Badass

I've always said having a c-section is not the "easy way out" (no pun intended) with it being major abdominal surgery and requiring what is sometimes a slow and painful recovery.  After two c-sections, a surgery for a ruptured ovary and Fallopian tube following an ectopic pregnancy honestly felt like a walk in the park. Yet it's seldom you hear women who've given birth by Cesarean described as amazing or courageous or tough. Those words seem to be reserved for women who have un-medicated, vaginal births. 

As much as I speak up about the Cesarean birth experience in an effort to reclaim that experience from those who try to portray it as an inferior birth experience, I've never thought about the positive things a cesarean reveals about a person.  Instead, I've spent my time defending the experience and trying to put it on an even playing field with the vaginal birth.  It was only after reading the essay My Wife's Cesarean Makes Her a Total Badass that I truly identified with being tough, or "badass" as the author describes his wife. And even though Chris would never be so public about his feelings, I could kind of hear his voice in this essay, which made me teary-eyed when I first read it.