One Hell of a Ride
Photograph by Julia Lorraine @julialorrainepeterson
Haley Shevener, CSCS, RKC2, USAW, FRCms, ACSM-CPT, Pre/Postnatal Fitness Specialist and Co-Founder of PopUplift, @popuplift
Five years ago, I walked into the birthing center of a hospital (that has since been torn down) and built walls with rigid rules of how I did - and didn’t - want to bring my son into the world. I believed in the magic and power of my body. I believed in my control. And then, my birth experience felt radically different than I had “planned”. And then, I eventually wound up with pelvic organ prolapse (POP).
The dissonance between my experience and the experience I had “prepared” for felt like failure versus triumph. Soon after that, the diagnosis of POP felt like a threat to my belief in the magic and power of my body (and beyond it, really) - a threat for which I had no compelling response, conceding that my experience surely negated any faith and hope I had in myself or this process.
I spent a long time angrily wondering why no one told me, why I hadn’t known. This is an anger that many share and its presence is valid and justified. Without education, our ability to make informed decisions is nullified. For me, though, this anger served as a way to place blame, and that blame existed so that I didn’t have to face the lesson that birth and life and bodies are unpredictable and beyond control sometimes. If I could place blame, I could find control and certainty - the things I wanted most from the beginning.
Mixed in with the anger, I’m choosing to learn that my body can be magical and powerful and beyond my control and chaotic. I’m choosing to find comfort in the idea that birth affects more than the new life it creates and that we don’t always get to decide the ways in which that might occur.
Yes, I continue to advocate for better education, more research, more management options, more robust support, informed consent. But this isn’t the biggest story that was born that day for me.