To the Things They Don't Tell You

Reader’s Note:

This talks about birthing, mentions of miscarriage, mentions of blood, and postpartum anxiety. Read at your own risk. Do not walk with me if you can’t.

To the things that they don’t tell you about— when you have a baby.

Dear you, six years ago,

Women are lied to a lot when it comes to the medical field and the act of birth. If they were told the truth, a lot fewer people would have children. I still think I would have—but if I could sit down with myself from six years ago, before my daughter came out, I don’t know what I would have said…

Maybe I would have started with…

Just take the damn pictures. The belly pictures. The progress from seeing our girl grow so small to over six pounds when she came out.

I know you feel bloated, like a whale— but trust me, looking back now, I wish I’d taken the pictures. To witness her still in my body. To witness my body doing something amazing: creating life and growing it, after so many failed attempts.

You will regret not taking them far more than you’d ever have regretted taking them.

Don’t rely on your mother-in-law to host a baby shower. It never happened. She’ll say things like, “Your move was a complete shock”—even though we told her about the move the same time we told her we were expecting. I was barely four months along; the move itself happened when I was over eight months along. Or “No one is going to want to go to a baby shower right before Christmas.”

If she didn’t want to do it, why did she say she would and then give countless reasons why it didn’t happen? Don’t trust her with it— don’t rely on her for it. You will be disappointed, especially when she helped plan out her other daughter-in-law’s baby shower, and it actually happened. Some pills are hard to swallow, even to this day.

(Sometimes you just want to feel special for those moments— the expectation of something hosted for you. Only for it to blow up in my face, because I wasn’t the daughter-in-law she wanted.)

They won’t tell you how violated you’ll feel in your own body, especially near the end of the pregnancy. They did a sweep, and it was the roughest thing I’ve ever had done to me. I didn’t know what it was — the doctor just said it would help start labour. So she goes in and puts pressure on an already sensitive area. I cried. There was a little blood, and I cried harder in the car, because I didn’t understand how this was supposed to happen when we were inducing a week later.

Advocate for yourself, or have your partner do it — it was hard. Doctors are busy, and sometimes they’re pushy. Don’t let them walk all over your plans. Within reason, they should follow them.

Another thing they won’t tell you: how daunting a baby is at night. When the world is asleep, and you’re up every two to three hours because sometimes they cluster feed. When you can’t sleep, because the moment you put her down, you’re back over there, watching her chest rise and fall like a madman. Realizing you have something called Postpartum Anxiety, and that it comes with a whole slew of others.

Dealing with anxiety isn’t fun. Dealing with Postpartum Anxiety— I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come back out. The constant checking if she was still breathing, because everything in your life failed you the moment you wanted it more than anything. You are constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for your life to be over.

It doesn’t. But that doesn’t make it easier — just less maddening. It still could. Statistics don’t lie, and SIDS is still a thing.

They don’t tell you how you lose your sense of yourself before baby. The autonomy you had, and how every moment is now tied to this small thing you can’t go five feet from. The woman who can’t get up to shower until baby is asleep — and even then, it’s five minutes to do a whole routine of care that used to take twenty. Cold meals instead of hot. Cold coffee instead of hot. Putting yourself dead last, because something else needs you more. It’s beautiful and so fucking draining at the same time.

I told our friend, when she checked in with me after a horrible week of not healing from my C-section, how you lose yourself — your body, your mind, your time — all for something so small. She was struggling to conceive, and I felt like I’d ruined her shiny reflection of what being a mom was. I didn’t want to do that— but I wanted to shine a light on the fact that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It isn’t the picture-perfect version movies depict birth to be: clean and sterile, a series of pushes, and out comes this beautiful thing from your loins.

No — it’s bloody. You will shit on the table, and the nurses will clean it up. If a nurse tells you that you didn’t— she’s lying. Everyone does. It’s chaotic at the best of times, and when the quiet finally hits, the pain becomes unbearable. You will agonize over whether you want pain meds, whether you want a natural birth, whether to build the perfect birth plan— when all you actually want is for your baby to come out safe and sound, however that happens to be. I had nine doctors in my room at any given time. A doula who was a godsend, coaching my husband and me through it.

I thought I knew everything.

I. Knew. Nothing.

What I’m trying to say, self of six years ago: you will fail. You are going to fail at a lot of things. You will know nothing. You will spend most of your time wondering if you’re doing this right, if you’re projecting your own insecurities onto your child— because nothing traumatizes you more than watching a mini version of you get the chance to be a child, when you had to grow up long before her age.

So, take the fucking pictures. You only get her once, and she will be your world. Okay?