Women With Influence

Last week the post I'd written last year, Don't Fear the C-Section re-surfaced itself on Twitter courtesy of Kirstie Allsopp. She'd come across it via a hashtag I assume, read my piece and deemed it worth a re-tweet to her 399k followers. How terribly exciting for me and very flattering of course. I've watched her television programmes for years and was quite taken aback by such a compliment. Fully aware that this would be the first and last time my blog received any level of notoriety from the outside world, I allowed myself to get a bit giddy about it, told anyone who would listen and congratulated myself with a large glass of wine at the end of the day. Oh yeah.
Then I got to thinking about why she'd done that, what was her motivation. Why does she care what I think about C-Section births? Kirstie Allsopp is typically known as a broadcaster of property programmes and has made a living selling vintage home ware and interiors. So I had a good google on her and discovered that it was a topic close to her heart, something she'd written an open letter about a few years ago. Having had two Cesarean births herself, she'd taken an exception to the "too posh too push" stigma and spoken out about how we should be better prepared for the eventuality of a C-Section birth, as now 1 in 4 results in one. Turned out she'd started a bit of a debate. With many women supporting and thanking her for speaking out and others slating her for promoting unnecessary birth intervention. She's not afraid to speak out about other women's issues either from her opinions on marriage and banning homework. Through to acknowledging your fertility window and considering putting that first before your education and career. You may or may not agree with her opinions but at least she has some and there relative and real. I found it really refreshing to see a woman with influence sparking a discussion about something important that actually relates to my life.

A History Of Anxiety

Anxious.
Its such a throw away word.
"I feel a bit anxious!" "I have anxiety about it." "I had a little panic attack."
Its a word we hear and use in casual conversation, to express our nerves or qualify our social awkwardness. Everybody feels anxious, you've just got to push through it and you'll be alright. Its such a shitty word, it lends itself to enable people  to talk about anxiety disorders as if they are not really illnesses. As if they are a self imposed state of mind for people who just need to relax a little.
I think I've lived with anxiety for the majority of my life. Its generally comes disguised as a very specific and tailored fear. Which then manifests itself deeper and further into my everyday life. Like when I was 8 years old and started refusing to go school, because I became terrified and transfixed on 'The Bad Book' being read out in school assembly. It is in truth quite a horrendous notion, that each Friday the list of 'Bad Children' was read out to the entire school and if your name was called, you had to stand up and be shamed. I hope nothing like that happens in Primary Schools these days. I spent my early twenties in a constant state of extreme anxiety. I don't mean that I was stressed or shy or a bit nervous. I mean that every day for five years, I had or fought off panic attacks. I mean that everything I did or didn't do was governed by the prison of my own mind. I built myself a tiny, little world with limits. I was quite safe there.

There's Too Much Fucking Swearing On This Blog

Its fair to say that there's a lot of swearing on this blog. None of it is particularly offensive in an aggressive sense, its all intended as tongue in cheek humour but I cannot deny that the profanity word count is pretty high. I'd never really considered it until recently, I'm pretty free and liberal with how I write, in that I write how I like and if I like it then I keep it. I don't write for other people, I write for myself and I've found it very therapeutic, cathartic even. I just start tapping away and if a 'shit' or a 'fuck' contributes to the giggles or exasperates my tone I go with it. Particularly if you're writing about something that pisses you off, I've found a couple of 'bastards' and 'arseholes' really help get your point across. Of course I'm thrilled to bits to discover that people actually read my nonsense and even if it is just mostly my Mum (hi mum!), I've enjoyed that I've made people laugh and engaged with them on a certain topic or event in my life. I've had some cracking comments and direct messages, many full of obscenities and 'Fuck Yes!' moments. I've laughed my arse off at some of the feedback I had on that tit post, apparently it is a real issue affecting mothers globally - not just me!

Mothering The Shit Out Of Life

Towards the end of last year I got pretty bogged down with all the things I had to do, the things I did do and things that were never going to get done. My mind became increasingly cluttered and stressed and over burdened by the demands of work, housework, my son, my husband and everything else that goes with it. There was always hoovering to do, always emails to respond to, always a dinner to cook. I was becoming increasingly frustrated with myself and my inability to get everything done. Everyone elses houses are always tidy, why was ours never ever tidy? We're never even here for fucks sake. At one point I was actually getting up in the middle of the night to hang up washing so it would dry in time. I would voluntarily opt out on reading my son a bedtime story, so that I could get dinner started so we wouldn't be eating at 9 o'clock again. I was giving a little of myself to everything, meaning nothing got my full attention, nothing truly ever got done or finished and well, I was fucking failing at everything.

Don't Fear the C-Section

My son was born via emergency C-Section at almost midnight on a Tuesday in August, after 48 hours of induction nonsense, not a single push or any sleep.
Sounds dramatic doesn't it EMERGENCY CESAREAN? It really wasn't, it was all pretty calm and chilled and I had plenty of time to internalise and ask questions about what was about to happen. Thank god because I had not prepared for this eventuality in the slightest.

When I was first pregnant the idea of a Cesarean terrified me, actually terrified me, I would lie awake at night worrying that I would be the 1 in 4 who would have one. I thought it would kill me, I thought it would kill my baby. I thought the anesthetic wouldn't work and I would feel them cutting into me. I thought I'd bleed to death, I thought they'd cut through my baby, I thought I'd die on the table before I got to see him.
It worried me so much that in the end I blocked it out. I mentally removed it from my brain, I didn't even consider it, for me it was not a possibility. So much so that I didn't plan for it, I didn't educate myself about it. So naive was I in fact, that I couldn't bring myself to look at my C-Section scar for a whole week afterwards because I thought it was going to be this great massive hip to hip - stapled together flesh scar that I would never quite get over.
It wasn't so much that I desperately wanted the natural birth experience, it was just my negative view of C-Sections clouding my rational thought process. I didn't know anyone who had a cesarean, I had only ever heard negative things about them, I had only ever been told  'we hope that doesn't happen' or 'but don't worry that is very unlikely'.
It is not something that was ever discussed with me with my midwife and it was only briefly touched upon in the NHS antenatal classes. Sure we all spent an hour on floor doing a giant 'natural birth' process diagram/ jigsaw thing giving me all the information I already knew from basic GCSE biology and BabyCentre.com. But what about the other stuff? What about the less common and the less ideal? I'm not saying they should scare expectant mothers with horror birth stories but lets get real here, C-Sections are a reasonably common occurrence and they should try to prepare us for that eventuality.

I, myself with no birthing experience had a negative and prejudice opinion of C-sections - how did I get that opinion? I think from the media and sadly also from my peers.

Telling The World To Go Suck It

I've changed alot recently, maybe I've had an epiphany, maybe I'm just too tired to care what people think. Or maybe I'm en route to some kind of Michael Douglas-Falling Down type break down, ah well who knows?
Anyway, the point is whatever the reason may be, I've just got a bit braver, I just give less of a shit.
Life is just better when you don't determine your choices based on the perceived reactions of others.
I realised this the other day when I shocked myself by shouting at an old lady in Aldi. Don't worry she totally deserved it, she was incredibly rude to me for no reason and I only gave her back what she gave me. She should think twice before targeting a harassed working mother who is due her period.

Truthfully, I am in no way a confrontational person. I hate conflict and I only enjoy arguing with my husband but I've reached a stage now where I might not actually tolerate other people's bad behavior and the world is just going to have to suck it.