The dear tokens of His Passion
Operating rooms, with their bright, glaring, lifeless lights are cold in order to create a hostile environment for any living bacteria. When I was wheeled into that room with my second child still in my belly I was barely conscious after laboring for 38 hours. “I think something is wrong. It’s time to think about a c-section.” I didn’t want to give up, but I was so tired. So so tired. I knew my midwife would only propose a c-section as a last resort. It was time. During labor I’d been given an epidural, and it hadn’t totally taken. The right side of my body was numb, but I had complete movement and feeling on the left side. I didn’t mind feeling part of my body when I was in labor, but now that we were in surgery the anesthesiologist looked me right in the eyes and said “I have one last thing I can try. If this doesn’t work, you’re going to feel it. You’re going to tell me that you’re feeling it because it will hurt. I’m going to give you a drug that will make you forget it all, but you’re going to feel it. This will be traumatic for your husband because you’ll be crying out in pain, but you won’t remember it.”
Giving my body over to a doctor to cut open terrified me on many levels. Being able to have full power over my body has always been important to me. I survived sexual abuse as a 3 year old, and that trauma imprinted itself into my body’s core functions. When I don’t have control over my body, panic ensues. The thought of laying splayed open on an operating table struck fear in my heart. Even today, after having undergone three c-sections, it still strikes fear in my heart.
Ever since I was a little girl I’d dreamed about pushing a baby out. As the youngest of nine children I’d watched all of my sisters and sister in-laws go through pregnancy and medication free birth. My mother would regale us with the birth stories of each grandchild and the miraculous moment when they burst into the world. I grew up knowing that I wanted to be a mother and that I wanted to birth my babies free of medical interventions. To me childbirth was a grueling coming of age that a mother came out of as a strong and capable woman, full of power. Little did I know that my story would be much different than what I’d dreamt of. I have three beautiful children, all born by c-section.
My first baby was breech. To deliver him the way I’d envisioned I tried everything I could: handstands in the pool, drinking gallons of water to ensure he had enough fluid to be able to flip, acupuncture, burning mugwort near my toes, hanging upside down from my couch, doing an ECV (where a doctor tries to manually flip the baby from the outside), driving an hour to a doctor who knew how to deliver babies in the breech presentation. At 39 weeks of pregnancy, my amniotic fluid dropped to a dangerous level, and we needed to deliver the baby immediately. The doctor was willing to let me try to labor. I knew the risks of delivering a breech baby, and once his heart rate started to rise I knew the safest thing for him was a c-section. When it was time, they sat me down on the operating table and had me bend forward. I had to hold completely still while they injected fluid into my spine. Soon my legs got warm and then went completely numb. I had no control, and my brain frantically tried to make sense of the fact that I had no power to move my legs. I waited. I waited and waited. I heard the quiet hum of the doctor and nurses communicating and the beeping of the monitors. The bright lights stared down at me. My arms were stretched out. Like Christ on the cross. We sang:
In the Lord I'll be ever thankful,
In the Lord I'll rejoice.
Look to God, do not be afraid,
Lift up your voices, the Lord is near.
Christ entered the moment. And then I heard his first breath, and with that faint sound, life burst into the cold, sterile room, and all of the darkness scattered.
When I was pregnant with my second son I found out I’d lost all my amniotic fluid at 36 weeks. I was induced for a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean). While grappling with the fact that the doctors told me that my baby boy might very well need to be in the NICU for up to a month I faced a hellish manual induction. Because of the urgency of the situation and the importance of making sure that the baby was handling labor well, my midwife told me that I needed to have internal monitors. I agreed not really knowing what I was agreeing to. Once the monitors were in place and left dangling from my body, they brought up all too familiar feelings of violation and abuse I had suffered as a child. In those dark moments it was as if my body said simply and succinctly, “I will not be forced into this.” After 38 hours of trying to coax my body into labor my placenta separated from my uterus. We needed to go to the operating room. When the anesthesiologist realized that the epidural wasn’t working and tried explaining the alternate option, I was hardly able to keep my eyes open. Thankfully the epidural kicked in just as they began cutting into me and I didn’t feel anything. There were no hymns this time. Just trying to stay awake to meet my baby.
In the difficult weeks following Peter’s birth I tried to find Christ in those dark moments. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened. To cope, I started looking towards my next birth. I wanted a do-over. I wanted to try again. I knew that if I just had one more chance I could push a baby out instead of having a doctor pry him from my womb.
While I was pregnant with our third baby, I tried to hold the birth as loosely as I could. I knew that the most important thing to me was having a healthy baby, but I also knew that I wanted to do all I could to avoid another cesarean. As her due date approached I prayed daily for God to show me the way. During my other births there came a moment when it became clear what needed to happen to have a healthy baby. I desperately wanted the same clarity this time so that I could have peace about whatever happened. To our surprise, there were no surprises this time around. There was no low amniotic fluid, no fast heart beats, just a perfectly healthy, happy and head down baby. We found a provider who would let us try for a VBA2C (a rare find in the medical world). She even let me go until 40 weeks to see if my body would kick into labor on its own. The incision from the previous c-sections began to hurt more and more so I decided we’d better induce labor to avoid a rupture.
Once again, my body wouldn’t be coerced into labor and we were at a stand still after 18 hours of trying. We reached the point where we either needed to stop the labor and try again the next day, or we needed to opt for a cesarean. The doctor said we had an hour to decide. In the hour between 11pm and midnight we prayed. We waited. We kept waiting. Nothing came. No answer. No clarity. The baby wasn't in danger– why would I choose a cesarean? And then I spoke, “Let’s do a c-section. Let’s meet our baby in the morning.” Peace washed over me and I knew it was the right choice, but I was left wanting to hear God’s voice more clearly.
Right before leaving for the OR the surgeon sat down with me and made sure I knew that after a third c-section there was no chance of ever trying for a VBAC again. I thanked her for making it clear, and tried to put it out of my mind. During the surgery my midwife told me that my uterus was paper thin. They could see my baby’s face through it. And her cord was tied in a complete knot. I’d made the right choice: labor could have ended tragically for me or my daughter.
Now that it’s been seven months since that birth it feels like a shadow has been cast over my life. I have lost any chance I’ll ever have to push a baby out. Birth is more than a moment in time for me. It is something I’ve envisioned, fantasized about in great detail: that final push when pain becomes life. An act integral to the human race, it was something Jesus’ own mother endured. If I can't do it, my life feels less valid. My child’s life feels less valid. Like somehow they shouldn’t be here because if a doctor hadn’t intervened, neither of us would have made it. If I could birth a baby without the help of a doctor, then maybe I could have been more one with God. Maybe it would have been my chance to heal from years and years of traumatic moments of not having control over my body; from the abuse as a child, to the c-sections, to the fear of driving I’ve developed after suffering postpartum vertigo. In my mind, having a vaginal birth was the path to healing and redemption, to empowerment and wholeness, and now that path has been firmly closed.
Over these past months I have asked myself, how do I walk forward when my body has let me down so completely? The week after my third c-section I looked in the mirror. My arms were battered from the twelve attempts it took to get an IV into them. My incision was bruised and raw. My breasts were stretched and swollen with food for my baby. My body, broken. But I have seen goodness in the suffering. I let myself fall in love with my daughter. I watched my two boys gaze in wonder at their little sister. I am giving my children a safe home. I let myself cry tears of joy mixed with tears of pain when one of my dearest friends birthed her fifth child without complications. I let myself be. I walked forward in the path laid before me. I drove even though I had panic attacks in the car. I asked for healing. I went to church even when it wasn’t easy because of anxiety. I taught my children their school lessons even though I doubted myself at every turn. And it is in living life that I finally heard his voice. Last week we sang this verse from Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending at church:
Those dear tokens of his passion
still his dazzling body bears,
cause of endless exultation
to his ransomed worshipers.
With what rapture, with what rapture, with what rapture,
gaze we on those glorious scars!
Suddenly the significance of Christ still bearing his scars after his resurrection opened a floodgate in my soul. He still has his scars. He still has his scars. In the next life, when I am resurrected, I will still have the scars from my c-sections. These scars matter. In them is bound up all of the brokenness of being a human, and they show how God entered into that condition through his death and resurrection. Jesus was fully human, and his life did not play out the way that humanity thought a king’s life should. I had a plan for how I thought God’s healing would play out in my life, but it is not happening the way I thought it would. I had been striving my whole life to heal through my own efforts. Just as Christ’s disciples didn’t recognize him at first because they were looking for something different, I had been looking in all the wrong places for my own healing. I thought it was something I could do myself, but really it was in all the experiences I was trying to avoid that a path to healing was being forged already. We often expect to find healing in beautiful moments of redemption when in fact it is the broken moments of suffering where Christ is ever present and redeeming all that was lost.
