Not What I 'Expected': The Untold Trauma Every Mother Endures, and Why We Need to Talk About It

“And that’s why I consider birth a ‘happy trauma’,” my midwife smiled behind her round glasses, “the whole experience is traumatic, painful and sometimes scary—but you have, at least, a happy end.” I looked up, exhausted (to say the least), through tear-filled eyes as she gestured to my five-day-old daughter, as if to ensure that there was no lost translation for what had been implied. “The baby”, she added, finally.
It was true. It was a happy ending. My daughter brought me nothing but joy. I had never known a purer form of love. It was surreal.

It was also terrifying.

Of all the things I wish were written in those “What To Expect” books that are home to every mother’s bookshelf, I wish there had been a chapter on preparing for the trauma. But, much like all of women’s issues in the course of history, the discussion of labour as a trauma was something swept under the rug and left for the survivors to talk about on their secret “Mom Forums” masked under the comfortable anonymity of non-descript usernames and internet-scavenged display pictures—mothers scared to admit the tribulations of motherhood outside the coveted online circle that becomes our only place to freely express taboo things, such as feeling anything except happiness, both ante-natal and post-partum.
There still aren’t enough places in society for women to discuss their birth experiences. I’ll probably be met with an amalgamation of eye-rolls and exasperated sighs about my birth experience, but I can assure you that if you ask any woman about her labour, she will respond with vagueness or, at the very least, a massive lie about the process. Some of us will smile and say “I felt empowered”, and that, honestly, only attributes to the part of the birth where we finally had the balls ovaries to tell someone to “F**k off” because, honestly, no one wants to be touched in the midst of a contraction that feels like someone grinding a car-sized power-drill into your pelvis. Some of us will vaguely say, “It was intense”, which is code for “every part of my body felt like it was being destroyed all at once every three minutes for an entire sixty seconds”. Some will joke, and say “well I had a caesarean—” to which the statement is never complete because caesareans are still considered by many assholes to not be a valid form of womb-eviction. Some women will say “well, all that matters is that my baby is here”, which usually can be interpreted as “I don’t even want to be reminded of even the slightest detail regarding the process that my body underwent to bring this tiny, goober-y thing into the world.” All, however, translate to “I am too afraid to admit the amount of horrifying feelings I had felt during this process, because society has systematically enforced me that I should only feel happiness and gratitude for what has happened.” Mind you, I am not saying that women shouldn’t feel happy and grateful, I am, however, saying that women shouldn’t feel like they aren’t allowed to speak up and say “my birth experience was so terrifying that I’m even afraid to have sex, again” or that there is no guilt or shame in the admittance of feeling nothing but anxiety and fear in the first two weeks post-partum. I was the mother who ‘slept’ with her hand on top of my daughter’s chest, to make sure she was still breathing. I was also the mother who cried every day for the first month of her daughter’s life, because I was in some form of chronic, unending pain, on top of not being able to express my anger and my sadness for my birth experience. I was traumatized—as any other mother in a high-risk delivery would feel—and I was untreated, because I was too ashamed to tell my midwife anything other than “I’m feeling great, just annoyed that my stitches haven’t dissolved, yet”.
When I visited my family physician (who, by the way, is a man), and confided my emotions and feelings regarding my birth experience and how it made me feel, I was simply handed a prescription for some sertraline hydrochloride—Zoloft—and a referral to a counsellor. This wasn’t the problem, though. The problem wasn’t that I had a mood disorder that affects something like one in ten women, but rather that I had no safe places or people to confide in about what I was dealing with, post-partum. Instead, I was met with people who expected me to return to my pre-pregnancy functionality, all of who I wish I could have screamed “You wouldn’t be happy, either, if you had six, huge internal stitches keeping your vagina and rectum separated.” However, it would have been rather unpleasant for the clinic to have overheard, and no one wants to hear about “women’s issues”, anyway. No one wants to hear about how you can’t sit for the first week—or two—and no one tells you how painful it is to have your stitches cut out of you if they don’t dissolve on their own. No one tells you about the burning you feel when you pee, and no one ever even bothered to warn me about the first post-partum poop and how it felt like you were giving birth all over again. I was oblivious to how painful breastfeeding is—chapped, scabby nipples, and all. It was conveniently unknown to me about how painful sex was going to be, and how terrifying the thought of anything going in there was. In fact, the only things that seem to have been exaggerated or considered something grievous to deal with, after having a baby, was the sleep deprivation.
Maybe, if people were more informed on what it was that our bodies went through during the process of bringing a new human into the world, that there would be more resources and more spaces to have open, unashamed dialogue between mothers about birth. And less unrealistically ‘picturesque’ ideas of how birth ‘should be’.
Personally, I feel that mothers don’t get as much appreciation for their physical contribution to life. But I understand. It can be hard to imagine what it feels like to be ripped, limb from limb, shove a six pound (at the least) human being through a small hole and tear through your internal muscular tissue in the process. I mean, it is pretty disgusting, but if you went through it, wouldn’t you want to be able to talk about it, too?