Content note: This piece shares a personal story of a traumatic birth experience. Please take care while reading.
I’ve been dreading sitting down to write this essay. For one, where is the time? Between diaper changes and nap schedules and warming yet another bottle and then somehow working full-time and remembering to eat myself, my days feel like a jigsaw puzzle that never quite comes together.
Since welcoming our daughter this past summer, the life I have with my husband has shifted overnight. We were once the childfree couple with long weekends and easy independence. Now, we’re full-time caretakers navigating work and a newborn’s unpredictable rhythm. Some nights, we manage to eat dinner together. Most nights, we don’t. It is the sweetest and softest season, one we both dreamt of for years during infertility and IVF treatments. But it is also consuming in ways I could never have prepared for. Motherhood requires everything of you, and it asks for it all at once.
“Motherhood requires everything of you, and it asks for it all at once.”
It’s taken nearly five months for me to feel ready to revisit my daughter’s birth. Or at least, I should feel ready, right? How long can you go without facing an event that left such an imprint? To wait any longer feels unfair to her, to me, to my husband.
We had planned an induction at forty weeks. It was a decision made with my medical team, partly because IVF pregnancies are watched more closely and partly because I was anxious after everything we’d been through to make it to that point. I couldn’t bear to wait any longer than necessary. I wanted my baby earthside, even if she needed a little help. So, we circled the date: Wednesday, five in the morning. Exactly forty weeks.
In those final days of pregnancy, I went to my OBGYN twice a week for Non-Stress Tests, each one a quiet ritual of reassurance. I’d sit in a recliner while scrolling social media or checking work emails, all while listening to the steady rhythm of my daughter’s heartbeat. It was always uneventful. Until one day, it wasn’t.
At thirty-nine weeks and six days, our baby’s heart rate dipped after a contraction, just enough to concern my doctor. “Let’s induce you this afternoon instead of tomorrow,” she said. And so we drove home to pick up our bags, then headed to the hospital.
What followed was, by all accounts, a textbook labor: a Foley balloon (that medieval contraption), an epidural, Pitocin, and an hour of pushing. By the afternoon of her due date, our daughter was here. We named her Lumi, the Finnish word for snow.
Here is what I remember in those moments after my daughter’s birth: I am holding her, studying her face, trying to connect her small, startled cries with the steady kicks that kept me company for ten long months. She feels impossibly fragile, as if she might dissolve in my arms. Around me, my medical team moves with practiced calm—voices low, hands steady—as they deliver the placenta and begin to stitch me back together.
My mom is filming, and my sisters are on FaceTime. She stops recording and hangs up the phone because my dad has just arrived from Northern California. She kisses me and then leaves to meet him in the lobby. I’m grateful she isn’t there for what comes next.
The bleeding starts slowly, then suddenly. I remember trembling and thinking of a friend who told me she had “the shakes” after giving birth. For a brief moment, I wonder if I’m imagining it. I try to force my body to stop. My husband, a firefighter and paramedic, stands beside me. This detail matters. He recognizes the voice—the one used by medical professionals when things are serious but they’re trying not to alarm the patient. When my doctor’s tone changes, he clocks it. This is when I know something is not okay.
“When my doctor’s tone changes, my husband clocks it. This is when I know something is not okay.”
My doctor is having trouble stopping the bleeding, and I am given the maximum dose of TXA, a medication that helps clot blood. But it doesn’t work. I lose a liter of blood, and then a team of ten (fifteen?) doctors and nurses swoop in. Everything from here is a fragment.
Saying goodbye to my husband and baby.
Consent forms in case of a blood transfusion.
Doors opening and bright lights. “Is this the bleeder?” someone asks.
My OB stroking my palm.
.
When I wake up, I am in the recovery unit with my husband and daughter. She is handed to me and latches effortlessly. I ask for a cup of coffee to wake up from the anesthesia. I learn that I had a second-degree cervical laceration in addition to a second-degree perineal tear—essentially, my cervix tore during birth, which is what caused all of the bleeding. We are taken to the postpartum unit where my parents are waiting. More family trickles in. I eat a Chipotle burrito, nurse Lumi. The next morning, my husband goes to the coffee shop on the corner for croissants, and it’s the best pastry I’ve ever had. It is as if nothing has happened. We go home after twenty-four hours.
.
My biggest grief from that day isn’t my own trauma, but my mother’s. When she returned from the lobby, the room was empty. My husband was with our daughter. My doctor and nurse were with me in surgery. Only the cleaning crew remained, quietly covering the blood with a tarp so she wouldn’t have to see it. That image—the shock of her walking in alone—stays lodged in my chest. I wish I could have protected her from that scene. Told her it looked worse than it was. Told her I was okay.
“I became a mother while staring at the ceiling, knowing my husband held our girl safely in the recovery ward.”
Instead, I was alone in an operating room, becoming a mother myself. Reflecting back, this is the moment I pinpoint as the true beginning of motherhood—not when I became pregnant, not when I pushed, not even when I first met my daughter’s eyes. I became a mother while staring at the ceiling, knowing my husband held our girl safely in the recovery ward, singing Avicii’s Gonna Love You to her over and over. In that moment, I realized I had completed what I had begged God to do for years: bring my baby earthside, safe and cared for. For the first time, I could rest and surrender, knowing she was okay. No matter what happened to me, my daughter was okay.
.
When we got home, I had to inhabit my new body. Everything hurt, but not in a familiar way. My stomach cramped while I breastfed. I bled clots that sent me into panicked calls to my OB. I ran a low-grade fever for two weeks. Every step felt as if my cervix was falling out of my uterus. Then, at five days postpartum, I contracted a UTI—and then my daughter and I got COVID. Just when I thought I was starting to heal, something else would knock me down again.
One afternoon, I was sobbing on the couch when my husband told me to get some sleep. I felt so weak, both physically and mentally, but eventually agreed. I stopped at the bathroom to pee, then froze. My cervical stitches had come loose and were hanging from me. I screamed in pain and exhaustion. And then I did what years of infertility and IVF had taught me to do: I pulled myself together and drove to the doctor.
In her essay When Everything Falls Apart, AFE survivor and therapist Kayleigh Summers writes,
“I couldn’t stop ruminating on what I could have changed, what I could have done differently to alter the outcome. I was angry and sad, and then consumed by guilt for feeling anything other than gratitude. I was one of the lucky ones. I was one of the ones who got to stay, who was given the chance to be a mom. Why couldn’t I just be happy?”
“I didn’t expect to feel that anger in the weeks after my daughter’s birth—but I did.”
I didn’t expect to feel that anger in the weeks after my daughter’s birth—but I did. I cursed God for making me struggle to get pregnant, only to let my birth go perfectly until the very last minute. It felt cruel. The day was perfect. She was here. And then, just when I thought the story was over, my body betrayed me again. One more operating room, one more notch in the belt of your body failed.
I also blamed myself. Did I push too hard? Too fast? Should I not have gotten the epidural? I couldn’t feel anything while pushing, so maybe that’s why my cervix tore. If I had refused the drugs, I would have felt the tear and known to stop. If I had let her come on her own, it could have turned out differently. Maybe maybe maybe. The games we play make sense of everything. The mental gymnastics. Of course, none of it was my fault. Of course, my body didn’t fail me—it had created and housed and birthed a baby! And yet. I felt angry. I felt guilty. I felt robbed and hollowed out and so in love with my daughter and so broken at what it had cost me to have her.
.
It has taken months just to scratch the surface of my birth experience. Even the title of this piece feels like a tease, because I’ve barely begun to untangle the layers of infertility, IVF, and a traumatic birth. But I’m trying. As my body heals, as sleep deprivation becomes a pastime (knock on wood), I’m starting to look at it all. Slowly and carefully.
Spending time with Lumi helps. As I write now, she plays on the floor and a soft playlist hums—she loves music. It’s November, and the windows are open because it’s still warm in Los Angeles. A cool breeze drifts in, and I take a deep breath, letting it move through me, finally making space for what I couldn’t before—the miracle and the terror of it all, side by side. In this way, I am processing everything that has happened, everything that has led me here.
One other step that feels enormous: my body has, for the most part, healed. (Women’s bodies are astonishing.) My cervix doesn’t feel like it’s falling out anymore, and I’ve been able to exercise again. During the years of infertility, the one place I could inhabit my body with love was the gym, specifically while running. The dark studio became my church, with music pounding and the treadmill humming beneath my feet. It was the one place where my body felt strong and where I could physically release my stress. Getting to run after birth was something I dreamed about. I needed that full-circle moment as a way to pay tribute to where I had been and the years spent wondering if I would ever be a mother.
“I needed that full-circle moment as a way to pay tribute to where I had been and the years spent wondering if I would ever be a mother.”
I didn’t plan to run a mile when I showed up at the gym class last week. But then I found myself on the treadmill, jogging. Then I went a little faster. Then faster. I corrected my form in the mirror. I tightened my core, ran through my pelvic floor therapy cues—and I ran. I didn’t pee. My uterus didn’t feel like it was going to fall out. I felt strong.
I met my eyes in the mirror and whispered: You did it. You made it to the other side.
The post How I’m Processing My Traumatic Birth Experience appeared first on The Good Trade.
