I’ve always found my friend Sarah’s blog enjoyable, but I thought that her post today was especially good. Read about how she labored at home for 3 days with her baby, then finally made the decision to transfer to the hospital.
What I found so refreshing about this blog post was her absolute honesty. It was helpful for me, as well, to realize the immense amount of guilt and shame associated with “failing” at an all natural birth. I’ve always struggled with empathy in every area of my life– I try, but I’m just really bad at it, turns out.
Sarah’s post helped me to understand the other side of things so that I can avoid hurting feelings. Out of all my friends who’ve had babies, 90% of them (including me) had a ROUGH labor with their first baby. Around half of those ended up in the hospital with an epidural, despite the fact that they took tons of measures to avoid it. By the grace of God, I made it through my 22+ hour labor without transferring or needing drugs (although G did come out BACK OF HIS NECK first! Yikes!). But it’s safe to say that I could use some help with empathy in this area.
Also, she was RIGHT ON with how her struggles with breastfeeding changed her outlook towards mothers who use formula. My first two weeks breastfeeding were literal hell-on-earth, full of tons of cussing and “WHY GOD, WHY??”. Then, when he was 10 months old, I had to use two months worth of formula on him because I got pregnant again. I’m so grateful that my experience with Anthony has been the complete opposite, but I’m also glad that it wasn’t my FIRST experience, or else I wouldn’t be able to understand the other side of it. If feeding Anthony had been my first experience with breastfeeding, I’d have probably put my foot in my mouth about a dozen times, then fallen flat on my face when I struggled the next time around.
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sarah marie says
Thanks so much, Kelly… I’m glad you enjoyed the post. I didn’t know your sister was nicknamed Nell, too!
Something I find myself thinking a lot about these days is how to raise children to ‘make (good) judgments’ without ‘being judgmental.’ It seems like such a fine line! It’s hard when it takes difficult experiences to learn empathy, but, like I said in my post, I think I may have been saved from becoming a natural birth zealot who might have potentially offended or hurt others by my strong beliefs. So, strong beliefs, rightly placed, are good, but…. life is full of gray areas, not just black and whites. I guess I just wonder how best to teach my daughter right from wrong, and black and whites where they exist, while still teaching her empathy and love.
Or I guess, as a certain professor we both know always said, “People are more important than ideas.”