Love, Birth and Relationships | Our Altered Life

This week I decided that with Valentine's Day right in the middle of half term I would ask some of the awesome blogging community to offer their thoughts on some of the areas that we think about when it comes to "love", that way it reduced my work load while I enjoy time with my girls. Today I am sharing a post written by the lovely Charlie from Our Altered Life, a mother to two beautiful twin sons who has been blogging for just under a year. It is all about how having a c-section made a difference to how her body is now and how it affects her relationship with her new(ish) partner. N x

When I was pregnant I had an idea of the sort of birth I wanted (don’t we all).

It involved gas and air, the welcoming through my lady tunnel of my babies (yes, plural) and I was prepared for the possibility of some perineum stitches and a John Wayne stagger for a few days post-delivery.

What I didn’t expect at 7cm dilated, as I prayed for my fanny and got ready to launch baby one into the world, was the announcement that the head was a bum and I’d be heading to theater in the next 30 minutes.

*Insert devastated face emoji*

I hadn’t wanted to have a cesarean, as I felt that it made the boys birth less valid somehow. Now I know, of course, that a mother is a mother however she acquires her children (I’m including adoption etc. in that too) and unbeknownst to me at the time, there is a hidden benefit to having your litter delivered through the sunroof.

I, according to the nurse who did my smear test many years later, still have a lady tunnel which is ‘as tidy as a teenager’!

We were chatting to fill the awkward silence while she lubricated to steel contraption of horror, and as she took the smear she asked me if I’d had a C-section in the way someone asks when they already know the answer. I felt quite proud in one sense, and yet disappointed as it wasn’t the sort of thing I could share on Facebook – my brother would never look at me the same way again (yet here I am sharing it in a blog!) It amused me to think that I was still neat and tidy on the inside, although as a recently divorced woman I had no one to ask if they *ahem* could tell and feel the benefit?

I’ve been with my partner now for almost 7 years.

In that time, he has commented a few times on how fabulous I am down under. G’day mate!  I almost feel like I need a badge that says “my children came out of the sunroof and my fanny is still intact. Go me!” Granted, I do have an overhang of skin that I don’t like much (I call it my human bum bag of flesh) but if I pull both sides up it becomes a smile below a belly button nose and two nipple eyes.

My lady tunnel is still just that and not the cave I feared it would become, and my husband-to-be is happy as a pig in mud with a woman with ‘down belows’ that haven’t aged at the same rate as the face.

Every cloud has a silver lining and every c section has a tidy tuppence.