27

I nearly bled to death at age 27. I didn’t know it until I witnessed the same thing happen to my daughter. It’s called postpartum hemorrhage. Here in America it occurs in a very small percentage of births, and a miniscule percentage die of it, which is why I thought nothing of it when it happened after the birth of my son. When I saw it happen to my daughter, right after she gave birth to my grandson, I nearly fainted from horror.

It happened so fast. We were chatting about the new baby, smiling and celebrating. She wanted to go to the bathroom and she couldn’t stand up. She lay back down on the bed and her face turned white. She complained of pain. Suddenly the door of the hospital room burst open and a team of doctors swarmed in, told me to get out of the way. They went to work on her and she screamed with pain and a gush of blood poured out of her. Beyond that, I don’t remember. I was in shock.

She survived, of course. She even wanted to do it again, to have a second baby. The second birth involved no hemorrhage, no drama. But the shock and horror still lives in me. I cry as I write about it.

I can’t be bothered quoting statistics of morbidity in childbirth; we’ve heard them; we know it. We’ve been taught it was a major factor of life expectancy throughout history, dragging down mankind’s numbers. Right now I’m just talking about the experience of seeing my daughter, so vibrant, so fearless, so willing to take on the perils of childrearing, in an instant seized with pain and terror. The look in her eyes said, “What have you done to me?”

I didn’t know. Because I wasn’t fully conscious when it happened to me. I slept peacefully through recovery, barely noticing my own newborn son. My husband witnessed it, though, and he refused to give me details. Nor would I have filled my daughter with fears before she went into birthing.

Nonetheless, the trauma is there, in the body. There are so many monumental physical changes during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum that we can talk all day, we can write a book about it, we can write a whole lot of books about it, we can develop an entire medical specialization around it. And yet, for most of us who have been through it, we say nothing. After my first childbirth, I was furious at the world, because No. One. Told. Me.

OK. I agree. We can’t talk about it. I throw up my hands. It’s life. Get over it.

If you can.

My daughter is not one to dwell on such adventures. We have talked very little about this shared experience, much the way survivors of the Battle of the Bulge didn’t talk about it, even with one another. But we are learning that PTSD among soldiers must be addressed, for the good of survivors and for the good of society. I can’t even imagine discussing PTSD among mothers. Let alone recovering from it. What would that look like?