Today’s guest used to be a bodybuilder and is now a trainer and the owner of a fitness center and the mother of two kids. I think she’d describe herself as a woman who likes a challenge, and that’s probably a good way to step into the role of becoming someone’s mother.. Different circumstances required her to overcome challenges presented at each step of this process–she originally had trouble getting pregnant, she had a traumatic experience with miscarriage which ramped up her anxiety during the pregnancy that followed, she wrangled with postpartum depression–and each experience taught her something valuable that she was able to use, and from which she grow and developed into a stronger, better version of herself.
Ways to Find Ashley & her Fitness Center and Videos
Facebook page for Heal & Seal https://www.facebook.com/HealandSeal
Facebook page for for mom+me strong https://www.facebook.com/mommestrongllc
To Follow Ashley, go to https://www.facebook.com/ashley.heyl
Rh incompatibility and RhoGAM
https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/rhogam-shot#cost
https://www.acog.org/womens-health/faqs/the-rh-factor-how-it-can-affect-your-pregnancy
https://www.verywellfamily.com/can-being-rh-negative-cause-a-miscarriage-2371474
Low body fat and infertility
https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article-abstract/2/6/521/639220
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9059/7/1/5/htm
Exercise during pregnancy
https://www.acog.org/womens-health/faqs/exercise-during-pregnancy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4622376/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6527310/
Autoimmune disease and pregnancy
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2019.00265/full
Audio Transcript
Paulette: Hi Welcome to War Stories from the womb. I’m your host Paulette kamenecka. I’m an economist and a writer and the mother of two girls. Becoming the mother of these two girls was no easy feat…my body was reluctant to cooperate with the grand plan in my head at many points in this process….
This is true also for Today’s guest. She used to be a bodybuilder and is now a trainer and the owner of a fitness center and the mother of two kids. I think she’d describe herself as a woman who likes a challenge, and that’s probably a good way to step into the role of becoming someone’s mother.. Different circumstances required her to overcome challenges presented at each step of this process–she originally had trouble getting pregnant, she had a traumatic experience with miscarriage which ramped up her anxiety during the pregnancy that followed, she wrangled with postpartum depression–and each experience taught her something valuable that she was able to use, and from which she grow and developed into a stronger, better version of herself.
After we spoke I went back into the conversation and added some details about medical issues that came up. I also had the opportunity to get the insights of a really well spoken therapist about postpartum depression and the heavy burden of expectation that is still a regrettably stubborn feature of pregnancy and motherhood.
Let’s get to this inspiring story.
Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show, can you introduce yourself and tell us where you’re from.
Ashley: Yes, thank you for having me, my name is Ashley Kates, I live in Lexington, South Carolina, I am a mother to two and I actually own a fitness studio called mommy strong specifically tailored towards women and postpartum women.
P: Cool, so we’ll get into that, but before we get there, let’s talk about the kids. Before you got pregnant, you probably had some idea about what pregnancy would be like, what were you imagining.
A: I think it’s probably what everyone assumes and I think motherhood was the same way for me is you see what videos and movies and such tell you, pregnancy is going to be like it’s glorious. It’s beautiful. You see your friends get pregnant, you see their beautiful maternity pictures. You think it’s nothing but rainbows and butterflies, people don’t talk about the pain, they don’t talk about prenatal depression prenatal anxiety, and you know the physical discomfort the symptoms that I personally do help women with now like the pelvic pain, the vaginal pain the abdominal back pain, stuff like that, I thought it was just like rainbows and butterflies, and they’re just gonna be beautiful and joyful the entire time.
P: Yeah, that seems to be a universal theme right that’s, that’s basically the story we’re fed for sure.
A: Yeah.
P: So, before you got pregnant the first time was it easy.
A: No, my husband and I tried for over two years to get pregnant. We then got pregnant, lost the pregnancy, the baby had passed around seven weeks but I carried the baby until the baby was about 10 weeks, and then I miscarried it or bled the baby out I guess you would say which that is a whole nother thing to talk about is the little information regarding miscarriage and what that looks like for women.
P: Yeah,
A: I was very lucky and grateful that the very next period, I concede my now five and a half year old.
P: Wait, so listen for a second with the miscarriage if you don’t mind. Did you go see the doctor and that’s how you found out, how did that come to pass.
A: So this is a great story, I actually have my very first appointment and they do an ultrasound and I come from what I would consider the more crunchy community, and they’re very on one extreme and they can be in very anti medicine, even things like ultrasound and so it was already sort of like a conflict of emotional interest for me but we went in, and it’s transvaginall, so you’re half naked laying there and the woman was doing and she said I’m sorry, I’m not detecting a heartbeat. My husband and I were like okay well what does that mean, like maybe it’s too early, and I kind of sat there and I’m sobbing and she’s got the wand up me and takes it out eventually she leaves us in there for about a half an hour, they move us to another room, leading us through a back hallway. And the doctor comes in multiple people came in asking me the same question we were there for over an hour and a half,
P: wow
A: said your baby has passed, it’s pretty clear. We can do a DNC right now, and just get it over with for you and us. It’s our first pregnancy, it taken us two years to conceive, we wanted to give our baby a chance maybe I wasn’t as far along as they had a single bed and read stories of that so we gave it a few weeks, I had a horrible experience with the nurse she ended up calling me a few days later and telling me because I was RH negative, if I didn’t get the RhoGAM shot right then and there, I’d probably never have a successful pregnancy, I would have miscarriages for the rest of my life.
P: Okay, to give some context to this discussion, the issue is Rh incompatibility which is a complication of pregnancy that evolves if the mother and baby have different Rh factors in their blood. What’s Rh factor? There’s a marker on red blood cells called Rh factor, and it can be positive if the marker is present, or negative if it’s not, roughly 18% of the population is Rh negative. This issue only arises if the mother’s RH negative baby is Rh positive. That’s the situation Ashley has. If you have this mismatch between baby and mother, you only get a negative outcome if some of the baby’s Rh positive blood gets into the mother’s RH negative bloodstream which can happen for a whole bunch of reasons including a birth during abortion or miscarriage, if the baby’s blood does get into it’s mother’s circulation. The mother’s immune cells view Rh positive blood as foreign and develop antibodies to attack these blood cells, which can wreak all kinds of havoc for the baby,
this mismatch won’t necessarily affect the first baby because it takes some time for the immune system to develop antibodies, but it could affect the health of later pregnancies, if those involve a baby who’s Rh positive. The good news is that there’s a fix for this, you can desensitize the mother’s blood, so there’s no immune system reaction by giving her a shot called rogram.
A: It was terrible
P: Good lord, oh my God,
A: it was terrible. The whole experience was devastating. It was I, you could say it was traumatizing.
P: Yes you could oh my god, I’m so sorry that you guys went through that
I’ve spoken before with a fantastic therapist, Rebecca Sheree from family tree wellness, about the challenges of navigating a miscarriage. And here’s what she had to say well we talked about Ashley’s experience
Rebecca: when you get pregnant, everything kind of opens up, right, we call it the portal in our work here. Family tree wellness because it just cracks you wide open. This whole experience of getting pregnant, trying to get pregnant, grief and loss also really cracks you wide open, you get more raw right and that’s a biological component where mom has to be open in order to connect and attach with her baby. And the flip side of that is that it also lets everything else in too right it’s sort of like you’re kind of porous and we don’t want to cut that off, right, right, we need that openness and I’d even go as far as to say that we need that openness throughout our lives, just so happens that this is when it really comes to fruition. So, it seems like that portal kind of cracked open with her getting pregnant that first time, it’s, it’s a really hard situation and it deserves a lot of warmth and kindness, and the ability to talk about it with somebody who really can listen and be curious with you.
P: So after the nurse calls you do call a doctor and say is this true or what happened.
A: I mean, here’s the thing, anyone who tries to scare you into anything is lying to you. I didn’t appreciate that. And in the back of my head, I didn’t really believe that was true but it did put fear in me that I was doing something to cause my body not to be fertile and this is coming off of two years of infertility, I gave it a little bit of breathing room, but I didn’t leave it for very long. I was more angry that she was that unemotionally intelligent,
P: yeah. Yeah, agreed. And let me ask you another question because we had a hard time getting pregnant too and after a year with no success. We went to the OB for health, he didn’t do that because you’re on the crunchy train.
A: Ah, so. To put it bluntly, I think my husband’s ego was more in the way he didn’t get checked and just kind of believed that it was meant to happen, it was going to happen and I’m just goes by and then you just don’t know all of a sudden two years is gone and there we are,
P: That seems like to me from my experience like you guys are amazing for for going that long because it’s so frustrating every month when it doesn’t work out right so I mean I remember the pile of negative pregnancy tests. So you know I just, I’m impressed that you guys could
like be hopeful.
A: Also I was a national level finger competitor, so I don’t know if you’re familiar with like bodybuilding and stuff. I had competed for about five years, and there when I was at my lowest body fat I was around 10% I stopped ovulating. So we just assumed that my body was trying to figure out how to have a cycle.
P: Just a quick note here, I looked up the relationship between body fat and fertility and a hard time finding papers to talk about body fat and infertility when body fat is too low, but I did find an article from 1987 That said that a person required 17% body fat to maintain a period, and 22% to have quote reproductive ability and the issue seems to be that body fat affects centers of the brain and the ovaries that produce all the hormones that you’ll need for fertility to happen.
A: It was inconsistent that first year that we tried some days would be 30 days. Some days 26 Some days 35 And then that second year it was pretty consistent it was every 29 days almost to the day to the hour. I think we were just
P: that make sense. Yeah,
A: like, take time. My body’s just recovering from five years of that.
P: Yeah, that makes sense. So, you keep trying, despite what this nurse says, and you do get pregnant. Mm hmm. That’s awesome. That’s a happy day in your house I’m guessing
A: it was scary actually I refused to take a test for a few days and my husband forced me to buy the test and to take it because I was afraid I wasn’t emotionally ready to go through. Same thing, but at the same time, I was so emotionally broken from losing our baby. I needed that to feel that life again.
P: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So, was the first trimester is just scary or how did you manage that.
A: It was terrifying. Yeah, really excited, but I always had the clock, the qualifier like I’m excited but let’s wait and see. I feel good but, you know, and every time I would go away as you know symptoms come and go, I would you know have crying fits and just freak out I didn’t tell people like I told with my first pregnancy and then we went to the first ultrasound my parents actually drove up from Louisiana, it’s like a 13 hour drive and they just want to be here no matter what the outcome is you, and it was wonderful and there was a little paper just, you know, floating around in there,
P: that’s exciting and very nice, but super nice for your parents to be supportive and to be there, and probably exciting for them right
A: it was their first leaving grandbaby
P: Yeah, yeah.
So how was that pregnancy, once you hit 12 weeks were you more comfortable,
A: I would say for the most part, I sort of let go and just trusted that this was meant to be. I remember I’m a Christian, by the way I remember being in the shower right before my husband forced me to take the test like crying, calling out to God like, why did you do this to me, why is this happening to us, you know, and he said very clearly, Have faith in me, because I have faith in you, you’re going to be pregnant again and it’s going to work, and so I just was like repeated that to myself over and over and over and over again,
P: that sounds like a good way to manage your stress was the rest of your pregnancy look
like.
A: It was really simple, I was very fortunate that I didn’t have any, I mean I had mild nausea here and there, but nothing like women experience. I was working at a chiropractic office I was getting adjusted so I didn’t really I didn’t have any physical pains whatsoever. I stopped exercising so that’s one thing that was very different is because of the, you know, the hormone history of the competition. I wanted to minimize anything in my body that could affect her health. My daughter’s health.
P: when Ashley says she avoided exercise during pregnancy, she’s reacting to her very specific experience with bodybuilding which led to very low body fat and messed with her hormones. I just want to note that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends moderate intensity aerobic exercise like brisk walking, because it may decrease the risk of gestational diabetes preeclampsia and cesarean delivery
A: it was really simple, really simple, really healthy I had no issues whatsoever I had wonderful cravings like everybody else, but, you know,
P: that sounds great and now take us to the birth, how do you know, today’s the day. How does that unfold.
A: Okay so this is where some of that, like crunchiness comes in so when I had the miscarriage, as I shared with you. You know, it’s, it’s not a it’s not a part of the lifestyle to get the ultrasound, but I needed that to feel confident that my baby was okay, I’d rather know than not know. So we got the regular ultrasounds and moving into birth, I was doing a hospital birth led by OB GYN and nurses, which again is sort of against the crunchy world. And it was, it was emotional conflict there, because in the crunchy world you know people say things like the body’s meant to birth you don’t need medication, it doesn’t on its own. It basically demonizes the medical community makes it seem like if you have a hospital birth, you’re going against your innate design as a woman, and you’re almost abnormal for being in a hospital. So I had fear that I was going to be treated like something that needs to be sterilized or just a robot vagina having a baby, not like a person, and you know, my OB was very friendly. It was very calm, very understanding. Of course they will arise when you say I want to do unmedicated so whatever, and that’s okay. I was a week post, due date, and waddled in they’re like, oh my gosh you’re still pregnant, I was like, yeah, here I am 41 weeks and they were like, Okay, so do you want to get induced today, I was actually asked as early as 37 weeks if I was gonna do so I’m like no, let’s let this baby do her thing. And then my doctor had a heart to heart, he’s like, we can’t, can’t let you go past 42 weeks. So we scheduled induction for week 42 My daughter is so stubborn, and she came two days before that.
P: Oh good, okay good.
A: And so it’s the middle it’s like eight o’clock at night, my husband’s on the back porch with our dogs crack lightning goes, and my mother in law told him, there’s going to be storm and your wife’s going on flavor and I happened exactly that way. First contraction, you’re like, I don’t know if this is really what I’m feeling it’s uncomfortable and you’re like ooh this is actually happening. Ooh, this is weird. And so we kept track of it, we call, and the doctor on call was like well you don’t sound like you’re in pain and I replied, Because I’m saucy that’s because I’m talking in between contractions. So he told us if it’s still, you know, progressing in the next hour. Come on in, so right around 11 o’clock we drove in my contractions were four minutes apart. They checked us in, I was like, I think, five centimeters because they admitted us. And I labored through the night and my contractions slowed when we got there, and I think all in all, right around 6am You know the doctor kept coming in saying things like, you don’t get a trophy for not being medicated, we’re gonna need to give you Pitocin. If you don’t progress further, you know, you’re there’s no way you’re gonna make this not an epidural like a negative talk but I was ready for battle you know cuz you’re taught that in a crunchy community to like fight against them.
P: Yeah but you crunchy community aside, this does not seem appropriate, this is not a caring, you centered situation is what it sounds like.
A: No, and that particular doctor, he was really funny during all of my prenatal appointments. It was kind of a surprise that he was acting like that. All that aside so I had probably been in labor from, like, 830 at night till six in the morning. The nurse comes in, they’re switching shifts and she’s with me till about seven, eight in the morning, no rest. And I’m falling asleep between contractions waking up, contraction falling asleep, and asked her, so how much longer do you think that I’ll be here, based upon the way that I’m progressing your experience or assumed it like the way that my contractions rolling and she’s like probably another eight hours, maybe as many as 12 Well, I’ve had friends with 24,36, 48 hours, labor so I don’t think that’s far fetched at all, you know, look at my husband and I tell him I can’t keep going this way, I really think that it’s time to get an epidural and the nurse suggested getting Pitocin. Because she said it’s not enough pressure to keep get the cervix ripe, dilated enough. My contractions aren’t effective as effective as they would like them to be she’s positive terms. Anyway, and I was like there’s no way in heck, I’m going to get Pitocin without an epidural because those things are a beast, so we’re doing it. She called in the epidural, got the Pitocin epidural around nine o’clock. I took a nap until about 1030 They woke me up, they’re like, Oh, you’re 10 centimeters, it’s time to push, wow, I started pushing, and I looked at the nurse and I was like, What time do you think she’ll be born and she goes, 1115 and she was born at 1114
P: Oh my god. Wow. Thank God you progress so fast.
A: Yeah, I think this shifted my mind a whole lot on epidurals. I noticed that when I was in labor, every time I had a contraction, every part of my body would tense up.
P: Yeah,
A: my like my pelvic floor, my rear my thighs my core, my hands everything. When I got the epidural on my body. Let go. Yeah. And I think that it gave my body permission to let my daughter bear down on my cervix and let it, let my body progress. I really shifted my mindset from thinking that epidurals were this demon to hey there’s a time and a place for them. Yeah, yeah, the time and place for them,
P: especially when you’ve been up all night laboring right you’re just exhausted, like, imagine you haven’t even put your body through the hardest part yet. Right, like, you’re going to need to draw reserves from somewhere so that totally makes sense. Exactly. Did you enjoy the birth? How did that go
A: Yeah, I was like, pushing and I couldn’t feel anything so I’m just doing what I thought memory felt like what it feels like to have a bowel movement this is what it feels like to push out urine so I’m going to try and connect to these sensations and push. And when she came out it was like, Oh my gosh, like I just birthed a baby
P: amazing. And also, I imagine, given your history as like a training person. You’re very kind of connected in touch with your body in a way that you can, you know, move things in a way that you want to.
A: I will say that that experience, transformed my mindset around the, around muscles and led me to where I am today, to where I do work with women with their core pelvic floor, and her postpartum body because so much changes in pregnancy, there’s so much that changes in your body, just in labor, so much that changes just in birth. First year postpartum. I mean it is. I like to say, more women go through in the two years of getting pregnant, and the first year postpartum that a man goes through in his lifetime.
P: Yeah,
A: exponentially incomparable.
P: I bet so. So what was it like when you went home.
A: So, right away when she was put on my chest, something was wrong. Like I could feel that something was wrong
P: wait, with you or with her.
A: Me, I immediately was afraid. I had postpartum depression but I didn’t recognize it. And I didn’t and I didn’t want to admit it because again that’s like, you’re, you’re doing all the healthy things you’re eating right or exercising or getting adjusted you put the oils on or whatever. If you have depression or anxiety, there’s something you’re broken right like that’s not supposed to happen so I didn’t want to admit it.
P: It took this issue to Rebecca know about the pathways to postpartum depression which is how does it develop,
Rebecca: there could be a biological component right after you have a baby, there’s a massive hormonal crash, right, and even like as as far into 48 hours after you have the baby, your hormones are just fluctuating. And so, you know, that is a component and we don’t want to discount that from a psychological perspective, you know, this idea of, oh my gosh, I just completely changed my life, there is no going back. And all of the ideas and messages that I got about what it means to be a mother come rushing it and I mean even right now talking about I can even get chills thinking about that right, it’s powerful, and all of those messages come not just from our own moms and our own families, but from society from what we would call legacy burdens things that are passed down intergenerationally that we have no control over, but somehow they’re in the cells of our bodies, so you know all that comes flooding in when they put that baby on your chest, and it sounds to me like when she said I knew that there was something wrong, that maybe there was some lack of connection, maybe she had some really fearful anxious part of herself that came into to kind of defend her from bonding right because of her previous traumatic experiences because, oh my gosh, what if I lose this one too. That’s so scary.
A: now, she was a she was a good baby. She didn’t sleep till she was two so she was up every one to three hours so she was 18 months old, I bed shared with her because I thought that’s what women are supposed to do, you’re supposed to breastfeed all night nurse on demand, and you sacrifice your sleep and your sanity to be a good mother, Because this is what you’re supposed to do.
P: I talked to Rebecca a little bit about the expectations that are placed on new mothers
Rebecca: we are taught that we have to sacrifice our bodies minds and souls for our kids…sort of my bottom line philosophy about all of this is that if our moms, and our potential moms were held in warmth and kindness and compassion, and the expectations were dropped it all be a lot better off, and that it feels like a really big tall order to ask for that, and that’s like a societal change that needs to happen. You look at other cultures that really put the mom first. And really care for her. After a baby’s born, it is so different, and also after women lose babies, you know other cultures have rituals around that that you know we’re talking about American society Americans really don’t have those rituals unless they create them themselves. And I think that’s equally important, but I just think that, you know, we’re missing the mark. At the very outset of creating families, it’s, it’s like okay, You know we’re not just a vessel for life It’s a privilege and an honor to be able to do that, I mean it’s nothing short of a miracle. Right. But because of that miracle we have to really be held in a way that is just infinitely different from how we’re doing it now, because how we’re doing it now is just putting a bunch of expectations on you should be this certain weight, you shouldn’t gain more than, you know X number of pounds during a pregnancy, you, you know, you should you should you should, And that just creates so much angst and fear inside of moms and, you know, we know that fear inhibits labor, it inhibits bonding, it’s just, it’s not, not a great place to start.
A: I ended up having to quit my job because I couldn’t do it all.
P: Yeah,
A: don’t get me wrong, she was a wonderful baby she was very happy, she very much needed her mom, and what I’ve learned now is that she feeds off my energy so when I’m having emotional mental struggles she does too and so we kind of like tip tap off of each other but for the most part, I mean, it was, it was still wonderful having her, it was just a struggle until that postpartum depression subsided.
P: Well, what I’ve seen is postpartum depression is one in seven women. And the most common side effect of pregnancy, so it can’t be that you’re broken, it must be that it’s hormonal resolution right or something like that.
A: I firmly, firmly believe and this is one of my many soap boxes is that we do not nourish the prenatal body the way that we should or the postpartum body,
P: Yup
A: the prenatal vitamin is not enough, I mean, women that have autoimmune diseases that show up within one to five years having their baby on thyroid issues one to five years after having their baby inexplicably wait one to five years after having their baby adrenal fatigue. It’s not like our bodies are all of a sudden malfunctioning, it’s because we’ve given given given given we literally create in life. Of course our bodies need to be nourished higher than a prenatal vitamins.
P: That’s totally true, as someone with an autoimmune condition. I hear you
So this is a big topic. Hey, the causes for most autoimmune problems can’t be attributed to one thing or another. True that autoimmune disease is a lot more common in women than men. I mean like a lot more common. It’s estimated that 78% of the population with autoimmune disease is female. And in general, one of the drivers of this imbalance is believed to be dramatic changes in hormones, which in turn affect the immune system. So we tend to see more autoimmune conditions in women after puberty and after menopause, and sometimes also after pregnancy. It could be that hormone swings after pregnancy, in conjunction with the stress of a new baby, Lack of sleep and nutritional deficiencies, contribute to postpartum onset, but the world of immunology, is a giant bottomless hole, and we learn new things about immune activity all the time, so stay tuned for more definitive information on this stuff.
So, ultimately, though this is a success story, you just kind of rode out the postpartum depression or did you get help or how was that
A: I did not. I didn’t even admit to it until my husband and I had a very horrible fights, and he asked me, one of the most simplest questions you can ask and it was are you happy, and I realized, oh my gosh, like, I’m not, but it’s not your fault. I have something’s wrong with me, and nothing happened. Like I didn’t take anything but all of a sudden I just felt lighter and then three months later I got pregnant again.
P: Wow. Oh my god, I’m going to be happy all day thinking how easy it was the second time, so thank you for that.
A: You’re welcome.
P: And how was that pregnancy.
A: It was, it was really good. It was challenging because my, we have so much chaos that happened since my daughter was born, my husband got hit by a freight truck in on November, 8 of 2017
P: Oh my god,
A: he had a concussion, they got he was fine but it put us in a really bad place, financially and emotionally, so he had residual effects from the concussion, and we had the two years have been my postpartum depression that kind of pulled us apart. We had like four or five months where we were good and then pulled us apart so I got pregnant, a month after his car accident. It was really good and I was already doing what I do now, so my heal & seal which is the diocese pelvic floor work. So my body physically was really good. I would say that I struggled a little bit with prenatal depression when I was pregnant, but most of that I could attribute to situational things we were going through, but I will say having gone through what I did with my daughter made me realize that I’m not broken. This is I am okay. This is the season of my life, I am worthy of getting help. It’s okay to take medication, it’s okay to break, it’s okay to eat some cookie dough, and not feel like I’m poisoning myself, you know, I can do all of these things, and be okay. And so I think mindset wise it was a lot better and I actually made the decision to hire a doula with that pregnancy.
P: That’s a good call. And so it sounds like the pregnancy was fairly straightforward.
A: I mean I was a little more nauseous with him but never threw up.
P: And then what was the birth like
A: the birth was incredible. Again, I went into it, wanting to have an unmedicated birth but truthfully, like my birth plan at the very top, just said to have a healthy living mother and a living baby I don’t even want to quantify the term healthy I just did living in the time between having my daughter and my son was about three years my daughter was three years and three months when my son was born. I’ve heard at least 200 Different birth stories. And I, I know that a birth can go any way, single direction at any single time at no fault to anyone whatsoever. And I didn’t want to set myself up with the expectations that I did in my first birth I actually didn’t tell many people that I got an epidural cuz I was ashamed of it. And I feel like that clouded the beauty of her birth and I didn’t want to carry expectations into my son um so as long as we were both alive medicated, I’m medicated C section, put under C section I don’t care. We just need to be alive.
P: yeah
A: So, same thing, exact same situation, I walked in at 41 weeks and they scheduled me for an induction and two days later or two days before the induction date my water broke, which didn’t happen with my daughter, and it terrified me a little bit because when you go into labor on your own, you’re not on the clock, but when you go when your water breaks or on a 24 hour clock now because of risk of infection, and I got my birth plan is everyone alive but I didn’t want to have to get a C section I didn’t have to. Mostly because I know what their cover is like for the scar, for any other purpose. Yeah, water rates, I call my doula. I was like I’m peeing myself and it’s not urine I’m pretty sure my water broke she’s asked me questions about color the smell and I was like, I don’t know, there’s just stuff coming out. My husband’s panicking. And he was like, first of all go to the store, buy me some pads because I just walk around like go buy me some pads so he goes and buys me some pads and comes back and I’m in denial that I’m going to have a baby anytime soon, so I’m just walking around the house, packing up my daughter’s bag with you know, snacks and coloring books and crayons and whatever. So, he here, we’re going outside lightning strikes it starts to rain just like the first one. Apparently my husband said he was watching the Miami Dolphins game and lightning struck as my Waterbrook
P: Oh my, God
A: I know. Go figure. So they’re outside the car he’s yelling. Are you coming or what and my first contraction had and it is world, different than an unwanted broken contraction, and I’m like gripping on to the banner or banister on our porch and he’s like, Well, what are you doing I screamed. I was like, don’t you think call me This is horrible. And it goes away like I’m so sorry. Oh, it’s probably gonna happen a lot, just forgive me and so I get the car sitting on like a stack of towels. Driving in. So this is three o’clock Waterbrook around 233 o’clock we’re heading there we get there, I’m having contractions upon each other, the doula met us there, I can’t get a foot walking without another contraction she’s squeezing my hips and waters falling out with me. They don’t even ask me questions, they just bring me a wheelchair and bring me right back and I’m so grateful. So we’re in there. And it’s interesting, my five year old daughter’s there I don’t mind her being there and my husband’s uncomfortable with it I think it’s beautiful for her to see, what birth is so that she doesn’t have fear, and yeah, 30 years when she has a baby, wherever she has a baby. And I was laboring unmedicated and I did great. My contractions were really intense. They lasted, I think over a minute and
P: oh wow.
A: When I got there I was at seven centimeters so I was pretty good. Oh, I mean I went from like two at my appointment to seven and I’m just, I’m gripping the handles and sitting there, I’m breathing through it, everything’s fine and then they come in and say, you know, we’re not getting a good heart rate on your son, can we do, whatever it’s called, I was like, what does that mean, and they’re like an internal monitor, I was like, does that mean you have to go up to my vagina. She said, Yeah, I was like, No, laying down was painful for me I wanted to sit up and
P: so I think what Ashley Kate is talking about here is called a fetal scalp electrode, it’s an internal monitor that you can use after your water’s broken. If your cervix is dilated enough, and it’s a small clip that’s placed on a baby’s scalp to directly monitor the fetal heart rate.
A: The doctor comes in and says, Listen, your birth plan is everyone alive but we don’t have a heart rate on and we need to do this and I was like, okay, so I waited for the break lay down, it was horrible. They inserted it, I sat back up I was able to get back in the zone and I was fine, then they’re, they’re like tugging on the cord and they’re talking, and apparently it wasn’t working so to do to get to. They laid me down sat me up, and that one wasn’t working so now they’re half there’s like six people in there and it’s starting to break my concentration, and so they’ve done it twice now.
P: Yeah,
A: third time they tell me that they need to reposition it and I was like, no, no, no, like this is torture so they lay me back down, which is fine, I mean I was just rebutting to pray that the gods of the world would just not make me do it again but I had to. So I lay down at this point, they’re like, holding my leg up, trying to take the other one off, well then I start having the ejection reflex, and I’m pooping myself.
P: Okay, this is what I think is going on here, the fetal ejection reflex is also called the Ferguson reflex and happens when your body expels the baby without pushing. There’s a hormone feedback loop that’s engaged during birth, oxytocin is released in bursts in the brain in the body, and it makes the uterus contract, the pressure of the baby, the birth canal stimulates the release of more oxytocin which causes your uterus to contract more and push the baby further down the birth canal, until finally the baby’s born, but the pressure on the cervix and the vagina releases the anal sphincter which can also make you poop. Keep in mind, this is a reflex. So Ashley does not have control over it, but a baby born without pushing does not mean a baby born without pain.
A: and the Doctors like you’re not completely you’re not gonna see I was like I can’t help it I’m screaming.
P: what’s your not complete mean?
A: my, I wasn’t completely dilated I was only enough. He’s like, if you keep tearing down you’re gonna tear your cervix and I’m I can’t like I’m not doing this.
P: Yeah.
A: Yeah. Don’t they clean up my doodle, still on my side, they’re still holding my leg up, husband and daughter have left the room at this point. My doulas with me, and they won’t let me sit back up because for whatever reason they can’t get a good whatever. So I started screaming okay this is it someone fucking helped me and like cutting someone effing helped me, give me an epidural, this is that I’m done, let’s do it so they’ve been gearing up for draw I’m 90 and a half centimeters, and the nurses are like, we can’t get it for you and the doctors like yes we can get like just to get it set me up within 20 minutes I have the epidural, I start to breathe and I feel good. And I look at them and I was like, I’m so sorry.
I’m sorry, and they’re like it’s okay, I was like no, I was crazy, like that’s crazy crazy they’re like it’s okay and I said okay, can the water really thirsty, so they bring me some water and the doctor is like you know what you relax for 20 minutes we’ll come back in and check you and we’ll have a baby and I was like, okay, great, sounds good. So he comes in, and Dude man is ready to go and he’s starting to come out and they lay me back or lay me back, And we get rolling right and I’m pushing. And I can feel pressure. It’s like when you have a really deep pimple and you try and pop it it’s like I could feel the pressure of him, loved it. I can feel him in my belly. So I felt like we were working together versus with my daughter was muscle memory so I knew what I was doing.
And I was pushing, and I think we were like five or six pushes in and the doctor looks at me and says, Listen, if you don’t push this baby out in the next two pushes, we’re gonna have to use the vacuum, and I’m a challenge oriented person and the nurse looked at me, the one I was with the whole time she’s like, Listen, you got this. You’re down, grab your knees, let’s go and I was like, Okay, I was like oh that’s what they’re like yes keep going, I was like, there’s my baby and he came on out and doctor gave him to me it was a totally different experience and with my daughter. It was, I was, I was immediately happier. I was clearer than before. It was totally euphoric, whereas with her it was like, Oh my gosh, what is happening with my leg. Oh it’s a baby here’s my bed like here’s my daughter come in. I thought it was wonderful and then I started thinking like Doctor was kind of reading by telling me that.
so we get three different perspectives on this birth right, I thought it was amazing. I thought he was rude, but I thought okay, like maybe that’s how he talks. It doesn’t matter, like it was one little comment, you know, my husband thought he was wonderful because he took control of chaotic situation and made up happen. My daughter said that he was disrespectful and rude and so now I’m sitting here. My baby, he’s, he’s like, I don’t know, three hours old, and I’m like, what is reality. Like maybe I was just so caught up in pushing that I didn’t realize that I was being mistreated or not, you know, we went, you know, wonderful postpartum the babies slept well I had no pain, no, no real issues to speak of waiting for my appointment and spoke with the doctor and I was like, are we going to talk about the birth at all and he’s like, Well, what do you need. Now I was like well, I have my perspective, my husband has his and my Doula has hers and I kind of want to marry that with what the doctor wrote in the notes to understand what happened, explain my side, and then the doctor said, Well, you know, apparently every time you had a contraction your son’s heart rate decelerated greatly, which is why he was so forceful about getting the monitor, once we got the monitor, we were able to track it yes that was in fact happening. That’s why He gave you the epidural and also why he was telling you so forcibly to push, because when he came out he had the cord wrapped around his neck twice.
P: Wow,
A: that changes perspective, right, Like, is the birthing mother, we sometimes want this gentle, loving experience, but maybe what I needed was to be firmly told because what if my baby had died because that’s right,
P: yeah.
A: Dying delivery, all the time. Yeah, it’s really changed my perspective like, that’s you could have said it softer but maybe not in a moment, you know.
P: Yeah, it’s hard to remember, even though they’re professional adopters are people too and he may have been panicked. Right and that’s his panic voice in the same way that you were yelling at your husband when your body was being squeezed that like an unbelievable force, and it wasn’t, obviously that’s not who you are, it wasn’t really in your control. Maybe he was just responding to the moment.
A: being urgent, Yeah, I have zero trauma from that birth, I know that people have trauma from birth, but I think having those two years of doing my healing seal or three years of doing that program, and hearing all those birth stories made me realize that all these different things happen. And it’s my reaction to it that controls how joyful, the outcome is, aside from medical neglect.
P: Yeah, agree, that sounds like an amazing learning curve, you had between the first and the second, which is not to say the things in the first weren’t difficult, and the experience before that wasn’t super difficult, but it seems like you took all the difficult things from that experience and used them to your advantage to understand like how you could have more of what you wanted in the next one.
A: I agree with you and I think the biggest thing that I realized is that none of it’s in my control.
P: Yeah,
A: I’ve heard of homebirths going awry. I’ve heard of MIS. None of it’s in my control. It’s going to happen the way that it’s going to happen and I think for me as a birthing mother and what I empower all of my pregnant clients is have your plan and have your preferences but make sure that you’re focused on your non negotiables and leave the rest of variables and I mean non negotiable. It’s not like I want to have an epidural or I don’t, but your non negotiables are things that you feel very passionately about like, I want my husband there, or I don’t want to do the vaccines, or I don’t want to do the eyewash or if I need it right then and there, or I want to breastfeed or I don’t want to breastfeed, those things are things that you can control
P: yeah,
A: everything else just happens, and we have to just roll with it, again, aside from medical neglect,
P: it is a it is a challenging experience because my guess is that for most of us before giving birth. There are very few experiences where you have so little control over your own body and sickness may be one example, but outside of like cancer or HIV or something it doesn’t. Yours like pregnancy does, and there aren’t so many people managing you right like it’s a different feeling to have someone else telling you, I’m getting the vacuum.
A: You can’t manage yourself which is why I had the doula. My goal is to try and connect with my baby and feel what my bodies and birth are do that if you can’t like birth a baby and manage people at the same time if anyone in the world could do it, I probably could because I’m a great multitasker but, no
P: yeah I agree, hopefully in the future it will be changed and doulas will be covered by insurance, but they seem like a necessary and necessary person to have on your team in that circumstance, I think, I think for the first birth women don’t understand how compromised, they’ll be right.
A: Yeah, and I love that it’s an on, not that they’re not emotional with you, because my Doula was one of my best friends, but she’s not as emotionally invested in the birth as my husband and I are he acts more on anxiety and fear, I’m acting out of pain and fear. She’s acting out of rational thought she can see it she’s in other words, she, she has perspective, she has a calm tone, you know, it’s someone that is more closely affiliated to me than the doctor or the nurse that I am just meeting, typically for the first time, you know, so I think it’s huge, it’s a huge comfort level I told her that she was wanting stability, like she was just a pole of stability for me full time.
P: That’s awesome. So what are your kids into now.
A: My five and a half year old is very girly. She’s very prissy but she’ll also get very dirty with you she loves digging in the dirt, and my two and a half year old is everything, boy. He likes cars and trucks and dinosaurs and dirt, and he is aggressive and he loves to climb and jump. Oh my gosh, he is just a knight,
P: that’s fun. That’s a fun age and then he probably sounds very busy.
A: Oh yeah.
P: Tell us about your business and how that is related your experience.
A: Yeah, so after, like I said I came from the crunchy community and I found that there was a lot of cattiness between women and motherhood. You know when you’re working as a professional, you kind of just pay attention to your job, you know, I didn’t have a ton of friends I didn’t socialize much how to when I became a mother and stop working. I socialize and I found women were competitive and negative with one another. I found that you’re either vaccination anti vaccination, mostly anti closely breastfeeding bottle feeding, Christian non Christian liberal, conservative, tall, short, fat, skinny, all this, it was stupid to me, because here I am struggling with postpartum depression. I just want to get through the day.
P: yeah
A: bEating up in the little for who I am. So I have this vision of having a facility where women could come and take care of their bodies physically, but in an empowering way not like you’re that you need to lose weight but like let’s get stronger so that you can play with your kids, and the healing field was really the first step to that so healing field. One of my friends was walking through the zoo with me and told me that she her vagina felt like it was gonna fall out. And she’s like, I have a single diastasis recti you’re good with muscles figure it out, I was like okay, challenge accepted me about six to eight months but I created a program how to test group, and then launched it and I then me, I’ll say God, God gave me the information but lives have been changing for the past four and a half years from this program. Women who felt like their core would never feel strong again back pain goes away, and women avoiding surgery, pelvic pain going away prolapse is going away and continents going away.
P: Oh wow.
A: In, yeah, in Canada, it’s actually really easy to fix. By the way,
P: Please tell me that you have like an online presence so people who don’t live in South Carolina can reach you.
A: Yes, so I have a Facebook page and I also have an Instagram for both humans and the studio which is called mommy strong. And the healing seal I have, I can do zoom sessions with people in person sessions and then I have an online vault where you can purchase videos that teach you how to do the techniques.
P: Super cool. And actually this is an amazing story and I’m so grateful to hear it. Thanks so much for sharing it. Thanks so much for coming on the show today.
A: Well thank you really thank you for giving me the chance to help empower women.
P: Thanks again to Ashley for sharing her story and to Rebecca for sharing her insights about the burden of expectations around pregnancy and motherhood, and about postpartum depression. One thing Rebecca mentioned was that the current estimate for the frequency of postpartum depression is now thought to be 1 in 5, and according to some counts, 1 in 3 women which is obviously ridiculously common and the fact that these numbers may be tricky to pin down because women aren’t directly reporting on their experience with it suggests that we need a new way to manage this….
I will put all the links to Ashley’s facebook page for her studio and her videos in the show notes which can be found at the War Stories from the Womb website.
Thanks for listening.
We’ll be back soon with another inspiring story.
