I experienced a traumatic birth with my first baby which included obstetric violence. This is actually something I shared in (what turned out to be) an incredibly beautiful and cathartic birth podcast (listen here!), so I suppose however many people listened to that podcast know I experienced obstetric violence, birth trauma, and postpartum depression, but I don’t think many people outside of maybe my husband, myself, and a few close friends know just how much I’ve worked on myself and changed my path because of this.
After my birth, I went back to therapy, and it was somehow even harder this second time. At the time, I thought it was largely sleep deprivation driving my moods, but after I had my second child, I realized that I can cope just fine with sleep deprivation if my life isn’t in a tailspin. Through that therapy I started looking around my life and noticing things that were toxic: parts of my husband’s work environment, parts of my work environment, our unhealthy habits, and other things. We decided to make a big change, and we landed in the same town as my parents for what we thought wouldn’t be too long, just long enough to recover and figure out the next step. Then, the pandemic hit, we bought a house, had some other really hard, frankly shitty things go down, and that’s when the real work began. It sort of all rolled into one slow-motion undoing of our lives during which time I started doing more art while deeply examining patterns I’d experienced. Some of this undoing is documented here in this blog, if you go back to the first months of it. Then I just stopped blogging. That’s when this becoming that I’m now in the middle of started.
I say becoming because I’m still letting what happens next be as organic as it can be. And because I still don’t know what the finished form will look like. I want to hold space for others. I want to make and teach and participate in good art.1 But I can’t control this process any more than I could control that birth, but I can go through it with an openness and knowledge that I can weather what comes up next. I didn’t have that in my first birth. I didn’t trust myself even as that voice inside screamed as loud as she could. I didn’t have a team around me I could trust, as it turned out. But I listen to myself now and I have an amazing team behind me now. When I went into labor with my second child, the experience was so, so different. My husband and I worked together and we were an active part of the process. I made my own choices and felt empowered. We joked the night before that I’d better bounce BIG on the birth ball, because the midwives I wanted to see were on call over the next few days, so let’s get moving. It worked! As my daughter liberated herself from my body, I fell back on the bed, exhausted and aware and PRESENT in a way I wasn’t the first time. And I truly feel like I’m living my life in that way now, too.
Actually an Artist 
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