The Birth You Didn’t Have

The conversation almost never starts with the birth. It starts with the baby’s sleep, with whether the stitches are supposed to still feel like that at eleven weeks, and then … That they did not hold her for the first forty minutes. That the room filled with people and nobody said what for. That they had pictured the day one way and it went another way entirely. The correction usually comes from the same person, in the same breath: he’s healthy, that’s the part that matters, and anyway it was ages ago now.

Yes. And.

What people are actually grieving

The lists clients give me are never about the outcome. They are about the parts of the day they had no hand in. A consent form signed between contractions. A partner sent out to wait somewhere and not told when to come back. Being moved down a corridor without being told where the corridor went. A phrase a stranger said over their body, in the third person, while they lay there listening to it. The lights. The forty minutes.

Some of it is grief for the version that did not happen, the labour they had read about and prepared for, the tub, the playlist, the first hour skin to skin that turned into a recovery room and a nurse carrying the baby in later, already wiped and wrapped by someone else. A planned caesarean has this too, and so does a caesarean somebody asked for themselves and then felt strange about having asked for. Feelings do not check whether the decision was ours.

The healthy baby argument

Healthy baby, healthy mum is a statement about medical results, and it gets presented as though it were a statement about feelings. The people who say it have usually asked how the birth went, heard the first thirty seconds of the answer, watched something cross the other person’s face, and reached for the nearest sentence that would close the conversation. It works. The conversation closes.

People apologize to me for bringing this up when the baby is eighteen months old, on the theory that there was a window for it and they have missed it.

Do not apologize, know that your story deserves to be heard and I want to hear it from you.

Your file is yours, and asking for it is free

You can request your own hospital record in Quebec. The request goes in writing to the person responsible for access to information at the establishment where you gave birth, and hospitals keep the form on their medical archives page. At the MUHC each site has its own archives office and its own extension, so a Royal Victoria birth and a Montreal General birth are two different phone numbers. The establishment has 30 days to answer.

What comes back is nursing notes with times against them, the operative report if there was a caesarean, medication times, who was in the room and when they arrived. It is written for other clinicians and it reads like a machine log. Most people open it alone at eleven at night, which is its own experience. The timeline often can answer the question that was bothering them, which is nearly always how long something went on for or who made the call.

The appointment nobody offers

Midwifery clients get postnatal follow-up to six weeks, and going over the birth is part of that care.

After a hospital birth you can phone the obstetrics clinic and ask for a follow-up appointment with the doctor who was there, to go through the file with them. Some will book it. Nothing advertises that this is possible, and asking for it sounds more demanding than it turns out to be.

If what is sitting badly is not the medicine but the conduct, consent nobody took, being discussed rather than spoken to, being left alone for a stretch that frightened you, every establishment has a commissaire aux plaintes et à la qualité des services. They have 45 days to come back to you. It is free, it is not a lawsuit, and no lawyer is involved. The CAAP centres will help you write it at no charge, at 1-877-767-2277. What arrives at the end is a written finding and sometimes a recommendation to the institution.

When it is more than sadness

Grief about a birth looks like sadness and anger and going over it. Something else is going on when the day replays without being invited, when you cannot drive past the hospital, when you avoid anyone who is pregnant, when sleep goes even on the nights the baby sleeps, when you flinch at a sound from that room. If this sounds familiar, counselling services are available:

Info-Social answers at 811, free, confidential, staffed by psychosocial workers, 24 hours a day. Psychology through the public network is free and the wait is … the wait.

Privately, the Ordre des psychologues puts a 50-minute session between $120 and $180, and group insurance usually covers part of that, often with an annual ceiling that arrives sooner than people expect.

Perinatal resource centres across the province, Montreal and Laval included, run peer support groups for exactly this. They are not therapy. They are a room with other people who also have a story about a day.

Postpartum doulas are there to listen, too, though we cannot offer medical or therapy support – we can really Listen.