The book, “mom-over”, by Dana Wood, definitely caught me off guard. I have been going through a real change this past year, refining and prioritizing my life so I can move forward from a much better place. Browsing the library, I saw the book on the shelf, a front cover that shows a mother’s midriff in a white tee, holding a toddler on one hip. “Mashup of “MOM” and “MAKEOVER” minus the pressure to look like a total babe 24/7.” It looked great, maybe I’d get some tips and help move forward the physical side of my current changes.
The introduction was slightly “too cool”, using lots of buzz phrases and trying to sound amused about her own journey that was just a little too forced. She keeps mentioning that having a newborn was so hard, such a challenge for a “spoiled-rotten beauty editor such as myself”. She refers to her journey as starting out as a physical action to get her body back and changed to a more mental and internal process to get back to being herself.
And the first chapter hit me like a brick. I havent gotten completely past it yet. I’m still on page six because I keep reading the same sentences over and over again.
“Getting it together: mentally” begins with some good advice: feel free to stay in Just Get Through It mode. She refers to not second-guessing yourself about parenting but there is also an undercurrent where she refers to “useless, energy-draining, second-guessing hooey,” and I’m never quite sure of why she brushes over the birth process and it’s impact so quickly but then it becomes obvious, quickly.
She had infertility issues, IUIs led to pregnancy and she experienced the same anxiety and Internet searches that a lot of moms do these days but she’s rather self-deprecating about what she calls “cyberchondria.” She admits to being concerned about her advanced maternal age (AMA) and a recurrence of anxiety issues. All of this is just a lead up to the traumatic birth where her healthy pregnancy led to an induction for being “late”, after 18 hours, her OB-GYN chose a cesarean (her words) and then she says the words I can’t get past:
“which is a perfectly normal scenario and one we’d discussed at length in the months leading up to my delivery day” followed closely by “Although I’d attended an extremely crunchy labor-prep class, one in which “medical intervention” was positioned as the handiwork of the Devil, I tossed all that useless guilt out the hospital window and placed my trust in my doctor.”
Three days later, she had a traumatic blood transfusion and talks about how “Nowhere-anywhere-on the checklist of Horrible Things That Can Happen When You Have A Baby did I see “Get a really scary Blood Transfusion.” She dismisses it as an extremely rare complication.
Oh, and BTW, her ob-gyn made a special trip into the hospital during a blizzardy day to convince her to have the transfusion, isn’t she amazing? “Again, I chose to listen to my doctor.”
Yeah, I can’t get past this chapter, this page, those words. I’m stunned, floored. I want to pretend that I see things like this all the time and it doesn’t matter but the truth is, it DOES matter. In the first six pages of the book, she’s already bought into selling iatrogenic, doctor-caused trauma down the river because it’s normal.
This is the former editor of a woman’s magazine. She is an educated woman, a journalist and she delves no further into her own experience and shows no questioning of what happened to her. Worse, she then dismisses and even insults childbirth prep classes because of their portrayal of *shock and surprise* exactly her situation, dots which she NEVER connects.
How often do childbirth educators see this happen? Unnecessary inductions leading to cesareans that have already been prepped into the minds of mothers for non-medically indicated reasons like “advanced maternal age” which isn’t a medical condition, btw, it’s simply a statement of the obvious. They were trying to tell her that this could happen to her and she chose to blame them for their attitudes rather than recognize the symptoms in her pregnancy care that an induction and most likely, a cesarean, were in her future and then ask the questions of “why” in the face of a normal, healthy pregnancy.
And then there is the flipside of this whole “I trusted my doctor” and “why didn’t they ever mention this” discussion. If she trusted her doctor, who was leading her towards both an induction and cesarean, why doesn’t she question why her doctor didn’t discuss with her that postpartum hemorrhage is not rare in cesarean cases, in fact, a cesarean itself is an automatic postpartum hemorrhage. That’s why any heavier bleeding often requires a transfusion. Why wasn’t a transfusion something gone over in depth in the discussion of surgery, why was it dismissed as a part of her informed consent process? Or was it? Was she simply one more mom who ignored the risks because she trusted her doctor and thought it would never happen to her?
I’m interested to see more about how she describes postpartum because so far, I can see why she had a rough time. She was going through a trauma she was trying hard to dismiss as well as learning to be a mother. She evidently chose to focus on the mothering side of this, as so many mothers do. It’s instinct. Mother the baby, ignore the cost to ourselves.
What I wish she would have learned and conveyed to other mamas is obvious. What she went through ISN’T normal and shouldn’t BE normal. It’s only normal if we continue to dismiss it and not hold ourselves and our providers accountable for the choices being made. We don’t have to wallow in guilt to do that. We can take action to make change while understanding our role may have been passive but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
I’m going to keep reading. I’m going to hope that she learns, changes, grows. However, I happen to know that the introduction already told me the blunt truth: She had two cesareans in 18 months. I’m thinking that I’m going to have to put the birth stuff aside to simply read the book for those things I originally picked it up for. I’ll just pretend I’m her and toss all the birth stuff out the window as unimportant, right?
