Birth Interviews

Interviewees:
1) "Vee"; mother of one; "senior citizen"
2) "Dee"; mother of two; "old enough"

To start off with, the women I interviewed asked for me to quickly summarize their experience of giving birth. For my first interviewee, Vee, she had a natural birth in the hospital and was put in one of those mock hot tubs they have to 'help calm us down'. The second interviewee, Dee, had one botched C-section and nine years later, a natural birth and an extended period of labor due to the baby twisting it's arm around their head. Both women focused mainly on the actual day of the birth for the interview and have extremely different stories.

Vee's story came off somewhat vague as it happened over forty years ago but she says while she couldn't verbally explain most of it, she remembers it vividly. Her daughter who was present disagreed, saying that every woman of her mother's generation was put under some sort of medicine  nicknamed Twilight which in hindsight, made the birthing process seem painless. "But of course it hurt," Vee kept insisting, throwing her daughter disagreeing looks. "I just had it easy, God bless." Her water broke in the morning and she had time to shower before her husband could take her to the hospital. Indeed, details from there out were quick and blurred together. She remembers being put into what she describes as a hot tub of sorts to relax her, "...maybe the muscles as well.... It's the best thing you can do for the mother." However, she did not give birth in that tub. They led her onto the bed, much more like a table, and once she was settled, they wouldn't let her leave it even to use the bathroom. She found this upsetting since she had always taken long walks during the pregnancy, even days before 'the big day'. Perhaps her twenty block hike home had something to do with her water breaking the next day?

Dee, similiar to Vee, made sure to always excerise during the pregnancy of her first child. As her stomach started to grow, she