I’m excited to find your piece and read this book. I have 2 kids, and my first was an unexpected C-Section. The recovery from the surgery was brutal! It was so great that I had my mother staying with me, but then she wasn’t available for my second labor and delivery. I fought so hard for VBAC and we hired a Doula… All went well, and I feel very lucky and grateful it did. This is such an important subject. There is not enough education before labor and delivery about what happens when things don’t go as planned.
It is truly wild how unprepared we are. Rachel's story is incredibly scary but her book is phenomenal and so well-researched. Thank you so much for the note. I'm so glad you liked the interview and hope you love the book as well.
Kate - so good to find you on here. Substack was feeling a bit mysterious and now that I finally started posting myself and feeling my way around I absolutely LOVE IT! What an important conversation you are having here. So good to tie these various issues together and recognize they fall under the umbrella of reproductive justice. I guess I wish I'd known a bit more about being induced as it happened so suddenly - "Your water broke too long ago" and then seven hours of miserable contractions later "If you want an epidural, it has to be now!" How to think with that pain and under that pressure. Knowing a bit more about that timeline would have been helpful, but are there just so many eventualities possible that one would have to go into an in-depth study to cover all of them? Yet more of the invisible labor of motherhood. Thank you for giving space for this convo.
Thank you so much! I agree - my oldest child is now ten and I still learn more every day about the birth experience that I didn't know before he was born. I wish all these conversations were more common knowledge in our twenties so people have a better understanding of what to expect. I absolutely went into it very 'best-case scenario' and it's really shocking how different it is from what we are often told.
I’m excited to find your piece and read this book. I have 2 kids, and my first was an unexpected C-Section. The recovery from the surgery was brutal! It was so great that I had my mother staying with me, but then she wasn’t available for my second labor and delivery. I fought so hard for VBAC and we hired a Doula… All went well, and I feel very lucky and grateful it did. This is such an important subject. There is not enough education before labor and delivery about what happens when things don’t go as planned.
It is truly wild how unprepared we are. Rachel's story is incredibly scary but her book is phenomenal and so well-researched. Thank you so much for the note. I'm so glad you liked the interview and hope you love the book as well.
Kate - so good to find you on here. Substack was feeling a bit mysterious and now that I finally started posting myself and feeling my way around I absolutely LOVE IT! What an important conversation you are having here. So good to tie these various issues together and recognize they fall under the umbrella of reproductive justice. I guess I wish I'd known a bit more about being induced as it happened so suddenly - "Your water broke too long ago" and then seven hours of miserable contractions later "If you want an epidural, it has to be now!" How to think with that pain and under that pressure. Knowing a bit more about that timeline would have been helpful, but are there just so many eventualities possible that one would have to go into an in-depth study to cover all of them? Yet more of the invisible labor of motherhood. Thank you for giving space for this convo.
Thank you so much! I agree - my oldest child is now ten and I still learn more every day about the birth experience that I didn't know before he was born. I wish all these conversations were more common knowledge in our twenties so people have a better understanding of what to expect. I absolutely went into it very 'best-case scenario' and it's really shocking how different it is from what we are often told.