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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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IVF Failure Felt Like Miscarriage


Ten percent of all known pregnancies end in miscarriage. So why does the subject still feel so taboo? For women dealing with the complicated grief of miscarriage, it’s not the stat that’s comforting—it’s the knowledge that they’re not alone, that there is a space to share their story. To help end the culture of silence that surrounds pregnancy and infant loss, Glamour presents The 10 Percent, a place to dismantle the stereotypes and share real, raw, stigma-free stories.

Infertility isn’t a word you expert to hear at 26 years of age. Certainly not when you’re still single and years away from thinking about your future family. But that’s exactly how old I was when, still young and single, I was told that stage IV endometriosis had stripped me of my ability to conceive. “If you ever want to have biological children, you need to do something about that now,” my doctor advised.

The development of my condition happened swiftly, so it’s not like I’d had years to prepare for this possibility. It was all dropped in my lap in a bundle; the diagnosis, the prognosis, and the suggestion that I act upon my fertility now, before it was too late.

I visited with a reproductive endocrinologist and weighed my options. At the time, egg freezing was considered a risk, still experimental—the rate of eggs that survived freezing was just too low, and the possibility that none of my eggs would survive and that I wouldn’t know that until years down the line was just too great.

I knew I couldn’t live with the years of uncertainty, my desire to be a mom anything but uncertain.

Embryo freezing was seen to have better odds, but if I was going to purchase sperm for that, I figured I might as well go the whole way and do a fresh in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle, which had the best chance of success overall. At least, that was how I reasoned with myself when I decided to pursue IVF as a single woman just a few months past my 27th birthday.

The process happened quickly. A month of medications followed by a minor outpatient surgery to extract the eggs that would then be fertilized for my IVF cycle. In the end, I had only three viable embryos. But the picture given to me of those three embryos was one I cherished. These are my babies, I thought.

Because I was young (with the assumption being that my youth might lead to more favorable results), the decision was made to transfer only one of those embryos at first. From the moment that transfer took place, I was convinced I was pregnant, turning down wine at dinner with a gleeful smirk. Every twinge and butterfly I felt was proof to me of that fact, even long before physical symptoms would have made sense. So confident was I that there was a little life growing inside me, I even toured the local midwife center, aiming to get on their list as soon as possible so that I could give birth to my baby in their birthing tub.

I was so convinced I was pregnant that when the call came 10 days later confirming that I wasn’t, I immediately fell to the floor in tears. I knew logically that what I was experiencing was not a miscarriage—you have to be pregnant first to experience that—but in my heart, a miscarriage was the closest thing I could think to compare my IVF failure to.

That had been my baby. I’d seen its picture. An actual, viable embryo had been placed into my body; all my hopes and dreams tied up in a little clump of cells that bore my DNA. And it hadn’t survived.



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Halle Berry on the 'Catwoman' Failure: ‘I Got a Shit Load of Money That Changed My Life’


Actress Halle Berry spoke out on Monday about her role as Catwoman in the 2003 movie of the same name that wound up being—and there’s no way around this—a box-office bomb. For Berry, coming off of 2002’s Oscar-winning performance in Monster’s Ball, it could have put a stop to her Hollywood dreams. As it turns out, though, Berry has zero regrets about taking the movie on: For her, the movie taught her a valuable lesson about listening to her intuition—and, well, it also made her a ton of money.

She accepted the Matrix Award from New York Women in Communication Monday evening and opened up about Catwoman in her acceptance speech.

“Everybody around me said, ‘Girl, don’t do it. It’s going to be the death of you. It’s going to end your career.’ But guess what I did? I followed my intuition and I did a movie called Catwoman and it bombed miserably,” Berry said. “While it failed to most people, it wasn’t a failure for me because I met so many interesting people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise, I learned two forms of martial arts and I learned not what to do.”

She also added that she made “a shit-load of money that changed my life.”

And then Berry dropped some incredible advice on the audience: “I say that to say, Following your intuition doesn’t always mean you’re going to be successful or win the prize, but it means you’re always going to learn the exact lesson or get the exact accolades or the exact check that you’re supposed to get for yourself. Never compare that to anyone else.”

Related Stories:
–Halle Berry Expertly Shut Down Pregnancy Rumors With a Hilarious Instagram
–Melissa McCarthy: From $5 in the Bank to Million-Dollar Mogul
–Evan Rachel Wood Is Finally Getting Equal Pay for ‘Westworld’



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