'It Felt Like It Was My Fault'

How an ordinary birth turned into a "house of horrors"

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

Note to readers: This post discusses abuse and trauma.

Victoria Hollis had her first child in 2001. She studied the Bradley Method of natural childbirth, which avoids all medical interventions and pain medicine. She had a detailed birth plan, a birth coach, and a husband to support her. She was 28, her pregnancy was healthy, and she delivered at a hospital in Blacksburg, Virginia.

But none of it turned out as planned. Here, Hollis, a licensed clinical social worker, discusses how the experience affected her mental health, her relationship with her daughter, and her marriage.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We lived in a little mountain town in Virginia. It was 25 minutes from the hospital. We just didn't want to have to be in the car going around the mountain roads while I was in childbirth. They admitted me, and maybe I was 3 centimeters dilated.

It was a rainy night, lightning storm and all. And our birth coach came, and my husband was with me. We’re super excited. We had been married five years, so we were ready. You know, we'd been hoping, we’d been trying. I'd had a great pregnancy, no problems whatsoever. We just thought we had a handle on this thing.

They made me get in the bed. The whole thing with the birth plan and the Bradley method is, you stay active, you’re walking, because that's what helps promote the progression. So it just became immediately not what I thought I was going to have.

It was around midnight. they put the gown on me, they put me in the bed, they hooked me up to all the stuff, and they kind of left us alone there. We had our little speaker with our CD player, with our music, and tried to turn the lights down a little bit. But it was jarring, from that moment on. This wasn't in our hands, and it wasn't our choice, and it wasn't our plan.

We were probably there two or three hours, and that's when the doctor came in. He was a big, burly older man, and just disinterested. Not very good eye contact, not patient, just came in and out, like, ‘Let's get this done.’ And the birth coach—if I remember correctly—he just shut her down when she tried to advocate for us.

Eventually, he came in and said that I wasn't progressing—which of course, I wasn't, because now I was nervous. We had 10, 12, things on our birth plan and what we wanted, and he didn't care. And because he didn't care, he drove the system. He was obviously in charge of it, not us.

My husband was worried, we didn't know what to do. I think we both just felt pretty powerless in the situation. We’re in Blacksburg, Virginia. There’s this one medical center … We don't have a backup plan. And so we just tried to just go with the flow and be as calm as possible. But it didn't feel good.

[The doctor] was like, ‘We gotta get this moving.’ On the birth plan, specifically, there's no Pitocin [a synthetic hormone], nothing to induce labor, we want it to be natural. But there were five babies being born that night. And I was 28, this doctor was at least in his 60s. He was a sort of authority figure. So, he started the Pitocin.

I had no medicine at all, [no painkillers]. It was awful. It was six hours of the worst pain. They said in the book that it wouldn’t be that way, that you could manage it. For millennia, women have delivered babies—and I believed it.

I just felt so alone. Because when you have pain like that, it’s prolonged for hours and hours, and you’re strapped down … I never felt pain like this before. It was just like I was being stabbed.

I was stalled out at 7 centimeters. [The doctor] was mad at me. He was just frustrated with us. ‘People do this every day, I don't know what's wrong with you.’

So it felt like it was my fault, that I was doing something wrong. And yet here I am in excruciating pain. I can see now, looking back … why this felt so abusive, because it’s a perfect parallel: A person in authority telling you it’s your fault that you're being hurt by them.

It was just like being trapped in this house of horrors, and there's a baby at stake. It's an unimaginable tension point between protecting this baby inside of you and getting out of this pain.

He did break my water. Then I pushed for a little over an hour, and it was awful. I was so exhausted and so scared by that point. When [my daughter] finally came out, her little head was extremely oblong. She was bluish, she didn't look healthy.

I know that she was under stress. And she did have learning difficulties, she has had ADHD. From the get-go— problems latching on. And I know it was my stress experience—of course it impacted her. It was mostly devastating because I worked so hard to make it perfect.

I could see us in this hospital room, and I’ve gotten her to my breast, and they’re trying to get her to latch on. I don't think I was really fully even present. I was just checked out and exhausted and sad and worried about her with her little weird, oddly shaped head.

I wasn't able to protect my baby. For a mom, especially a new mom, that’s the most important thing on the earth. And I felt like I had failed her before she even entered the world.

And that persisted through her whole childhood, this feeling of inadequacy. I was so ashamed, because I was a therapist. I couldn't tell anybody, it just was a secret of my own. I felt like it was my fault. I just tried to control my daughter more. I had this very strong sense of, if she's okay, I could be okay.

And my husband couldn't understand my anxiety. He was graduating with his Ph.D. right around that time, and starting his post-doc. I just did my best, but I felt more and more separate from him. I felt more resentful towards him that he didn't understand.

When you have PTSD, you are looking for the risks of the environment. So Rachel, my daughter, was the source of my anxiety. I kept looking for things that were not okay. I just was so hyper-vigilant … I couldn't put her in Montessori because it was too much time away from me. Her sleeping with me and nursing until she was 2, was—at least when she was with me, I knew I could make sure she was okay.

You can only be in that heightened state [of anxiety] for so long, where you’re kind of just dissociated, disconnected. That's how I was in that period. And then my friend's husband put his arms around me one day, and I felt like somebody actually was going to take care of me.

And guess what? Having an affair when you have a four-and-a-half-year-old, and then you find out you're pregnant from your husband that you're getting divorced from—guess what that does for your stress? I put 1,000 percent more stress on myself.

I was so empty, and I had no strategy to get refilled.

This is the first in a series of articles where subscribers tell their birth stories. If you would like to share yours, learn more details here.