Failure is universal. It’s never fun, but we’ll all confront it at some point, be it through bad luck, bad behavior, or just sucking at something. Why are we so bad at talking about it, and why are we so afraid of it? The stories of Failure Week are here to help remind us that the world doesn't end when something goes horribly wrong, and that we can learn as much from life's disasters as its successes.
It’s true that childbirth isn’t like what you see in the movies, but when it comes to having a Cesarean section, you’d be hard-pressed to conjure an existing pop culture reference at all. In fact, when I tried to think of one for this article, the only examples I could find were horrifying affairs in equally horrifying settings: Noomi Rapace’s self-administered C-section in Prometheus, the grisly birth of the vampire-human hybrid Renesmee in Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1, or the gruesome “death by C-section” in The Walking Dead that nearly caused one actress to quit the show.
As a woman who’s had one, I find this disheartening. Sure, here’s hoping you never end up in a C-section scenario that also involves fleeing zombies, but statistically speaking, it’s very likely you’ll have one. In fact, if American culture is meant to imitate American life, at least one in three of the birth scenes you see on TV and in movies should end in a C-section. (According to the CDC, 32 percent of all deliveries in the U.S. in 2015 were via C-section.)
And yet, we don’t see them—and we certainly rarely talk openly about them in a mode that isn’t laced with anxiety or disappointment. In my case, an extremely premature delivery meant that a Cesarean was medically necessary, but that didn’t lessen my feelings of failure and disappointment at not having had a “normal” delivery.
To be clear, a vaginal delivery is certainly what’s considered “normal.” Hell, one photographer even had the gall to refuse to shoot a woman’s C-section delivery because “a surgery isn’t birth.”
For me, I felt as if I’d been denied some sense of completion—like I had run a marathon but didn’t get to cross the finish line on my feet. In lieu of the climax I’d pictured in my mind, I was numb from the waist down and felt only the sickening pressure and then odd lightness that comes with a doctor surgically removing your baby. There’s nothing that feels powerful or primal about lying on your back in an operating room. I went home with a medal, but I didn’t feel like a winner.
Maybe other mothers feel this way too—having never experienced vaginal childbirth, I can’t say—but I can say that there is this expectation that a “good” birth represents a triumph of willpower or strength, and that if you end up with a surgical conclusion, you simply weren’t strong enough or tough enough. (Similar stigmas remain about getting an epidural—that women who elect to receive one are somehow weak or—even more distressing—less worthy of the mantle of motherhood, which requires pain and sacrifice to claim.)
The expectations of what a birth experience should be like—how it should not only deliver a child but also deliver a woman across some invisible threshold between nonmotherhood and motherhood—are mostly unrealistic, and yet they have serious staying power.
When I asked women in some of my various parenting circles about how they felt about their C-sections, it was clear I wasn’t alone in feeling I hadn’t managed to have a baby the “right” way.
Lauren, 36, said she’d had two C-sections, and “[nearly two years] after the second, I’m still not emotionally recovered. It’s almost impossible not to internalize expectations.”
Libby, 38, said, “I think most of the shame is self-inflicted. I think a lot of people take others’ individual commentary personally sometimes, but it’s just projection. For instance, I might say I felt disappointed that I had a C-section. Hypothetically, a person I’m speaking to also had a C-section and does not feel disappointed, but somehow feels attacked for not feeling disappointed that she did not have a natural birth. Does that make sense? I think it’s normal and all part of how a woman accepts and copes with the way her birth went amidst a slew of hormonal emotions postpartum. We all want to bond and relate to one another as mothers, but the reality is that while we are all women, we are all also individuals with different goals and expectations, personalities, and emotional temperaments.”
On the other hand, Kelly, 41, said, “I make a point of talking to people about this because I think the birth-plan culture is terrible and creates an unnecessary way for people to be disappointed.” (As I was finishing this piece, she emailed to say she’d just delivered her second baby—via a scheduled C-section.)
Then there was *Sarah, who said she actually felt “very positive” about her birth experience but did confess that she makes a habit of telling her birth story a bit differently. “I felt like I had to prep people by first telling them I had a C-section, because I assumed they were expecting a story that ended in a vaginal birth. I also always included that I labored for many hours and that the reason for the C-section was because the baby had a cord around his neck. It felt like if I just said I had a C-section, they might assume things about me that I didn't think were true of myself—that I was weak, that I gave up, that I did something wrong.
“I do think there is stigma around C-sections,” she added. “When the induction wasn't going well, I was worried this meant there was something wrong with my baby, that he was weak and couldn't tolerate the stress of labor. It also brought up the idea of ‘survival of the fittest.’ If I didn't have access to surgery, would my baby have made it? Then I think of all the medical inventions—antibiotics, asthma inhalers, surgery—that allow people to ‘make it.’ Most of us wouldn't be here without some medical intervention somewhere along our genetic line.”
This, in fact, is precisely correct. Having a C-section shouldn’t come laced with feelings of failure, any more than taking penicillin or getting your appendix removed. The truth is, the idea of success or failure at giving birth is just another way women internalize wildly unrealistic expectations—like “having it all” or “I woke up like this.” However you have a baby, you’re a winner.
*Name changed
