My birth experience third time round was perfect. It was the kind of birth that you say “Oh fuck off” when you hear someone talking about it. It was the kind of birth that The Positive Birth Company would print in their book to promote their Freya app (which I would highly recommend) and the kind of birth that a midwife might tell you to lower your expectations of if you wrote it in your birth plan.

It was so perfect, in fact, that my brain could not compute it because births like this didn’t happen to people like me. My brain told me that I didn’t deserve to have such a positive experience and this was only happening because something really bad was going to happen in the future and the universe was trying to keep things equal.

I allowed myself 3 days of pure happiness and bliss with my perfect newborn and then woke my partner in the middle of the night, trembling and on the verge of vomiting to tell him that “it” was back.

If you have read my posts before you’ll know that if there’s one thing I absolutely love it’s googling the shit out of symptoms and researching absolutely everything I can when I have a baby to take care of.
When Bo Burnham asked whether he could “interest me in everything all of the time?” the answer was “Absofuckinlutely, if it’s related to ‘health risks in children’ because that’s my area of interest”
It was due to this thirst for knowledge I had once again found myself googling something in the middle of the night that had triggered a domino effect of catastrophic thoughts, all of which were readily available to be fuelled by an AI crafted algorithm based on every query I had ever whispered, googled or thought, which was a lot.

An example of some of my google searches in the first few days:

“Baby sleeping too much”
“Baby squeaking”
“Baby shivering” (this is not the one to google)
“How long does it take to know you have sepsis”
“Baby crying very loudly”
“Baby looks red”

Given that I have experienced the newborn phase twice before this my brain still decided to wipe most logical thought from my mind and punish me by convincing me that there was no way I could have my perfect birth and get out of it unscathed. One of the hardest parts of intrusive anxious thoughts is that you know deep down that they are unlikely to happen but your body is fuelled with adrenaline and errs on the side of caution so whilst you’re dialling in the first two 9’s on your phone your head is like, “This was probably just a sneeze” but your heart is like “Just get a professional here immediately to eradicate any uncertainty”

The difference third time round was that I now had a new secret part of my brain, the secret part that had been paying attention in my therapy sessions, the little sponge part of my brain that was trying to save the rest of my body from being in constant fight or flight mode because it was absolutely sick of this shit. This tiny little sponge dragged me back from the edge along with my partner who sat and held my hand as I recited historical American medical papers (it’s always the American papers that are the worst) from 1991 that had been dug up on my searches for info on google. I knew this time that I had to keep my head together for the sake of my other two children who were now old enough to question why their mummy was running up and down the stairs at 2 am or standing in the garden saluting magpies. I listened to this tiny secret sponge part of my brain as much as I could. I listened to it as it screamed at me over and over “Thoughts are not facts”

On day 5 I visited my midwife, showed her some videos I had been filming (in cinema mode, naturally) and she once again immediately instructed me to unplug my router. She would later go through my birth notes with me and gently explain that perhaps, just maybe I was allowed to have this birth experience for no other reason than sometimes births can be perfect.