'Wrecking' your vagina it is a legitimate source of fear for many women (and men) when it comes to natural vaginal birth. It was definitely a concern for me. I didn’t know how my body would be able to do the seemingly impossible. Before experiencing birth, I thought I was going to have to push a watermelon through a pea hole and I’d heard my friends talk about their vaginas like the scene of a car crash after giving birth. I didn’t know anyone who gave birth without tearing unless they gave birth via caesarean.
I didn’t realise how much this fear was influencing me until I was giving birth to my daughter. I was in the pushing phase and I could feel her head crowning. I knew I was going to tear from the pressure she was placing on my vaginal opening. I was kneeling on the hospital bed and by this stage my midwife was using fear tactics to get me to push harder. They were concerned about my daughter’s heart rate as I was being constantly monitored due to meconium being present in my waters. I knew all of this. They had been communicating their concerns with me more and more pressingly, the longer I took to birth her. But as I felt her crown, I froze. I stopped pushing and let her slide back up the birth canal as the contraction waned instead of doing what I was told, to hold her there with my pelvic floor muscles until the next contraction came. I felt the pressure release from my vaginal opening and I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to have to wreck my vagina to get this baby out.’ I was terrified. What would happen to me? What would happen to my beautiful vagina?
As things progressed, my midwife became more aggressive with his tactics. I was turned on my back to lay down on the hospital bed, knees up and he told me that if I didn’t start pushing properly, he was going to go and get the doctor and the vacuum to suck my baby out. I really didn’t want that. So I mustered everything I had and pushed as hard as I could. And with sweet relief and a 2nd degree tear, she was out.
The doctor spent what felt like a very long time stitching me up, he was meticulous. Internal and external stitching was used to realign my vaginal opening. By the time I had the courage to touch myself, it was probably a day or two later. It felt like a completely different body part, a foreign experience that I couldn’t integrate with my own understanding of what my vagina felt like before. It also hurt like hell and I was on a constant roundabout of paracetamol and ibuprofen to numb the pain and reduce swelling.
I know all of this sounds awful. Why are you telling me this Jess? You are not making me feel any better at all. I tell you this because it is normal to feel this way. It is normal for any injured part of yourself to swell and feel painful until you start to recover. And recover you will.
My vagina took time to heal. It wasn’t ‘back to normal’ after 2 weeks or even 8. But over time it did go back to normal. Vaginas are made to birth babies. Once we let go of our personal expectations of what our bodies ‘should’ look like post-partum and just give them the grace to heal, we release the anxiety associated with this too and healing becomes an integrated process of becoming whole again instead of judging our bodies at a prenatal standard.
I also highly recommend seeing a women’s health Physio post-partum. They are an incredibly valuable resource in understanding the diversity of vaginas and how they heal after birth. If things just don’t feel right, there is professional help available.’
Words taken from 'Release The Fear Of Birth: The Mind Body Integration Method'.
If you would like some help overcoming this, or any other birth related fear, you can grab your copy here https://amzn.to/3Q8FjAr
Or if you'd like to work with me one on one, check availability here. (Author's note: this is not meant to discount the narratives of women who experienced physical birth trauma, simply to normalise the vaginal recovery period post birth.)
Comments