Those early weeks and months after giving birth are hard on you. Pregnancy and childbirth turn your body into a completely foreign place. Things about your body you took for granted suddenly become unpredictable. Even your ability to control your bladder.
You assume that after you give birth, some familiarity will return, but often, it doesn’t. At least not right away. When you first come home after your vaginal delivery, you might expect a little bit of leakage, but you might be shocked at how much you have to retrain yourself—and how little it’s like “riding a bicycle.”
You’re stressed and inexplicably sad. You aren’t taking care of yourself as well as you should be because you are physically and emotionally drained. You don’t shower or shave or wash your hair. You are existing, hanging on by a thread, taking care of your baby but not yourself. And even after the swelling is gone, the episiotomy is healed, everything is back to normalish, even then, your body isn’t cooperating.
You pee when you walk, when you sneeze, when you bend over to pick up the baby. You never really know when it’s going to happen, so you go to the bathroom a zillion times a day. You’re afraid to leave the house without a pantyliner. You’re afraid you smell. You’re actually pretty sure you do smell: like pee and milk and desperation.
So you just stay home. You stay in and you worry about things you have no control over, things that don’t even exist in the real world, the world outside of your world. And still, months later, it’s not better. People joke about it—“Cross your legs when you sneeze!” “Better not laugh too hard!”—because it seems like everyone who’s given birth knows. But why are they all so chill about it? Why do they not cry? Why is it no big deal?
When you’re so far inside your head that nothing else even exists, you pretty much stop caring that you spend a week without a shower or three days in the same clothes, and you stop noticing that you leak urine every time you even think you need to go to the bathroom. It just becomes another bit of background to the maelstrom in your soul. After all, you’re already failing, so of course your body isn’t going to work again, of course you’ll never be normal again. Why would you? You aren’t the same as all those other moms who know what they’re doing. Obviously they’re doing something right and you’re doing something wrong.
You read an article that says that women with urinary incontinence are more likely to develop postpartum depression, but you don’t know you have PPD, you just think you’re a horrible mom with a failing body. So you don’t mention it to the doctor at your follow-up. You don’t mention it to anyone. You do Kegels and hope that one day it gets better.
Maybe you don’t get back to where you were, where you always just assumed you’d be, the place where your bladder cooperates and does its job, reliably, every time. Sometimes, it’s five years later and you still don’t have 100-percent control, but the fog of PPD has lifted, your kids are thriving, and you can finally laugh at the “cross your legs when you sneeze” jokes, because at least you know you aren’t alone.