Heart-Shaped Box: A Mother’s Tale [Part the First?]

As you may have gleaned from my brief post after Baby Sister was born, her arrival was the culmination of a long medical adventure.

And, moreover, her birth was the cap on the child-bearing part of my life.  So, as I’ve moved psychically from child-bearing to child-rearing, I’ve been thinking a lot about my journey to becoming a mother.

That journey started several states away, but only five years ago.

Five years.  Goodness.  It’s staggering to me to think about that: five years ago, I was a teacher and a wife, feeling that tug that is familiar to so many of us as we start to consider growing beyond a unit of two.

But motherhood was just an inkling rather than the indelible mark it is now.

That journey has been shaped all along by the fact – unbeknownst to me before I started it – that I have a bicornuate uterus.  My uterus, you see,  is shaped like a heart instead of an oval.  Many women with this condition have trouble becoming pregnant and experience repeat miscarriages.  Others – like me – carry their babies in the breech position.  Others – like me – run out of space to grow their kiddos and deliver them early.

I’ve always liked the idea that I’ve grown my children in a heart-shaped box, despite the problems it’s caused.

Our journey to becoming parents wasn’t the smoothest one, medically speaking.  And yet ours had far fewer potholes than those of many of the women I know.  But it’s a story that I feel compelled to tell.

To whom?  Well, to you, maybe.

I want to tell you more, at least, about Baby Sister breaking my water, insisting on an early exit, a few minutes after I called Husband from my hospital bed telling him that we had a c-section scheduled for the next day.  I want to tell you about the two men who spent four weeks outside my hospital room on scaffolding, caulking windows in subzero temperatures.  I want to tell you about the guy who visited each day, booming on the door of my room with his giant class ring and hawking the local newspaper.  I want to tell you about the ice storms that prefaced Baby Sister’s arrival and the sunshine that followed it.

But is this the place for that?  The space for that?  Is this a story you want to hear?  Or is it a story I should keep to myself, to ourselves, to consign to a pretty journal to give to Baby Sister if and when she starts to feel that inkling herself?

What do you think?  Do you like reading other women’s birth stories?  Or do you find them too personal and – let’s face it – potentially boring? 

Image: “There are many things in life…” by katerha via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Tagged as: bicornuate uterus, birth story, Kristen @ Motherese, Motherese, mothereseblog