By Casey Neill
A shock delivery in an ambulance station versus a scheduled caesarean – Tayla Keene’s two births couldn’t be more different.
The Mooroolbark mum’s experience post-birth has been chalk and cheese, too. Postnatal depression clouded her first months with Jasper, but therapy put her in good stead for Lyra’s start to life.
Tayla had always wanted to be a mum and instinctively knew she was growing a little life with fiance Trent Broome before a positive pregnancy test confirmed it.
“There weren’t any symptoms as such but I knew straight away,” she said.
“The first test came back negative but the next morning there was a faint positive line.
“Trent didn’t believe me until we were sitting in the doctor’s room getting our results back.”
Her pregnancy with Jasper went smoothly, but things kicked up a notch about a week past his due date.
“I woke up about 2am with contractions all across my lower back,” she said.
“I timed it roughly in my head. They were repetitive, but not consistent.”
Trent woke up to Tayla writing notes on her phone. They decided she’d get as much rest as possible and send her midwife a message in the morning.
“I was lucky, I was part of the midwifery group practice program,” she said.
“My midwife was actually a family friend of ours, too.
“I texted her about 8am, but she’d been at a birth with someone else that night and had to hand me over to her partner midwife.
“I laboured during the day at home.
“We were living with my parents at the time in Christmas Hills.
“I was going to The Angliss, they knew we were about an hour away.
“It was probably around lunchtime that I wanted to hop in the bath for a little bit.
“The contractions started to get pretty regular.”
She’d read an old wives’ tale that you could tell how far dilated you were by how cold your legs were, from your knee to the top of your thigh.
Tayla thought she was about 8 centimetres and called her midwife, who listened to her breathe through a contraction and said she was still in early labour.
“I think they underestimate people’s pain tolerances,” Tayla said.
“I wouldn’t say labour for me was painful.
“I’ve had really bad periods my whole life so I can say I’ve had periods worse than labour.”
Tayla was told to come in when she could no longer talk through her contractions, that at that point she’d be in the next stage of labour.
“Maybe 20 to 30 minutes later we were bang in that next stage,” she said.
“Every contraction brought me to my hands and knees.
“I was pushing – I couldn’t not push.”
She got out of the bath, dressing herself between contractions, and her dad and sister helped her get into the car with Trent.
Her waters broke about 20 minutes down the road, in Lilydale.
“I reached down and I could feel his head,” she said.
“I told my husband he had to pull over and call an ambulance.
“I was OK. If we had to deliver this baby ourselves on the side of the road, that’s what we were going to have to do.
“You just have to accept it.
“I was never scared of birth as a thing because I figured women had been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years before me.
“My body was designed for this. Whatever happens it’ll be fine.
“I just had to listen to my body.”
They soon came to an ambulance station.
“We didn’t know if it was manned,” Tayla said.
“We pulled up on the side of the road. I don’t know how I made it inside.
“I just pulled my pants off and I was on my hands and knees on the ground.
“Trent’s rummaging through their cupboards, getting their blankets out.
“He’s on the phone to dispatch. They’re telling him what to do.
“Luckily, at this point the paramedics who were happening to have their lunch at 4pm took over.”
They got her up onto a trolley – then received dispatch instructions to respond to her call.
“The paramedic that was mainly helping us, this was his third birth,” Tayla said.
“Most paramedics don’t get to deal with them. They usually get called straight after the fact or just don’t get to see them.”
They pushed the trolley into the amulance and Tayla got onto her hands and knees and pushed.
“I could feel the ring of fire. I knew one more push and he was out,” she said.
“There was this wall of paramedics standing behind me.
“A paramedic half caught him while the rest of him came out.
“We all chilled out in the ambulance for a little bit.
“The paramedics made sure we were both OK.
“I had a little bit of a tear. Everything was really good.
“He latched pretty much straight away on the drive there and fed maybe about half an hour, 40 minutes.
“We came in through emergency and they took me up to the birth ward.
“They had to pull my placenta out in the end.
“I had a third degree tear that was quite deep, so they took me into theatre.”
Tayla said Jasper barely cried in those first hours and was so strong he was almost holding his head up.
“He wanted to be a part of everything,” she said.
“He had so much of his personality even before he was born.
“Now we see how it translates to him today. He’s very strong, outgoing, reactive. He has a big personality.
“He was a very easy baby.
“The hardest thing for me was probably breastfeeding. Something so natural did not come naturally.
“My milk came in very quickly but I had an oversupply which was leaving me very sore all the time and wet constantly.
“Then we both developed thrush as well because my breast pads were so full all the time.
“He had a bit of a tongue tie that we got snipped.
“Once we got through those first weeks we were pretty good.
“He followed the awake windows and the sleep schedules.
“He grew really quickly, he learnt things really quickly. All of his milestones he has reached early.
“He would have been about four months old when I started recognising signs of postnatal depression.
“I had a textbook perfect child, yet I struggled so much, and I’d always wanted to be a mum.”
Living at home didn’t help, and then the Covid lockdowns hit.
“He was about 18 months old when I first went to the doctor to start a mental health care plan,” Tayla said.
“I knew I should have done that a lot sooner. I kept waiting for it to go away.
“That guilt of ‘I should be happy about this, I’ve got a really good child, a really happy child’.”
Tayla had always been an overachiever and people pleaser.
“If I admitted that I needed help I felt like a failure, I felt like I wasn’t doing this mum thing the way everyone else seemed to do it.”
Jasper was about 2 when Tayla was able to speak to a counsellor.
“I’m now such a big advocate for counselling and therapy,” she said.
“I still see my therapist now, two years later.
“One of the biggest things she did for me was normalise a lot of feelings I was having.
“We made plans and strategies but also looked at a lot of the root causes of things.
“I learned to give myself the grace that I need and be OK with where things are at.”
For about the first year after having Jasper, the thought of having another child terrified Tayla.
“But I never wanted him to be an only child,” she said.
She spent time with her therapist and returned to work in a new field, finding a job she enjoyed.
“I don’t really know exactly when it was, but a switch turned and I felt ready to have another child,” she said.
“It took a lot longer for Trent to come around.
“Jasper’s birth for me was a very empowering experience. For Trent it was a very stressful experience.
“The thought of me going through potsnatal depression again was a big factor for him and really scared him.”
They fell pregnant the same month Trent came around to the idea.
The early days were very different to Tayla’s first pregnancy.
“Period symptoms are very similar to pregnancy symptoms, so I ignored everything,” she said.
“We were probably about seven weeks along before I took my first test.
“I didn’t want it to be negative. It was something I’d really wanted for 12 months.
“There were so many symptoms. I felt really hot, wanted a lot of sweet sugary things.
“I was at work one day and cracked it about something, and my colleague said ‘you just seem very quick to anger, are you alright?’.”
She picked up a test at the supermarket on her drive home, and was relieved it was positive.
Unlike her pregnancy with Jasper, Tayla felt nauseous throughout.
“About halfway through my pregnancy with her I had an ultrasound with the perineal clinic at Box Hill,” she said.
“I took myself to a pelvic floor specialist when we first agreed we were ready to have another baby and my recovery seemed really good.
“I had an ultrasound and the colorectal surgeon said they didn’t advise another vaginal birth.
“That crushed me.
“It was really hard to not cry in the appointment.
“I instantly felt like my choice had been taken away from me and my body had failed me.
“I felt very let down by my own healing.
“It took a while to come to terms with having a caesar.
“It was a situation I couldn’t control so I just had to let it be and control what I could.”
Tayla wanted a maternal assisted caesarean, where the mother helps to lift her baby from her womb.
“Going through the public system it’s not really a big thing that they do,” she said.
“No one could give me a straight answer as to why I couldn’t do it.
“I was told it would depend on the doctor on the day.
“I wanted at the very least immediate skin to skin.
“They gave me my spinal at 9am, she was born at 9.16am.
“It was such a strange experience.
“You could feel everything that was going on in terms of the pushing, the pulling, the tugging.
“She was crying before they’d even properly got her head out.
“They lowered the drapes and we got to touch her.”
Only 10 seconds passed between Lyra entering the world and being placed on Tayla’s chest.
“She was instantly very different to Jasper – very vocal, a lot sleepier,” she said.
“It’s different when you’ve been evicted rather than knocking on the door.”
She said the hardest part of the caesarean was the first few days, particularly standing.
Lyra latched and put on weight well, and Jasper was bursting to meet her.
“We’re very lucky Jasper’s been really good with her,” Tayla said.
“He just wants to hug her all the time and give her a kiss on the head.
“He can’t wait for her to play toys together.”
Lyra was eight weeks old when we spoke, and was having reflux and tummy issues that were affecting her sleep.
“She hates being put down, she will not tolerate being put down for more than a minute,” she laughed.
“I don’t think the exhaustion is as bad because you’re conditioned to it.
“Being in our own house has made a massive difference.
“My mental health is in a much different place this time around.
“We are having regular check-ins because we’re more aware.
“She’s more difficult than Jasper, but we are in a much better position this time around.
“You could not get two more polar opposite kids from the same family.
“But they’ve both got those piercing blue eyes.”
