After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk studied first responders and their trauma. After a person suffers a traumatic incident, the brain pumps hormones such as oxytocin through the body, which elevates mood and alleviates fight-or-flight responses once they’re no longer advantageous. A side effect of oxytocin is that it dulls the memory. What Dr. van der Kolk found was that when first responders came off the field and immediately described what they had seen to other professionals—the gold standard protocol for the Red Cross at the time—it prohibited the flood of memory-dulling chemicals and kept the first responders in an adrenalized state, inscribing their trauma in the amygdala, the primal part of the brain from where the fight-or-flight response originates, rather than moving it to the prefrontal cortex, where it can be stored as a gentle recollection.
The entirety of the 19 hours I spent pinned to a hospital bed, I texted each of my five best friends real-time updates, describing how everything felt in meticulous detail so that not only did I ensure they would never forget but also that I would never forget. I essentially did what Dr. van der Kolk warned against. Instead of letting the oxytocin flood me, dulling the memories, I made sure that every thought would be etched forever in my brain. It seemed normal, in the 21st century, when iPhones are more ubiquitous than babies, to live-text my labor.
My doctor barreled in, ready for her moment. She looked refreshed and enthusiastic, smiling and very awake, her eyes darting around excitedly. Time to PUSH! Let’s meet this baby!
The nurses explained that they’d look at the monitor and see when I was contracting, and cheer me on to bear down, one leg held up by each shoulder, like I was squatting but on my back. I burst into tears—full sobs I had been too embarrassed to let out earlier. I was exhausted and had no energy to hide my fear. All at once, the nurses and the doctor said, almost in unison, Oh no, what’s wrrrooonnnggg? As if I were a little kid who’d stubbed my toe.
I don’t want the ring of fire! I wailed and wailed. The room went silent for a minute.
You have an epidural, said the doctor. The ring of fire is only for women who don’t get the drugs. You’re not going to feel a thing. I wasn’t sure I quite believed her, but it calmed me down enough that I managed to stop crying. This is it, I thought. This is where I die—or worse. I had no choice but to move forward. I put my hair into a ponytail and turned on my music.
My husband, Tom, clutched my left leg, and a nurse held my right, and they all started screaming, Go! Go! Go! Push! I smiled because it seemed like they were all having fun. The actual birth didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel anything. The baby was out in just a few minutes, almost like an afterthought. And what should have felt like a triumph, shooting a healthy baby out of my vagina using muscles I couldn’t feel, numbed from the waist down so completely that when Tom put my leg down it flopped to the side uselessly, felt instead like just one more assault in a long list of assaults, so mild in terms of the other tortures inflicted upon me that it was hardly memorable.
When they put the baby on my body, I looked down at him, and my heart sank. I felt nothing. No overwhelming love or happiness, no excitement, not even curiosity about him. I didn’t count his fingers or his toes. I just looked at him, grossed out by the white stuff from my body that he was covered in. Someone had told me to scoop it off his body to put on my face—that it was like nature’s Crème de la Mer—and I complied, but still looked like shit when I glanced in a mirror a few hours later, only a bit more ghostly.
You didn’t tear, the doctor said, as I saw her hands moving between my legs at the end of the bed.
I guess that’s good, I replied meekly. It was as if the place in my body where I’d normally feel love or sadness was floating away. I don’t think I could have gotten angry if someone had come up and slapped me. I don’t think I could have gotten excited if someone had said I’d won the lottery.
I felt a tugging against what I guessed were my labia; no pain, thank God, just a sort of pressure.
It’s good, she replied. But I just gave you a stitch, mostly for him. She nodded at Tom, who looked at me a little bewildered, furrowing his brow but not saying anything. I tried to think of something to say, but she’d already continued. And now I’m taking your placenta and cutting it into pieces to store in the fridge here, for testing in case we have any issues. I couldn’t see what she was doing now, but I noticed a bucket get carried away by a nurse, and then I heard blood slop to the floor, and Tom’s eyes widened. She pushed down on my stomach, and I felt some sort of clumps fall out of me. I didn’t have the nerve to ask what they were or what was going on. I just wanted to go somewhere alone and sob.
Tom, what time is the sushi coming? I asked, but he’d forgotten that I wanted sushi and champagne as my postbirth meal. I’d had fantasies of cheersing with him in paper cups, my infant asleep next to me as I tasted my first spicy tuna roll in 10 months. But he’d forgotten and ordered mediocre street pizza instead, with the hospital food abysmal and nothing else nearby.
Around seven the next morning, they wheeled my baby in from the overnight nursery.
Can’t you keep him in there? I asked. The nurses explained it was better for him to be in here with me, bonding, which, while sensible, sounded like the absolute last thing I wanted to do. I pondered lying, telling a nurse I was in pain and needed a couple of Vicodin so that I could spend the day in bed, passed out on painkillers and forgetting my circumstances. But when Tom announced he was going out to get breakfast and for a quick walk, that my mom should be here any minute, I decided it would be too risky. I spent an agonizing 20 minutes alone with my baby, terrified he would start to cry and I wouldn’t know what to do. Thankfully, he stayed asleep until the lactation consultant found me. I hoped maybe she’d know what to do if he woke up. She came breezing into my room in her blazer and pencil skirt, nothing but smiles.
So how is breastfeeding going, Mamma? she asked me like we were old friends.
I can’t breastfeed, I told her. I knew that much. Though I wanted to say, Read between the lines, bitch. I’ve never felt so violated. I cannot give any more of my body than I’ve already given or I’ll die.
Instead, I smiled and just said, I thought about it a lot, and no thank you, not for me. As I sat propped up in my hospital bed, on a pile of ice packs, I looked over at my baby, asleep in his plastic bin, and shuddered at the thought of him sucking on my body.
The lactation consultant came toward me, as if she was going to give me a hug, then grabbed my right breast and squeezed it.
But there’s milk in there, she said. See, I just got it to come out. Breast is best. Plus, it will help you lose weight.
I have never cared less what is “best,” I wish I’d said. I have zero feelings on breast milk versus formula. You could tell me breast milk would give me the body of Elle Macpherson in 1989, the bank account of Steve Jobs, and would turn this baby into an immortal superhero, and I wouldn’t do it, because the very thought makes me want to find the nearest scalpel, take a deep breath, and slam it between my ribs, right into my heart. But I just stared at her and said, Okay, thank you, I’ll think about it.
She put some pamphlets down next to me and waved a cheerful goodbye. I stared down at my oozing breast and felt like nothing about me would be mine ever again. This was how Tom found me when he came back from his walk, sobbing in my bed, the baby still asleep in his bin.
The lactation consultant violated me, and my right boob is totally fucked up now, I choked out, looking down to see a floppy breast resting against my stomach. The pores of my areola were stretched and open, milky liquid dripping down my belly. The thought of attaching a baby to my body made me feel like a self-aware zoo animal, as if I were suffocating from expectation, filled with rage and trapped. Being pregnant had put such stress on my abdominal muscles that they’d split apart, and my organs sort of hung out and I couldn’t suck them in; it would take 18 weeks of physical therapy to “fix” it. But worse than pregnancy and labor and its aftermath, as well as the strange rage toward my husband that lingered in the interstices of my mind like a low-grade fever, was feeling pressured to fall in love with this stranger-baby, who I thought looked not much different than a malnourished frog. All I saw in him were my flaws, the things I’d hated most about myself since childhood. And I’d felt the pain of my homely face so many times in my
life; I knew the way it correlated to my value as a person. So when I looked at him—when I looked at this creature I had somehow birthed from my own loins, this being that supposedly was my whole raison d’être—I saw my hideous nose, my weak chin, all the insults from boys on playgrounds written all over him, and I felt like I’d lost my entire life and identity to this ugly baby in one day.
In the hospital, my parents came in and out, and my in-laws stopped by. I refused to get out of bed, letting them hold the baby and wondering if they saw him as ugly and alien as I did, but afraid to say it out loud. Did other moms feel this way? I wanted to pull my mother aside and ask her, When do the maternal instincts kick in?
Only I was afraid she would say, They should have already. That would not be something I could have handled hearing, so I sat on my little throne of ice packs and thought about how badly I wanted to turn back the clock.
Copyright © 2025 by Bang Bang, LLC. From the forthcoming book Motherload by Sarah Hoover to be published by Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.
