“A Mother is Not a Zero-Sum Game” Up at The Normal School

My essay, “A Mother is Not a Zero-Sum Game” is up at The Normal School. It’s about my experiences during pregnancy, labour, and the early postpartum months.

Throughout that time—and even now— I felt so betrayed by my body and by the medical system. I’d had a difficult pregnancy, a difficult labour, and then a complicated, incomplete recovery. I’d first gone into pregnancy thinking it would be easy—I’d weathered worse, I told myself, and I’d get through it unscathed. Well. I was wrong. And as I was dealing with birth injuries and other serious medical issues stemming from labour, there was this overwhelming social pressure to distill all of my experiences into the narrow, oxymoronic framework of sleepless joy.

Since the only way I can make sense of anything is by writing it down, I started taking notes in a single document while still in the thick of it all. Every day, I laid down new sentences, paragraphs, and fragments in an effort to understand what was happening to me. The fragments gradually started to take a shape, eventually coalescing into an essay. I am so grateful to the Normal School for publishing it. 

Since it’s gone up, I’ve been overwhelmed by the responses I received from women on social media. So many mothers reached out to thank me because they saw so much of their own experiences reflected in my story. I was completely unprepared for how many other women have silently endured labour trauma, and I’m so grateful to all who’ve reached out to share their own stories with me. 

What is abundantly clear is that we need to make more space for women to be honest about our experiences—no matter how messy or complicated or uncomfortable those experiences may be.