The Return of Maternity Matters

January 8, 2015 JayneLeave a comment

When I started blogging in the Autumn of 2010, a large part of my need to get my thoughts out of my head was because of the birth trauma I’d suffered whilst having Sausage in August 2008. Skip forward two years and I’d joined forces with Susanne from Ghostwriter Mummy, someone I’d only ever communicated with online, but who understood me better than some people I’d known my whole life because she’d been through a traumatic birth of her own.

You don’t want to believe that trauma, depression and PTSD will be something that defines you for the rest of your life but, in my experience, it’s something that does stay with you forever – you just learn how to carry it more comfortably, over time, like a heavy bag with a rubbish handle. And it’s out of this shared experience that Susanne and I started Maternity Matters, a place for us and anyone else to tell their stories, find some support and to join together in improving knowledge and care for families who’ve suffered a trauma.

Over the past three years we’ve shared some incredible accounts of women of all ages and all walks of life, as well as collating news regarding maternity care in the UK, although life and babies (two more for Susanne and one more for me, bringing our collective total to six!) meant that the site has gone unloved for a while…until NOW! We’re hoping to bring Maternity Matters back to life and get it back on track. Susanne and I have a lot of new experiences to write about and we’re hoping that we’ll have lots of contributions from fellow bloggers and parents who want to share their stories.

In the meantime, Susanne and I will be launching the #MaternityMatters linky, starting tomorrow, for you to link up any article, blog post or story relating to:

fertility

conception

pregnancy and pregnancy related conditions/ complications

childbirth – of all kinds

breast/bottle feeding

postnatal experiences

parenting a baby

pregnancy/baby loss

The linky will go live every other Friday and we’d love to get as many of you as possible linking up with ANYTHING maternity-related. Also, if you’d like to contribute to Maternity Matters, please email jayne@maternitymatters.net with your ideas.

Baby · Birth · C-Section · cesarian · Family · Maternity · Maternity Matters · Parenting · Personal

A Healing Birth

March 13, 2014 Jayne9 Comments

If you’ve read Sausage’s birth story before, you’ll know that it didn’t go at all to plan. The whole thing was a disaster, right up until the surgeon pulled her from my body in under a minute, saving her life and getting her into the world safely. It’s taken five years to consider the prospect of doing it all again, but as you’ll know if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, my second daughter was delivered just over three weeks ago.

I had to be in hospital for two and a half days before I gave birth as I was only 36+6 weeks gone and had to have steroid injections to ensure that the baby’s lungs were properly developed. However, steroids can play havoc with blood sugar and being diabetic already meant that I needed to be closely monitored to ensure that I didn’t go too low or too high, as well as being on a constant insulin drip. I had to take my blood sugar, via finger prick test, every hour for the entire duration of my hospital stay, which sucked. The first night I was there, I managed a total of 45 minutes sleep, and the second night about 2 hours sleep.

By Monday morning, I was SO ready for my c-section to happen, despite being nervous about the whole thing, and luckily I didn’t have long to wait. Husband arrived before 9am and soon, the scrub nurse was ushering him off to get into scrubs and wellies (yes, seriously, wellies! Although, I must say, he looked rather tasty in scrubs!).

Walking into the operating theatre felt odd – last time, I’d been shoved through on a gurney and put to sleep in the space of a few seconds. Now, I was chatting and laughing with the theatre staff and being put at ease by Husband. The spinal was the part I was dreading the most, but I had two anaesthetists in the room, both of whom were very reassuring and kind, and not only was it over in no time, but it was SO much less painful than I expected it to be. Don’t get me wrong, feeling someone sticking a needle into my spine was slightly odd, but it was totally manageable.

Once they were sure that the spinal had worked, the screen was put up and the operation began. I could feel lots of pulling and moving around, but no pain – all of it was very odd! At one point, Husband stood and looked over the top of the screen, just in time to see the baby being pulled out of my tummy! She’d been very low down and had wedged herself in with one arm above her head, so the surgeon had to use one side of a set of forceps like a spoon to help him to scoop her out.

Between the moment she was pulled out of my body and the first time I heard her cry, it felt like all of the air had been sucked out of the room. The trauma of Sausage’s birth hung over me like the blade of an axe, but hearing her let out a cry made the horrible memories evaporate. I’ll admit, I cried right along with my newborn daughter, tears of relief and love pouring out of me. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude to both the team who’d done my c-section, and the surgeon who’d managed to deliver Sausage all those years ago.

It had all gone to plan and my newborn daughter had been delivered safely.

After the baby was out, the surgeon took a long time sewing me back up and it really shows – my scar is almost invisible! One of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had was as the team were prepping me to take me to recovery; out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the nurses move something across the bed – it was only when I looked down that I realised the ‘something’ she’d moved had been my right leg, but I had no sensation in it at all!

Despite three miserable days spent hooked up to a drip, despite my tiredness, my bruised coccyx from sitting in a bed the whole time, despite being away from Sausage and Husband and despite all of my fears, I felt utterly blissful in the hours after the birth. It was such a different experience from my first c-section and I really felt like it had gone a long way to repairing some of the damage done to my heart and mind. Being conscious and hearing my baby’s first cry was something I’ll never forget.

We were home within a day and a half and family life has steadily been getting back to some semblance of normality. We’ve discovered that the baby loves to be swaddled, wrapped like a burrito, leading to the name she’ll be known as here on the blog…Burrito Baby, or BB!

I’ve got lots more to tell you all about the first three weeks of BB’s life, so keep your eyes peeled for more posts. Also, there’s still time to nominate Mum’s the Word for Best Pregnancy Blog in the MAD blog awards, if you feel like doing us a favour…

Family · Maternity · Maternity Matters · Mental Health · Politics · Pregnancy

Sometimes, Breast Is NOT Always Best

November 13, 2013 Jayne5 Comments

I promised myself I wasn’t going to chime in on this debate, it’s one of those subjects on which people will never agree and I completely respect the right of any woman to make the decision she wants to make in regards her own body and that of her baby. However, this latest piece of news about breastfeeding is leaving me feeling really upset. In case you haven’t heard, the Government has put forward a proposal to offer mothers who choose to breastfeed their babies a £200 shop voucher as a reward.

According to the BBC: “The pilot scheme is being targeted at deprived areas of South Yorkshire and Derbyshire and funded through a collaboration between government and the medical research sector. A third area is expected soon with the plan to trial it on 130 women who have babies from now until March. If it proves successful, a nationwide pilot could be rolled out next year.”

While I don’t debate that helping women who want to breastfeed is a positive thing, this scheme couldn’t be any less helpful to women who are not in a position to be able to breastfeed. Further to this, there needs to be a more general acknowledgement that being ‘physically unable’ to breastfeed isn’t the only valid reason for women to choose not to do it. What about those women for whom there’s a psychological issue? Is it fair to further add to the stigma for them?

The main reason I wasn’t going to comment on this issue was because of my own relationship with breastfeeding. As soon as I fell pregnant with Sausage, I knew that I would be unable to do it. The thought of breastfeeding is literally repellent to me; the thought of a child latched on to my nipple makes me feel physically nauseous (for reasons which are real and genuine, but I’m not going to go into here) and while some women may consider it selfish of me to not try and overcome these issues and feed my child, for me it was easier to reduce that pressure and give my child adequate nutrition by other means, enabling me to concentrate on being the best mother that I could be.

Am I jealous of earth-mother types who have no problem breastfeeding? Well, yes, I suppose I am, but only because they’re viewed as better mothers than me. As it turns out, because Sausage was in the NICU and I didn’t get to hold her until she was a week old, I never produced any milk at all, not even a slight leakage, so when people ask about feeding, this is the part I tell them, so worried I am about the stigma of bottle feeding by choice. But, consider this:

I’ve never smacked my child.

She’s never stayed with anyone other than Husband and I overnight and we rarely go out as a couple and leave her with anyone else.

She’s developmentally advanced for her age.

She’s kind, polite, well spoken and deeply considerate of others.

Do I deserve vouchers for this? Is none of this on-par in terms of importance with how I chose to nourish her as a baby? Does the person that we’ve raised not have more of an impact on society than whether she was fed from a bottle?

Whilst talking about this on Twitter yesterday, the Tots100 Twitter team asked:

In short, my answer to this is no, you can’t please everyone all the time, but I’m not sure if this scheme does represent the many OR the few in either case. I receive a whole load of press releases each day and this morning alone, I’ve received emails with the following titles:

“Newly-Qualified Student Midwives Cannot Find Jobs”

“Pay Freeze Forces Nurses To Take On Extra Shifts”

“Maternal Mental Health Alliance Launches Innovative Guidance About Specialist Mental Health Midwives”

I’ve blogged before about the fact that I’m a huge fan of the NHS, but surely these three short sentences illustrate perfectly that there are SO many more valuable areas in which money could be spent? I understand that it’s NHS policy to encourage breast above bottle, but surely improving care and empowering women by helping them to have happy births is a far more sensible distribution of resources? As a mother who dealt with more than her share of pregnancy and post-natal issues, I can wholeheartedly say that a very close second, in terms of importance, to the health of the child is the mental health and happiness of the mother and pressurising women with financial incentives is just cruel.

In typical Tory fashion, the areas which have been chosen to pilot this scheme are ‘deprived’, which means that the Government is basically making new mothers jump through hoops for a small financial gain. Does that not seem rather distasteful to you? What of those women who have genuine issues with breastfeeding, but feel unable to turn down the financial incentive because of their circumstances? One of the biggest factors in causing post-natal depression is the feeling of loss of control at some point during the pregnancy or birthing process, so by forcing women to make decisions which make them uncomfortable, because they simply cannot say no to the cash, makes me genuinely concerned about the potential for a huge rise in cases on PND in the UK.

And more to the point, what right do these people have to try and regulate our breasts? There are FAR bigger issues to deal with than this and encroaching on women’s freedom like this is disgusting. But I’m not at all surprised – it’s Conservative mandate to systematically dismantle and divide, starting with the poor.

I guess we should have all seen this coming, really.

Maternity Matters · Parenting · Personal

We’re Fine.

July 18, 2011January 2, 2014 Jayne3 Comments

Through my work with Maternity Matters and involvement with the Birth Trauma Association, I read a lot of stuff by women who’ve suffered similar trauma and disappointment to what my family went through when Sausage was born. I read about people who are let down by a lack of care, poor facilities and a health service which treats them like a number. I talk to people who feel alone, like no-one understands their feelings and thoughts and I do my best to let them know that I know exactly how they feel. I know Susanne won’t mind me saying that she does the same and I’ve seen her counselling others through their heartache on many an occassion.

It’s Sausage’s 3rd birthday in just under three weeks and I have something that I wanted to share with anyone who may read this. It’s really important that I get this out there and I genuinely hope that people read this and are comforted by my words.The thing I need to say is this:

We’re okay.

Three years ago, I thought my heart would never stop hurting. I thought I’d be consumed by my rage, feeling at times that I fully understood spontaneous combustion, convinced that it happened to people who spent their waking hours burning with white-hot rage. I thought that every time I looked at my daughter I’d see the tubes and wires that covered her the first time I laid eyes on her. I thought I’d never be the same again.

But we’re okay.

Yes, I’m still angry, I still have huge chunks of my memory missing, I probably won’t ever be the same again in many ways. But I don’t want to be. I wouldn’t wipe my memory of all of the bad things that happened because I’d be doing my daughter a huge disservice if I did. I need to remember. But all of that doesn’t detract from the fact that we’re fine. That doesn’t give credence to the insensitive morons who say that we should just be grateful that our children have turned out okay. I just hope I can give some of you some hope, when it feels as though the black cloud will never clear.You need to know that it’s OKAY to feel this way.

One of the things that I was adamant about in my birth plan was that I wanted to have skin-to-skin contact with my daughter when she was born. Because I was unconscious and she was so poorly, this wasn’t even vaguely an option, but what I need you to know is that it hasn’t affected our relationship one iota. We’re as close and two human beings could possibly be, despite the fact that I couldn’t hold her until her 7th day of life, so anyone who worries that a lack of contact early on will have a detrimental effect on your relationship needs to try to remember this.

I’m not trying to preach and I’m certainly not trying to demean or belittle the feeling of anyone who is suffering the effects of a traumatic experience. I’m just hoping that my experience can help others and let you know that you will be okay. It may never go away completely, but it won’t always be as fresh and painful as it is now.

It may be a cliché, but time really is a great healer.

Maternity Matters

Maternity Matters Newsletter

April 10, 2011January 2, 2014 JayneLeave a comment

It’s been a week since Susanne and I launched Maternity Matters and I don’t think we could have asked for a better response than the one we’ve had. We’re overwhelmed with the comments, tweets and messages that we’ve had from the wonderful community of bloggers, parents and Twitter friends that have been a part of all of this, and we’d like to say a massive thank you to all of you. We couldn’t have started without you, and we hope that you’ll continue to support and contribute to Maternity Matters. We really feel as though we’ve started something important and special.

Launch day was a day of news, on Saturday we read about how Susanne cannot watch One Born Every Minute, and we want to follow that up by planning a 4OD viewing of an episode, alongside a Twitter party for anyone who’d like to join in, in the hope that we can support and encourage each other to face our fears. She also wrote about how Motherhood has changed her, whilst I talked about my scars, both physical and emotional. I published my birth story for the first time ever, and was truly moved by what you all had to say. We also introduced The Birth Trauma Association, an organisation that help to spark the idea for this site, and for who we hope to do some fundraising in the future.

Over the course of the week, we’ve heard the amazing Mummy Beadzoid tell us her extremely emotional and traumatic story about the premature birth of her child, read about the effects that birth can have on Fathers, learned about effective methods of holistic therapy in the form of EFT, and about the incredible efforts of George and Tim Sexton, the brothers who are planning to cycle 1700km across Europe to raise money for SANDS, as well as all of the other maternity news.

We hope that week two is as successful as the first, we hope you continue to read and find Maternity Matters informative, but most of all we hope we can help you, in ways that we ourselves were not.

If you’d like to contribute to Maternity Matters, please email Susanne@maternitymatters.net. For any technical questions about advertising, badges or hosting a Maternity Matters linky on your own blog, please email Jayne@maternitymatters.net

Thanks again, and take care.