You would’ve expected to see comments of support and congratulations on Raye Lee’s Facebook page, after she gave birth earlier this month. Instead, the new mother was bombarded with comments claiming that a C-section somehow invalidated the monumental occasion. We’d love to spend a paragraph (or more) explaining why declaring a C-section “the easy way out” is a terrible thing to do, but Raye’s emotional (and graphic) follow-up post does an even better job.

LONG DRAMATIC POST WARNING:

“Oh. A c-section? So you didn’t actually give birth. It must have been nice to take the easy way out like that.”

Ah, yes. My emergency c-section was absolutely a matter of convenience. It was really convenient to be in labor for 38 hours before my baby went into distress and then every contraction was literally STOPPING his HEART.

Being told at the beginning that I was displaying great progress and wouldn’t need a cesarean section… and then being told that I was being prepped for major abdominal surgery was not a shock at all. It had nothing to do with the fact that I physically couldn’t because I was given no other choice to save the life of my child. Oh, and that surgery is super easy peasy to recover from.

WRONG, That is all sarcasm.

This was the most painful thing I have experienced in my life.
I now belong to a badass tribe of mamas with the scar to prove that I had a baby cut out of me and lived to tell the tale.
( because you can die from this, you know. )

Having a shrieking infant pulled out of an incision that is only 5 inches long, but is cut and shredded and pulled until it rips apart through all of your layers of fat, muscle, and organs (which they lay on the table next to your body, in order to continue to cut until they reach your child) is a completely different experience than I had imagined my sons birth to be.

This was not pleasant. It still isn’t.

You use your core muscles for literally everything… even sitting down, imagine not being able to use them because they have literally been shredded and mangled by a doctor and not being able to repair them for 6+ weeks because your body has to do it naturally.

When that first nurse asked you to try getting out of bed and the ripping pain of a body cut apart and stitched back together seared through you, you realized the irony of anybody who talks about it being the “easy way out”. So f*ck you and f*ck how you see what I did.

I am the strongest woman, that I know. Not only for myself, but for my beautiful son… and I would honestly go through this every single day just to make sure I am able to see his smiling face.