Denny Rice wrote:
"Perhaps the fogginess is nature's way of helping us to "forget" the
labor, concentrate on the baby, and maybe even be willing to have another
someday!"

With all due respect to you, Denny...
I've heard this kind of remark made a lot, and usually I have felt
uncomfortable with the sentiment---as if women are supposed to be so stupid
that they have to be "tricked" into perpetuating the species. I guess it
feels like a "put-down" of women who have had a birth experience that they
don't want to forget, or a birth with good parts and not-so-good parts.
People treat it like an athletic contest that the mother lost, or a stage
performance that was so bad nobody congratulates her afterwards.  Where's the
respect for her effort and her faith and her courage?

For me, my first childbirth was an absolutely transformative experience, a
rite of passage that I got through pretty much on my own, due to the
unsupportive rules that applied to birthing women in that particular
institution (an early HMO) in 1968.  If I was foggy afterwards it was because
I was totally engrossed in reliving, recalling, analyzing every detail of the
labor and birth, as well as learning how to be a mother and how to nurse my
baby (again with little societal support).  And one thing that made it hard
for me to integrate the birth picture into the rest of my life was this very
attitude that I encountered in so many people, beginning with my OB, that
birth was an experience best forgotten, not to be remembered and certainly
not to be treasured.  It made me wonder whether I was crazy, or whether
everybody else was!!  And it made me sorry for women hadn't had a birth they
wanted to remember.

Think of all those breastfeeding hormones bathing mom's brain---oxytocin
sliding along the neurons and CCK seething up from her gut.  She's SUPPOSED
to be foggy, for goodness' sake!  This is not the time in her life to
negotiate the Mid-East peace accord or paint a masterpiece or audit a
company's accounts.  Let's give her credit for the important human-making
work she has done and continues to do and let her rest in the fog.

Chris Mulford, RN, IBCLC
Swarthmore  PA  USA

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