When I was pregnant with my firstborn, I had none of those dreams of heroic labor. I was in my late thirties, had had trouble conceiving, had repeated miscarriages, and was afraid I’d missed the boat and would never have a child. Under those circumstances, I saw birth as a means to an end, and didn’t much care how I delivered. The doctor could take the baby out my left ear for all I cared, as long as the child was healthy and safe. So when I’d been in labor all day and things didn’t progress as they should have, I wasn’t upset when the doctor said he needed to perform an emergency cesarean. The recovery was painful, but it is after any abdominal surgery, and after a few days of bad pain and a few weeks of limited activity, I was as good as new. I experienced none of the guilt or depression I’ve heard about so many other c-section mothers having. The idea of feeling guilty because I had somehow “failed” at the test of true womanhood strikes me as ludicrous, and yet I’ve read a fair bit about it, and even heard it from women I know personally. I’ve also read that postpartum depression is more common after surgical delivery, but I was lucky enough not to have it, and I know a number of women who delivered vaginally — some completely unmedicated — who had postpartum depression anyway. I’m no expert on this subject, but it seems to me that if the incidence of depression is higher after surgical delivery, part of it stems not from the surgeries themselves but from people making c-section moms feel bad (intentionally or not) for failing to live up to society’s ideals about childbirth.

I have a friend who, like me, has four children. Our firstborns were actually born on the same day of the same year; our seconds were born in the same month, my third a few months before her third, and her fourth a few months before my fourth. Both of us labored with our first and had emergency c-sections. Both of us had the choice of scheduling a c-section for the second or trying for a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean). I opted for a second c-section because the admittedly slight risk of uterine rupture in that procedure scared me. My friend, who was pressured by family members to try for a “real” birth (her sister-in-law came right out and said that she wasn’t a “real woman” if she couldn’t deliver her babies vaginally) tried for the VBAC, went through a horrendously long labor but was still unable to deliver, and ended up having another c-section after all. My recovery from a scheduled section was fairly easy, while hers after a traumatic labor followed by surgery was difficult.

I freely admit that often VBACs are successful. I know a lot of women personally who have had them, and were thrilled at being able to deliver naturally after a previous surgical delivery. I’m happy for them, and I agree that the choice ought to be the mother’s. But in all too many cases the choice means pressure to make the right choice: to choose the kind of delivery that will validate your credentials as a real woman, much as the choice of feeding by breast or bottle means that making the wrong choice marks you as a substandard mother.

As I wrote before, my first three c-sections were performed at a hospital in California where a nursery was available. Most of the mothers who delivered vaginally there kept their babies in their hospital rooms with them, and after the first 24 hours after surgery, I kept my baby with me most of the time too, except when I wanted to sleep or shower. But for that first day after surgery, I really could not take care of a baby on my own, and because there was no nursery staff to help, what that really meant was that for c-section moms, the hospital policy was BYOBN: bring your own baby nurse. Pretty neat racket for the hospital, which doesn’t have to pay a nursery staff, and for the insurance companies, which have to pay out less for each hospital stay since c-section moms are eager to get the heck out of the hospital and go home. I stayed four nights after each surgery in California, but only three this time, because what was the point of staying in the hospital when I couldn’t rest? I had to have someone stay with me every night I was there, my aunt the first and third nights, and a good friend (and Portia’s godmother) the second night. The logistics of the BYOBN policy bring me to yet another way this hospital made me, as a c-section patient, feel like a second-class citizen.

St. Vincent’s hospital has two types of rooms in the maternity ward, one for mothers delivering vaginally, and another for patients recovering from c-sections. Because a woman delivering vaginally remains in the same room for her labor, delivery, and recovery, the rooms are large and spacious. They have a table and chairs in addition to the bed, plenty of room for walking around, wood (or what looked like wood) floors, big windows with nice views, and big flat-screen TVs on the walls. The rooms for c-section recovery patients are about a fourth (that’s being generous; it might even be closer to a fifth) of the size of the nice rooms the real mothers get. The window in my room looked out onto the machinery on the roof of a lower level of the hospital, the old TV had a remote that didn’t work (eventually they managed to find one that did), and the baby nurse I was expected to provide for myself had to sleep on a small chair that pulled out into a very uncomfortable and undersized facsimile of a bed. When this “bed” was pulled out, there was barely enough room to get around, and we had to keep moving the baby’s bassinet in order for my aunt (the BYOBN) and the hospital nurses to get to my bed. I was still hooked up to the IV and other unmentionable attachments so wasn’t doing any walking around myself. On the second evening they let me move to a regular two-bed room in the pediatric ward next door (no way they were letting me into one of those posh rooms saved for the real mothers) and the rest of my stay was more comfortable.

In her book about motherhood, actress and c-section mom Patricia Heaton called the cesarean “the kindest cut of all” (for those of you who think I named my baby after a car, that’s a play on a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar — Caesar, cesarean, get it?). After my California deliveries, I agreed with her completely. If enough hospitals go the way of St. Vincent’s here in Santa Fe, I’m afraid we’ll have to put the “un-” back in that line.

This was my dumbfounded response when I toured the maternity ward (the only one in Santa Fe) where I’ll be delivering next month. The hospital where I had my other three children had one, and since all my deliveries were c-section and I wasn’t quite up to round-the-clock baby care the moment I came out of surgery, all my babies spent at least some time in there. I just assumed all hospital maternity wards had nurseries. They all used to, at any rate, as I’ve read many a mournful lament and many an angry diatribe from mothers who were deprived of crucial bonding moments because hospital staff insisted on taking their babies to the nursery for one reason or another.

Over the past several decades, rooming-in (where the baby stays in the mother’s room and sometimes never even goes near the nursery) has become more common, but at my old hospital it was an option rather than a requirement. Don’t get me wrong – I think it’s a good option. If a new mother wants to have her baby in her room every moment of her hospital stay, more power to her. But I’m going to be recovering from major abdominal surgery and facing a return home to four young children including a baby who will have me up every couple of hours for who knows how long, and those few nights in the hospital are going to be my last chance to get some sleep.

When I pointed out that I was going to be recovering from surgery, and wasn’t sure I was up to taking full charge of the baby for the entire hospital stay, the nurse blithely suggested my husband could stay with me and sleep on a chair that pulled out for that purpose. Since we have three other children my husband will caring for at home, that isn’t an option. And even if it was, I wouldn’t want him in that tiny hospital room with me, tossing and turning on an uncomfortable chair-bed, and I’d wake every time the baby did anyway. I liked being alone in the hospital when I delivered before; I don’t like an audience for my physical maladies, and I want to be alone again this time.

When I told the story to one friend (who had also delivered by c-section), she said that her hospital had had a nursery, then added, “But I couldn’t imagine who would want to send their baby there.” That’s the attitude most mothers giving birth today have, I’ve found. So I guess dinosaurs like myself, who are selfish enough to want a few hours of uninterrupted sleep while recovering from surgery, will just have to adapt.