber’s candor about an experience that is seemingly common in our modern maternity landscape. As a postpartum nurse it is always illuminating to take in the myriad experiences of other women in birth and postpartum and a good reminder to be extra aware of how I move through these experiences with the women I care for in those early hours after birth, no matter how it went.