By Brianna Forsman 
To the other moms like me,
You know who you are. You’re the mom with the traumatic birth. The one with the emergency C-section, the dreaded NICU stay, or the memories of your very life being on the line. You’re the one who feels robbed of your first year of motherhood because of postpartum depression. The one who still lies awake at night, trying to bring calm to the persistent anxiety. I know you. I’m with you.
Perhaps like me, a simple photo of a new baby snuggled on his or her mama’s chest in the hospital brings a torrent of unwanted tears. You never got to experience that initial skin-to-skin moment, and that disappointment is crushing. Maybe you don’t even remember the first time you held your child, or it was hours or days before you got to feel their gentle weight in your arms. Instead of watching your husband’s face when he first saw your sweet babe, your view was shrouded by a blue tarp and cold metal poles.
For some of us, the sound of our child’s first cry fell on deaf, sedated ears. For others, our arms and hearts ached with emptiness as we went home, but left our babies in plastic beds surrounded by tubes and wires to be cared for by NICU nurses. When birth trauma is part of your story, a well-meaning family member asking when you are going to “have another one” causes every fiber of your being to tense. This seemingly innocent question launches a war between your heart and mind. Longing battles with panic, terror collides with hope, and uncertainty wrestles against the desire of your heart.
Yes, we want more than anything to have another. I crave to see my son become a big brother, and I long to give him his best friend. But the risk is high, and the painful memories are still too fresh. There is no promise that we could get pregnant again, and even if we could, we aren’t totally sure we want to.
It’s a hard reality to wrestle with the fact that the pictures from the hospital don’t always bring joyful memories of “the best day of our lives.” Instead, they remind us of disappointment and fear. They taunt us with the dreams of what should have been. They make us question our ability to mother. They scream the lie that somehow we failed ourselves and our babies from the very start.
We look at everyone else with their “normal” birth experience, and envy envelops us. A fellow new mom posts a beautiful tribute to life with her newborn, and we chide ourselves for the walls of recovery and blanket of depression that darkened our first months of motherhood. And the thought of trying for another? It comes with the echoing chorus of anxiety-induced what-ifs. What if things go wrong again? What if I lose the baby or my own life? What if the depression comes back?
Hear me loud and clear, mama: You. Are. Not. Alone. Traumatic births all look different, and the residual effects show up in different ways for each of us. But deep down, all of us are uniquely united through our traumatic experiences. We are absolutely not failures. We are all stronger than we ever knew. We have all fought hidden battles with a courage only we can understand. We can see other struggling moms with an empathy we would have never possessed before.
Although this experience is agonizingly hard, and although the future can be wildly scary, we can find peace in knowing we walk this journey together. I believe there is hope for us. Hope that someday we can celebrate not only with the people whose story we once envied, but that we can also celebrate our own story. It may not be how we wanted it—it certainly wasn’t how we pictured it. Our story was out of our control, and we never asked for these lingering effects that blur our lives.
When we look back, we will see that even in the trauma, there is beauty. Even in the questioning, there is hope. And I know in that hope, and from that beauty comes healing for the other moms like me.
by Natalie Brenner 
by Kamrie Smith 
by Brittany Olson 
