pain

Treating women like idiots has the additional consequence of making women less likely to report symptoms in general. It’s really exhausting

It’s not just that I’m “not a morning person.” Mornings hurt and I experience complex trauma. They make me feel fragile and vulnerable.

There are so many little things I never thought about before I lost the ability to do them. Pain is fluid. It seeps into every crack and corner.

From the beginning, mothering and being mothered are both brutal. One day you’ll hurt your mom, I thought. And she’ll hurt you, somehow, without knowing it.

My well-meaning friends would share how their ‘bad cramps’ were cured with birth control or yoga, and I’d feel like the failure with a low tolerance for pain. I’d sit in bed, between pain spells and wonder if my agony was an elaborate form of laziness designed to help me shirk the adulthood. The Bad Cramps Brigade meant to foster solidarity, was inadvertently gas-lighting me.

It felt like I was being knifed in the stomach. My husband suggested a shower. I grabbed him, looked him in the eye and said, “I know you’re trying to be supportive. But if you really want to support me, GET ME AN EPIDURAL NOW.”

We compare birth stories like war stories. Twelve hours of labor, 32 hours of labor, three hours of pushing, we fall into the trap of trying to one-up each other. So yes, I can see why, to a parent-to-be who is enthusiastically anticipating pain relief, the refusal of an epidural might seem like a bit of a hero complex. And maybe for some people it is! But it’s none of your goddamn business.

On her past, her present, and what she'd call her autobiography: