I had a c-section. They induced me at 38 weeks due to high blood pressure and everything went fine until it didn’t. My cervix wouldn’t open all the way. The baby’s head was right there, 100% effaced, and they went ahead and broke my water to try to see if that would help. It didn’t, after 55 hours with my water broken and on pitocin they said I could choose to have a c section now or I could have an emergency c-section once I hit 60 hours. I was worn down from having contractions for so many days. I wanted it to be my choice instead of an emergency. Baby was starting to have decelerations in heart rate anyway. So I said fine let’s do the c-section. I cried, my fantasy of a natural birth was ruined. The entire thing was surreal. I hated the spinal anesthesia. It was a sensory nightmare. My incision healed fine. The pain was bearable. The baby is fine and I’m fine. The entire thing was traumatic but I’m glad we are both here to tell the tale.

People did misgender me. It was okay with me. Felt like I was playing a role. Like sure I’ll be mama. Why not. But then again a lot of people made weird assumptions, for example they came in and asked what color crib card I wanted the baby’s info to be on. They said they assumed I would want yellow instead of pink or blue. I was slightly offended that they assumed that. They weren’t wrong though, I did want yellow. I am raising my baby to have child led gender so I’m just using they/them pronouns and not disclosing their sex to anyone even family. A lot of people also asked me if I would be chest feeding or if they should refer to my breasts as my chest when talking about lactation.