"It was so empowering: I wish every doubter could watch me give birth"

“The echoes of your mum’s experiences, they lived in you”, says our CEO Nikki Wilson to Frankie Gibbons (Birth Trauma Peer Support Worker) on Frankie’s podcast On a lighter note. Frankie and Nikki discuss intergenerational trauma, among many other things. We highly recommend listening to the episode here. Frankie describes how her second birth – an empowering, wonderful home birth after a previous traumatic one – completely turned her mum’s opinion on birth upside down.

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Frankie: “My mum had quite traumatic birth experiences. She is from that generation – and Northern proud  – ‘you crack on, you don’t complain’. So when she would ever talk about the births it would be this whole joke – how she was in labour for days and every time she would tell the story it would get exaggerated and she would laugh about it and say things like ‘the day you were born was the worst day of my life’, all of that stuff. And that has always been her mindset around birth.

But I knew, really she has had so much trauma to deal with. In a time where nobody wanted you to talk about your mental health and you needed to go back to work. And it was just ‘carry on with it’.

When then I had my traumatic birth experience it really consolidated her opinion that birth is negative and bad – that is just how it is. Why would you even think it’s going to be good? That is not even an option.

With my second daughter, I planned to have a homebirth and I was so full of the joy of how wonderful birth can be, and that’s what I wanted to experience. I really had everything set on having that fantastic, empowering experience. And my mum tried to get on board, but I could see she was terrified. She didn’t believe it could be wonderful. She thought I was going to be let down and heartbroken and in bits and, you know, that ‘mother-worry’ that you have and you just want to protect your baby. Even to the day I went into labour, I could sense she had those nerves.

Fortunately, I had a wonderful, positive experience. An as I gave birth in my living room – thirteen months after a horrendously, traumatic emergency caesarean – I looked up, as I had my new baby in my arms, and my mum and my 1-year-old were sat on the stairs watching me through the bannister. And I could see it on their faces, of these two generations: for my mum, it’s like the clouds were lifted and she went ‘Oh, it’s true: birth can be really amazing and fantastic and wonderful’. And her eyes, at 61, opened to this world that she never knew was there. And then my daughter, the first experience of birth that she will ever have has been this fantastic and wonderful, empowering and supportive birth.

And I say this all the time: every doubter in the world, everyone’s mum who is a bit worried about them going for a home birth or a birth choice that they might not make, I want them to come and watch me give birth.”

Listen to the full podcast episode here.