(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
Welcome to the birth prep podcast. I'm Taylor, your birth bestie, who's here to support you as you plan and prepare for the unmedicated birth of your dreams. If you're ready to ditch the fear, conquer the hospital hustle, support that bump and bod, and walk into the delivery room like the HGIC you were born to be, then buckle up, babe.
This is where it all goes down. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the birth prep podcast. I honestly, like, I don't even know how to start this episode.
I'm just mad. I'm a little ticked off. I'm a little over seeing this happening to mothers, and I've been there, done that.
I'll have a, well, I'll tell you later, but I'm like, I have a whole story. But I am so tired of hearing this phrase thrown around. It's so dismissive.
It's so belittling. It's used to end the conversation that honestly, truly deserves to They're like, oh, you know what? Well, you know, you start a conversation like, well, I didn't feel heard, or this happened, and I really wish it didn't go that way, or I'm just still, God forbid, you're still processing what happened on the biggest day of your life, probably. And someone's like, well, you know, at least your baby's healthy.
Well, at the end of the day, you know, your baby's good, and that's all that matters. I need you to hear me. That's the bare minimum.
A healthy baby is the bare minimum. It's the floor, not the ceiling. It is not some fake finish line where your experience and your voice and your body just stop mattering, because like, who cares about mom? No, everyone should, because the baby only exists because mom exists.
Okay? Okay. And if you've ever heard that phrase used to shut down a conversation about your own birth, this episode today is for you from someone who has been there, done that, and is sick of seeing it. So we're going to get into where this phrase comes from, why it's not actually as helpful and comforting as people think it is, and what you actually deserve, because it ain't this.
Okay? So let's get into it. Okay. First, where is this phrase even coming from? I'm going to be fair for a second, because I don't think most people say, you know, healthy baby, healthy mom, or, you know, as long as your baby's healthy to be cruel.
I don't think that. I think it's usually coming from a place of relief. Someone's trying to comfort you.
They're trying to put things into perspective. And listen, a healthy baby and a healthy mom is generally something to be so, so, so grateful for. And I'm not about to sit here and tell you that gratitude is the wrong response to a safe outcome.
It's not. But here's where it goes wrong. Somewhere along the way, healthy baby stopped being the starting point of the conversation and became the only acceptable ending point.
It became the thing that people say instead of asking how you're actually doing. It became the phrase that makes your birth trauma feel ungrateful to even bring it up. It became permission for everyone, including the medical system, to treat outcome as the only thing that counts and processes something you should be quiet about.
And that's the problem. That's my beef with it. Because outcome and experience are not the same thing, and you are allowed to care about both.
And honestly, we should care about both. I remember sitting in the bed after having my first baby, and she was on my chest. We finally got to hold her after they had to whisk her away.
They put her on my chest, and I honestly don't even remember that. The only reason that I knew that that happened was from photos and the fact that there was a blood spot on my chin from where my chin rested against her head for a split second. She wasn't breathing, so they snipped the cord so fast, like in one fluid motion.
The main thing she needed was me, but they took her away, started whacking her with this little mallet thing, and saved the day, all that. And she was finally, after all that, they didn't even return her to me until she was all wrapped up, and then my husband held her first, and I didn't even get her until I was done being sewn up and stuff. I'm like processing this as I'm talking about it.
Anyways, I remember sitting there, holding her finally, and just being like, holy cow. That was way worse than anybody told me it was going to be. And it wasn't necessarily the pain that was the worst part of it.
I think it was just the fact that I truly felt like an object and an extra in my birth. I felt like an object the whole time. I was treated like an object, so of course I felt like an object.
And I was never asked anything. Everything was phrased as like it was required of me, and I just felt so incredibly defeated afterwards. And I remember everyone just sitting there being like, oh my gosh, you did it.
I'm so proud of you. No epidural. That was amazing.
Oh my goodness. Rock star mom. Blah, blah, blah.
You know, all the compliments. I'm like, again, well-meaning. So well-meaning.
Everyone's relieved. Baby is here. I did it.
I made it. On paper, I followed my plan. I wanted a vaginal birth and no epidural.
And I did that. I pulled it off. And everyone was so excited about it.
But I literally was sitting there like, I do not feel excited. I'm so glad she's here. All those beautiful, wonderful, positive emotions were there.
And I loved that she was here and that that was over, praise the Lord. But I just remember sitting there not even feeling like I could say how I felt because everyone was sitting there telling me the exact opposite. So I totally felt wrong for feeling the way that I felt.
And then that, of course, isn't helpful for anyone, especially me. And it's like keeping that bottled up inside. I didn't know what to do with it because it felt wrong to feel that way, but that's how I felt.
So not only was I dealing with the negative feelings, I was dealing about the negative feelings about the negative feelings. So I was in mental hell starting out my motherhood journey, my first day of motherhood. That's how I felt.
And I honestly wish I could go back and hug myself because she deserved so much more than that. And everyone was just like, so excited about it. And I was so devastated.
And I didn't even feel like I could say that. And I didn't. I didn't.
It kept me quiet for it. I just thought it was normal and that I just had to accept it. That's what it was.
Birth was just always going to suck for me. It was always going to be this awful, terrible experience. I was always going to feel this way afterwards.
So I might as well just suck it up and get over it. Except that's not how feelings work. Is it? If anybody knows if anyone's been around long enough, that's not how that works.
I walked into my next experience and created the exact same result because I carried all that in with me. You can't just set something down unless you work through it. And I just stuffed it up and put it in a little box.
And I was like, Oh, we'll just leave that there. And the box came flying open in my second birth and everything was there. All the junk that happened for my first birth, I carried right into that second one.
And that was the biggest disservice I could have done to myself. Anyways, all that to say is that you get to care about both the outcome and the experience because they are not the same thing and they are both important. You get to prepare for the outcome and the experience.
You get to make decisions based on the outcome and the experience. So that leads me to why healthy baby as the only metric is a major problem. If healthy baby is genuinely the only metric that matters, then it doesn't matter how you got there.
It doesn't matter if you were coerced into an induction you didn't want. It doesn't matter if your concerns got brushed off for hours while you knew something wasn't right. It doesn't matter if you were spoken to like you were hysterical instead of a grown woman who knows her own body.
It doesn't matter if you left that hospital with a healthy baby and a nervous system that's still trying to recover two years later. None of that matters. If the outcome is the only thing that counts, all of that becomes irrelevant.
And I don't believe that. And I don't think you believe that either or you wouldn't still be listening to this episode right now. Here's what I actually believe.
You can have a healthy baby and still have a birth that was not okay. Those two things can both be true at the same time. A safe outcome doesn't retroactively make every part of how you got there acceptable.
And I'm so sick of that being the narrative. You're allowed to grieve a birth experience even when the baby on the other side of it is perfectly fine. This isn't about being ungrateful.
This is about refusing to let healthy baby be the easy out for hard conversation because that's really what it is half the time. It's not actually about the baby at all. It's a way to avoid sitting with how you felt and what you went through and what was or wasn't explained to you.
It's so much easier to say, but the baby's fine than to actually engage with tell me what happened to you in there. And you deserve people who are willing to do the harder thing. No one did that with me.
I had to sit down one day and start processing it little by little. It took time. It was years before I did any of that work and years before I saw how much damage holding that heavy stuff was doing to me and definitely what it was doing to my births and my postpartum experiences.
And I am so grateful that I have done that work, but like, gosh, like it should just be a part of it. You know, first of all, it should be avoid preventative measures should be taken, which is why we prepare, but also there should be space held afterwards too, because things don't always go according to the plan. You can prepare your butt off and still leave disappointed.
So I just girlfriend, sorry. My little baby's being a little insane today. No, no, no, no.
My little piggy. She's trying to rip the bracelets off my arms. She's no longer the cute little newborn potato.
She's still cute though. Now I do want to pause here because I'd be doing you a total disservice. If I didn't say this part too, some of you listening did not get the healthy baby.
Some of you are in the hardest version of this story and Nick, you stay a diagnosis, a baby who isn't okay. A baby you didn't even get to bring home at all. And I'm not glossing over that.
I'm not putting that in the same sentence as the floor. Like it's just some small thing that is its own mountain. And it complicates everything that I just said, because suddenly the outcome isn't just this given that we're supposed to be grateful for.
It's the thing you are fighting for or that you did fight for. It's the thing that may still be uncertain. It's the thing that just swallows you whole.
If that's you, please hear me. Your experience in that birth still matters to how you were treated, how you were spoken to, whether you were included in decisions about your own child or not. None of that becomes irrelevant just because your situation is harder, but you're carrying something.
I'm not trying to minimize by talking about this healthy baby, bare minimum for the rest of this episode. I just want you to know that I see you and I'm not skipping past you. For the rest of us, the ones who did get the healthy baby, that's exactly why we don't get to use it as the final word either.
We don't get to let it close the conversation when so many moms would give anything just to be standing where we are. That baby being okay is the beginning of the gratitude conversation, not the end of the accountability conversation. So let's talk about what you do actually deserve in this situation.
Because if healthy baby is the bare minimum, is the floor, what's the actual goal? What am I telling you to aim for instead? Because unfortunately, this isn't just people talking about our births. This is quite honestly the goal that I hear all the time from women on the internet. I just see, oh, I just want to be alive at the end of it.
Oh, I just want a healthy baby. That's all that matters. That's my whole plan is leaving with a baby that's alive.
I'm like, holy, maybe we deserve to be informed before decisions are made about our body, not informed after the fact as a courtesy. Maybe you deserve to be listened to when you say something doesn't feel right instead of being told you're overreacting or being dramatic. Maybe you deserve a provider who explains the why behind a recommendation instead of just saying, well, it's hospital policy and walking out.
You deserve to leave your birth feeling like you were a participant in what happened to you, not someone that things were done to, not an object sitting on the table, not someone who was dismissed and was just an extra in her birth. You deserve to come out on the other side of labor, not just alive, but proud, not just safe, but seen, not just surviving the experience, but actually able to look back on it and feel like it was yours. That's not asking for too much.
That's not you being entitled. That's the actual standard of care that you should expect. Not the bonus round you get.
If you're lucky enough to land a good nurse or a provider who happens to take the time with you that day. And this is exactly why birth prep matters so much to me and why it's not just about pain management or contraction timing. Real birth prep means walking into that space, already knowing what you're allowed to ask for, already knowing your options, already knowing what a respectful birth actually looks like so that you're not just hoping for the best and accepting whatever happens because you just didn't know you could ask for anything different.
That's what happened to me. I just simply didn't know they come in. Oh, we're going to check your cervix.
Hey, we're going to just break your waters real quick. Hey, the doctor's going to come and do this. And no one asked me a single question that day.
I just said, okay. I didn't know I could say no. It was never, I was like, Hey, do you want to do this or not? Or Hey, here's the three options, A, B, or C, which one would you like? Hey, let's talk about this for a second, because this might be the best option for you based on what we're seeing over here.
There was no sort of conversation like that. Everything that day truly felt as if it was required for me to birth my babies and spoiler alert, none of it was not a single bit. I can name at least seven decisions that were made for me that were totally unnecessary and just made based off of convenience and timing and all of that.
I was not, I, none of that should have been implemented without my consent or without expressing the need to do so. And again, there was no need. So the options should have been laid out for me and they weren't.
And unfortunately that's the common experience for women in the birth space. If you aren't doing this work, trust me, do not count on anyone else to do it for you. And I'm not saying any of this to scare you.
I'm saying it to tell you, like you are the girl, you are the girl. If you are waiting on someone to save you, if you are waiting on someone to come and do it for you, baby girl, no one is coming. No one is coming to save you.
No one is coming to do it for you. No one is going to do it better than you, even if they did. So you are the one, you are the one I am encouraging you to raise up and do the work and make sure that you're getting the experience that you want to serve because no one else is going to do it for you.
When you know your options, when you have language ready for the moments where you need to advocate for yourself, when you've thought through what you want before you're in active labor and vulnerable and tired and all the things, that's how you raise the bar past healthy baby and into an experience you actually feel really good about. Prep isn't about guaranteeing a perfect birth. Nobody can promise you that.
If I could, I'd be a rich lady, but it is about giving yourself the best possible shot at a birth where your voice was actually in the room. Cause that matters way more than you think. So if you're listening to this and something in your chest just tightened up, because this is exactly what happened to you.
I want to say something directly to you. You're allowed to hold both. You're allowed to be so deeply grateful for your baby and still be honest that your birth wasn't what you needed it to be.
Those aren't in competition with each other. Gratitude for the outcome doesn't cancel out the grief for the experience and nobody gets to decide that timeline for you, but you. Here's something else I want to name because I think it's at the root of why healthy baby gets used the way it does.
Every mother in this community would sacrifice anything for her child. That's not in question. If it came down to it, every single one of us would take the harder road, the scarier outcome for ourselves, the body that doesn't fully recover.
If that's what it took to bring our baby through safely, that's just true. I know it. I've seen it time and time again.
I also live it myself is part of what makes motherhood what it is, but that's exactly why this matters so much because we will sacrifice everything when it's actually necessary. So we don't need to be talked into sacrificing things that were never necessary in the first place and unwanted intervention with no real indication is not okay. Being dismissed instead of informed is not okay.
A decision made about your body without you in the room for it, it's not okay. None of that is the noble sacrifice of motherhood. That's just things happening to you that didn't have to happen.
Dressed up afterwards as the cost of a healthy baby. Don't let anyone hand you a bill for something you never actually owed. Okay? God didn't design you to just survive births.
He designed your body with wisdom, with strength, with the ability to bring life into this world in a way that's powerful. Not just something you white knuckle through and hope you can just come out on the other side. Okay.
You were made for more than the bare minimum. Your birth is allowed to matter too. So if you're in the thick of processing a birth that left you with a healthy baby and a heavy heart, that's not ingratitude.
That's just being honest. And you don't owe anyone a smaller version of your story just because the outcome was technically fine. Okay.
That got a little fiery for a second, but you know what? I'm not sorry. Because this needed to be said. A healthy baby is the bare minimum.
You deserve to be informed, respected, and heard throughout every single part of the process. Not just handed a healthy baby at the end and be like, oh, well, you're a mom now, so that should be enough for you. No.
If you want to start building towards a birth where you actually feel like a participant instead of a bystander, that is quite literally what the birth prep course was made for. To teach you how to be head girly in charge of your experience, to teach you what to expect and all the things in between. And that is honestly the most important thing that you can do is become a woman who knows her rights, who knows what she wants, who will fight for her needs and her wants, who will do what she needs to do in order to bring her baby here healthy and safely, of course, but also to make sure that the mom that that baby leaves with is healthy and safe and good too.
Not just physically, but mentally as well. And if you've had a traumatic experience and you are preparing to give birth again, you have to work through that trauma. It's a non-negotiable in my opinion.
You have to take responsibility for it. Yes, you're a victim in so many ways. I can almost guarantee it.
And playing the victim, continuing to walk in that mindset is only doing you a disservice. You have to take responsibility for it. You have to heal from it.
You have to hold space for yourself and that version of you who just truly didn't know any better, who was taken advantage of, who was lied to, whatever the story is, right? And you have to do that work in order to make space for a new story to be written. And I wish it weren't so, because it's messy work. It's hard work.
It's heavy, heavy work. And I can speak from personal experience that it's not fun. It's really not.
And it makes sense that so many people avoid it. And some people just blame the doctor or blame the nurses or blame whoever was in the room or blame the education source that they got or whatever. And it makes sense.
I get it. I've, I was there for years. I totally get it.
And at the end of the day, I'm the one that's carrying that heaviness and I deserve to clean it up and feel lighter. Inside the birth prep course is birthing with trauma. It's a whole training.
It's honestly the longest one in there. It is a lot. And it's all the work that I did to work through my trauma in order to make a vastly different experience for myself.
That work was required for that. I had to do that work. So I walk you guys through it all.
I walk you guys through how to create a story with that in mind, making sure basically like learning from it and what we're taking into our next birth intentionally to avoid that experience. And also to just redeem what that experience was before. I don't know.
I believe in recompense. The Lord is going to get, give it back. The Lord is going to give what was stolen from you 10 times over.
And it's going to be the most beautiful, amazing thing in Jesus name. Anyhow, if you want to chat about any of this, I know this is heavy stuff. My DMS are always open.
I'll probably send you a long voice memo back. Um, but feel free to reach out if you'd like to, I'll put my Instagram in the comments for you. And I'll also put the link for the, um, the birth prep course in there too.
So you can check that out. And if you have any questions about that, again, my DMS are always open. So that's it for today though.
Thank you for listening as always, um, take care of yourself this week and I'll chat with you again next Thursday. Until then, as always, happy prepping.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
