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Shawn Johnson: ‘My C-Section Made Me Feel Like A Failure As a Mom’


Four-time Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Shawn Johnson East—like so many women—has incredibly high expectations of herself. So when the delivery of her daughter Drew Hazel didn’t go as she’d planned, she felt like she’d failed in her first moments of motherhood. “I went in with such a stubborn mindset of thinking the only way I could bring our baby into the world was naturally. No meds no intervention. At 14 hours when I chose to get an epidural, I felt guilty. At 22 hours when we were told I had to get a C-section, I felt like I had failed,” she wrote on Instagram. Here, Johnson East opens up to Glamour about the complicated world of social media moms, wrestling with mom guilt, and what it means to be a strong mother.

As an athlete, I had one mentality: you have to be strong, not weak. I was never one to take pain medication, worried it might affect my performance or somehow make me less of an elite athlete. Fast forward to motherhood, and those same attitudes applied. I muscled through the aches and pains of pregnancy, never wanting to be ‘that complaining pregnant woman,’ and planned to have a natural birth—it was my body against the pain. It was my first real mom decision and I felt like the safest option for my baby was going natural. That’s what I thought it meant to be a strong mother.

Things did not go as planned. Fourteen hours into labor, I asked for an epidural. By 22 hours, I was being taken for a C-section.

It my first wave of mom guilt. I felt like I’d caved, like I was selfish for getting the epidural. I wondered, Am I already making a poor decision for my child? I felt guilty, like I wasn’t doing this for my daughter but as a selfish reaction to the pain. And when doctors told me I’d need a C-section, I felt like this beautiful dream I’d had as a first-time mom to do the best thing for my child had failed. I know that C-sections are relatively safe procedures—safer than delivering vaginally in some cases—but I couldn’t stop thinking, What if something goes wrong because I selfishly decided to do this? I felt like I had failed her already.

There’s so much pressure on moms to be perfect. We tell moms that they have to be perfect otherwise they’re going to scar their child, raise them the wrong way, and leave them with issues that will be all mom’s fault. Sometimes it feels like no matter what decision you make, it’s the wrong one. In the hospital, I had this painful doubt: Am I already doing something wrong for my baby?

People on social media have a lot to say about this. We all know the mommy shamers—I’ve already been asked how dare I not breastfeed—people with such passionate opinions and an appetite for confrontation. It can breed a very negative mindset that you’re doing everything wrong for your child. But there’s another side to social media that offers so much support and makes moms not some idealized figures but human.

I know this from personal experience. Three years ago, my husband and I shared our miscarriage on social media—it was such a random leap of faith but opening up about that pain was really the only thing that got me through it. Thousands of women reached out with their own stories and it showed me a whole community that I didn’t really see before. It made me feel so much less alone.

After 22 hours of labor ending in a C-section, our daughter Drew Hazel East was born happy and healthy. After we brought her home, I thought about how healing it felt to share my miscarriage and decided to open up about feeling like a failure for having a C-section. I still had doubts about the whole thing—Should I feel guilty? Did I do the right thing? Seeing messages like “I went through the same thing and I felt the same way,” was so reassuring. I stopped feeling like a failure as a mom and felt human again.

When we’d shared our miscarriage story, I felt this frustration: Why aren’t these feelings of insecurity and shame talked about more? Why do women feel like they have to keep it hidden? I think the same thing goes for having a kid—people make every topic so dramatic, so controversial, and so political. You’re a natural birth mom or an elective C-section mom. A breastfeeding mom or a formula mom. A stay-at-home mom or a working mom. There are so many topics that just alienate you from the world immediately.

I think that’s the wrong approach. The moment I got to hold my daughter for the first time, I literally could have laughed at myself and everything that I cared about before that moment. For me to have cared so much about what it would mean if I had an epidural was crazy—I’d brought my daughter into the world happy and healthy. And that was all that mattered in my first moments as a mom.

Now I think being strong as a mom is learning how to go with the flow. You can have your plans and you can have your preferences about what’s best, but at the end of the day it’s about you and your child figuring things out together. Being strong as a mom isn’t sticking to a plan, it’s figuring it out and wrestling through it. It’s about being able to hold your baby and say, “Okay, we made it one step closer to whatever the goal is.” And being okay with however you get there.

Shawn Johnson East is an Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast, YouTuber and mom. Follow her at @shawnjohnson.





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Sex After C-Section: Sex After My C-Section Helped Me Stop Feeling Like I’d Failed Giving Birth


It turns out that tiny strips of silicone can help reduce the appearance of scars. You place them on top of the wound at night, and over time the scar fades. I wasn’t home a few hours from the ob-gyn before ordering a jumbo pack online. The sooner it came, the sooner I could start getting rid of This Thing.

Before the scar, stretch marks, and baby, my marital sex life was hot. We were the kind of couple who often wouldn’t make it to the bedroom, christening the couch or a beach blanket in our desire. I felt confident as I figured what my husband saw in me was what I saw in the mirror: a former collegiate swimmer with small perky breasts and firm thighs. After my C-section, with grayish purple lines dancing around my nipples and lower abdomen, and a scar cutting through my pubic region, I’m not so seamless, the physical changes a reminder of what my body has been through.

When we were cleared to have sex after five weeks, I was excited to be close to my husband again but apprehensive about how it’d go. I wasn’t feeling particularly seductive—with breast milk leaking out of my nipples and my hair in an unwashed bun, I wasn’t exactly turning myself on. My body and mind had been through a transformation, one that felt far from anything bedroom-related.

But something changed when we had sex, my angry scar on full display. Naked again with my husband, I not only felt worthy; I felt hot. I felt reminded that my body is powerful, feminine. After all, it brought our baby safely into this world, vaginal birth or not.

“Pin me down,” I commanded, hardly believing how confident I felt. My husband grinned, never more willing to oblige. I finally felt like the strong, beautiful woman my husband had been telling me I was. His excitement for me—scar and all—reminds me to embrace myself more fully.

Our scars are difficult to accept. They remind us of something in our lives that didn’t go quite as we expected. But they are also a part of our journey, our story, our beauty. My C-section brought me my giggling babe. It brought me closer to my partner. Perhaps most important, it brought me closer to loving myself even when things don’t go to plan.

When I think about it that way, I don’t hate my scar at all. In fact, I don’t need those silicone strips. I never even opened the box.

Jenna Jonaitis is a writer in Michigan covering lifestyle, wellness, and parenting. Follow her on Instagram and see her other work here.





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Olympian Allyson Felix Broke a Record Held by Usain Bolt Just 10 Months After a C-Section


Over the weekend, Olympic sprinter Allyson Felix won her 12th gold medal at a track and field World Championships—breaking a record formerly held by Usain Bolt, the runner often referred to as the “world’s fastest man.”

Felix, 33, took the world record from Bolt in Doha after a 4 x 400 mixed-gender relay race victory. She’s competed in four Olympics and won nine medals, six of them gold, but what makes this victory even more important is that it’s Felix’s first since giving birth to her daughter, Camryn, ten months ago.

The birth wasn’t easy. People reports that the Olympian suffered from severe preeclampsia and gave birth via C-section. “It’s different, definitely challenging. I think for any new mom when she returned to work just, you’re exhausted and you’re balancing your family and what it all looks like,” she told the magazine in July about getting back into her training routine.

After her major accomplishment this weekend, Felix simply tweeted, “Humbled???.”

Since then, she’s spoken out about what this victory means as a mother. “Our journey to motherhood and back is bigger than us and bigger than sport. I believe it’s about overcoming and that is something we all have to do,” she wrote on Instagram yesterday. “I have seen the power of the collective. The need to speak your truth. It’s a pivotal time for women in sport. We can create change. Women, let’s support each other. Uplift and encourage. Open doors for one another. Celebrate and elevate each other. We can all win. This is sisterhood.”

It seems her daughter, and other mothers, are her biggest inspiration. “Life looks different. Cammy is 10 months old today. Figuring out this mom life,” she said. “I’ve had to fight a lot this year- for my health, for my daughter, for women & mothers, for what I deserve and for my fitness. I’m really proud to be at my 9th world championships and this one is extra special because my baby girl is in the stadium to watch it all.”

Felix, a new Athleta ambassador, has an impressive record of using her platform to advocate for women—and especially mothers—in sport. After Olympian Alysia Montaño called out her former sponsor Nike for not supporting pregnant athletes, Felix (and fellow Olympic runner Kara Goucher) also spoke up. “What I’m not willing to accept is the enduring status quo around maternity. I asked Nike to contractually guarantee that I wouldn’t be punished if I didn’t perform at my best in the months surrounding childbirth,” she wrote in a New York Times op-ed in May. “I wanted to set a new standard. If I, one of Nike’s most widely marketed athletes, couldn’t secure these protections, who could?”

It’s safe to say Felix has set a new standard: Women can be mothers and champions.



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Brazilian Women Are Throwing Elaborate C-Section Watch Parties —and Everyone’s Invited


When you think of women giving birth via Caesarean section, a big old party might not be the first thing that comes to mind—it is major abdominal surgery, after all. But a new story from the Washington Post reports that the latest maternity-related trend in Brazil features wealthy women throwing elaborate (and expensive) celebrations for their elective C-sections and inviting friends and family to watch the entire thing.

Elective C-sections, where the procedure is scheduled ahead of time, have long been popular in Brazil. The Post reports that Caeasarean births make up 55.5 percent of all deliveries in Brazil (and 84 percent in private hospitals). By comparison, the paper states that in the US that number is just 32.9 percent. Now some women are turning these births into major events and hiring “maternity planners” to plan the parties—and hospitals are starting to cater to them.

For example, there is a private hospital in São Paulo where a woman can pay 2000 reais per day (or $500) to rent out a suite that has a balcony and a mini bar, plus a living room and bathroom for guests. In the works? A new maternity ward that will have a wine cellar and a ballroom. “It’s cultural,” Marcia da Costa, the hospital’s director, told the paper. “Brazilians want to plan for everything. They don’t want to hit traffic on the way to the hospital. They want to get their nails done, get a wax, to plan it like an event.”

Mariana Casmalla had a C-section party in full makeup, complete with crystal vases filled with roses and silver trays with chocolates and cakes for her guests. “It’s a special occasion,” she told the Post. “Don’t we get dressed up for parties and special dates? It’s the same thing.” One event planner says that her clients spend around $10,000 for services like flowers, guest books, monogrammed sheets, personalized water bottles, and favors for guests.

However, the Post reports that the World Health Organization has been working for years to reduce the number of elective C-sections because they are “nearly twice as deadly for mothers than natural births and require longer recovery times for mothers and babies.”

Obviously, however women and their families should decide how they want to welcome children into the world—including privately and with little fanfare—as long as the health of all involved is the top priority. For these Brazilian women, being surrounded by people they love makes the experience that much more special. “I love it,” Bruna Viera, who spent weeks planning her scheduled birth party, told the Post. “You feel the tenderness people have for you. Many moms suffer from postpartum depression and feel isolated. Your hormones are raging. But to be surrounded by the people you love, people who saw you grow up, is extraordinary.”



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Kate Hudson Is Being Called Out for Describing Her C-Section Birth as 'Lazy'


PHOTO: Luca Teuchmann/WireImage/Getty Images

Kate Hudson is facing a lot of backlash for a comment she made on C-sections. For her cover story in Cosmopolitan‘s October issue, the actress filled out a quiz that included prompts like “My post-sweat-session hacks,” and “What I do to de-stress.” Pretty innocuous stuff for the most part, but one answer did not sit well at all with many women: For the “Laziest thing I’ve ever done” prompt, Hudson wrote down, “Have a C-section!”

Moms and mom-supporters across social media immediately set her straight. “How insensitive,” wrote one user on her Instagram. “Shaming a way that so many women don’t chose to have their babies but have to! I labored for over 24 hours before it was no longer safe for me and my baby. I think that’s the furthest thing from lazy! And women who have to have C-sections for other reasons aren’t lazy, this is why our society thinks it’s ok to mom shame. You lost another fan here.”

“I don’t know what sort of c section you had but the one I had was far from lazy!” commented another. “I had all plans to go natural and was 10cm dilated and pushing for hours until I had my baby come out via emergency c section. It was soo painful for weeks and I struggled to even lift my baby for days. I really hope your comment was a joke!”

This is a great time to remind both Hudson and anyone else who looks down on C-sections that there is no “right” way to give birth. Although the World Health Organization discourages medically unnecessary C-sections, since such a major surgery can be risky for both the mother and child, in some situations a C-section birth can be much safer than a vaginal birth. Not to mention there’s nothing “lazy” about C-sections: The recovery time is much longer than with vaginal births and the pain while healing is much more intense.

Still, a lot of women get shamed for what some people (falsely) consider to be “taking the easy way out.” In February, screenshots of a conversation between a mom and a photographer who refused to shoot her birth photos because “a surgery isn’t birth” went viral. Outraged mothers chimed in to explain to the photographer exactly what’s wrong with that sentiment, but the stigma against C-section births is still pervasive and widespread.

As for Hudson’s comments, some defended her by saying she wasn’t calling all C-section births lazy, just her own. She delivered her 13-year-old son Ryder by Caesarean, and her 6-year-old Bingham with a vaginal birth. Others said she was probably just making light of the situation.

“I had 3 c sections in the last 4 years, and I found the comment hilarious,” commented one Instagram user. “Sounds exactly like something I would have said as a joke.”

But joke or not, perpetuating C-section shame is never O.K.



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