Here’s What No One Tells You About Giving Birth

As a global maternal health researcher and the leader of the nonprofit Nurturely, I unintentionally spent the past decade preparing for the moment I would become a mother. I read every book on birth and postpartum. I took — and even taught — every class. I read every “I was an OBGYN and even I didn’t know…” article written by professionals who thought they were prepared then ended up anything but.

I knew the stats, the physiology, the history.

I prepped my partner for the possibility of postpartum depression, anxiety or even psychosis.

I was ready to bleed, poop and puke.

Cognitive preparation, however, is one thing. The experience itself is another.

My love of control is obvious from one glance at my aggressively color-coded Google calendar, and letting go of the reins is not my strong suit. Yet those rare, occasional experiences of surrender — complete loss of control during a naked mushroom-induced frolic in the woods, for example — were actually my best preparations for the journey of giving birth. Birth requires a complete fall away from reality, a surrender to whatever physical and emotional feelings arise. No meticulous birth plan (ask me how many pages mine was…) could change that.

Why is it so hard for our society to grasp the realness of birth? We use every euphemism in the book to gloss over the pain, the unpredictability. “Surges” or “waves” instead of crushing pain. “Back labor” instead of rocket-ship-blasting-out-of-my-butt. We create clean, linear protocols to predict an unpredictable process: the dilation wheel, for example, spiraling from 0 to 10 and suggesting a neat, orderly path toward delivery. Yet birth is anything but linear.

We practice slow, measured breathing and share videos of meditative humming, but not the tremors of uncontrollable screaming that often follow. We sanitize the experience, posting photos of clean, swaddled babies while erasing the messy in-between moments like my husband wiping poop as it actively emerged from my body. (I will cherish that video forever.)

This denial goes beyond the use of Instagram filters. It’s a societal unwillingness to confront the messy, visceral truths of a life-altering ordeal.

Birth is unpredictable. It is full of gore, fluids, wetness and screams. It flirts with death. Even today, with modern medicine, the memory of death’s risk is embedded in our brainstems, triggering uncontrollable fight-or-flight responses as the baby gets closer to the outside…