When I was in graduate school, many years before I contemplated having children of my own, a close friend had a baby. A week or so after she was born, I went to their house to bring a gift. The truth is probably not this extreme, but I recall my friend opening the door and, as I stood there in the foyer, announcing that she had a fourth-degree vaginal tear stretching from her vagina all the way to the anus. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if I should suggest we take a seat.
Before I had children, I had the vague sense that there must be some trauma associated with birth. But I had certainly never contemplated the details. To say the news of my friend’s fourth-degree vaginal tear was a surprise was an understatement. Part of the reason for the surprise was that I wasn’t yet at that life stage, but the other part is that—minus a few helpful friends—women simply do not talk much about the recovery from childbirth.
There are a lot of baby books (I just wrote one) that aim to tell you what will happen with your baby. And there are a lot of pregnancy books (I also wrote one) that detail what happens to you while you are pregnant. But the literature is oddly lacking in discussions of what happens, physically, to the mom after the baby arrives. Before the baby, you’re a vessel to be cherished and protected. After the baby, you’re a lactation-oriented baby accessory.
This omission is problematic, since it fails to inform women about what to expect after they’re expecting. Physical recovery from childbirth is not always straightforward, and even in the best of circumstances, it’s messy.
If you’ve had a caesarean, your doctor will stitch up the incision and dress the wound. This is typically a straightforward process, and similar from woman to woman. With a vaginal birth, there is more variation, largely due to differences in the degree of vaginal tearing. This tearing most frequently involves the perineum—the area between the vagina and anus—but you can also have tearing in the direction of the clitoris.
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