One Month Postpartum: An Unfiltered Reflection
The raw, hormonal, truamatic and unexpectedly sexy reality of the first 30 days ✨️
This is a real, unfiltered look into the first month postpartum with two under two after an extremely traumatic birth. I will attach the original birth story below, but a very brief TL;DR is this - a VBAC attempt very quickly changed from calm and pain free to a full blown uterine rupture in a six minute time span, requiring a STAT repeat C-Section under general anesthesia.
This piece is going to give a raw, unfiltered and very real view of my experience of the past month. I’m going to break it into four subsections, those being emotionally, physically, body image, and sexually. Now if you’re new here, or you somehow stumbled onto this at 2am while nap-trapped and questioning every life decision, a quick disclaimer. I don’t do polished motherhood but I also don’t do sugarcoating. I don’t do martyrdom either. You’re going to get the good, the bad, the gross, the hormonal, the chaotic, and yes… the sexy. All of it, exactly as it is.
A decent amount of my content leans NSFW, and this piece is no exception. But more importantly, I want to be very clear about something. My experience is not the standard, it’s just one version. Postpartum hormones are absolute chaos. The same hormonal cocktail that makes one woman recoil at the thought of being touched can make another feel borderline feral. There is no universal timeline, no “bounce back,” and definitely no libido benchmark you’re supposed to hit. So if your experience looks nothing like mine that doesn’t mean something is wrong, it just means your body is doing its own thing.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into it.
Emotionally
I’m not going to lie, emotionally this has been extremely tough on both of us. Much more so than the first postpartum. The first time had its moments, but that was mostly tied to the shock of having our daughter at 35 weeks for no medically explainable reason. We were thrown into parenthood five weeks early, which was jarring but ultimately manageable. This time is different. This time, we are both carrying our own versions of birth trauma. As the weeks go by, the pain isn’t easing the way I thought it would. If anything, the flashbacks, the guilt, the what-ifs, the self-blame… they’re all getting louder.
There have been multiple nights where the house is quiet and my mind takes me right back there. Being rushed down the hallway, hearing doctors yell that they couldn’t find the fetal heart rate, the anesthesiologist urgently calling for propofol, and the moment I felt something inside me tear like a chainsaw in a way that I knew instantly was not normal. The part that guts me in a way I can’t fully put into words is that I went through all of that without my husband by my side. It makes me cry everytime I think about how he showed up before things went haywire and how much I know he would have grounded me in the chaos.
On the other end of this, I’ve seen him carrying his own version of it. There have been nights where he’s been deeply emotional questioning if he somehow “pushed me into a VBAC” (he didn’t, he always supported whatever I wanted), wondering if he should have researched more and gently encouraged me toward a repeat C-section, or if there was anything … anything at all he could have done differently. In some ways, I would argue his experience may have been even more traumatic. At least I was under general anesthesia for the worst of it. He was left pacing a hallway for over an hour, genuinely unsure if I was alive. No explanation, no context, just watching them rush me into the OR and being left with the silence of not knowing. I cannot even begin to imagine that level of helplessness.
On top of all of that, I’m grieving something I didn’t expect to grieve this soon, and that being the very real possibility that the choice to have more children has been taken from me. Technically, I could get pregnant again. But it would automatically be considered very high risk. It would include weekly MFM visits, preconception imaging, a scheduled C-section as early as 35 weeks, and a long list of risks that are not theoretical, they are now very real to us. The surgeon told my husband that, given the extent of the rupture and how weak my prior scar appeared, he strongly advised that this pregnancy be my last. At the absolute bare minimum, he said not to even consider another pregnancy before three years postpartum and even then, with caution. He also stated that in the rare case of a birth control failure before that point, termination would be strongly recommended.
So while pregnancy isn’t physiologically impossible… the reality of it has changed completely. My husband is firmly in the “absolutely the fuck not, never again” camp, and I understand why. He’s not the one flooded with postpartum hormones, and the way he says it is not reactive. It’s final. He has been very clear that he cannot emotionally handle the risk of almost losing me again. Honestly… I get it. For me, I can’t even fathom another pregnancy right now. Logically, I know it’s probably for the best that we don’t have more biological children. But having that choice taken from you and it not something you decided on your own, rather something decided for you by circumstance is a level of grief I was not prepared for.
There’s also this strange, painful contradiction we’re both sitting in. Neither of us are particularly fond of the newborn stage. We never have been. Yet… this may be our last time in it. So there’s this constant push and pull between wanting to get through it, and wanting to hold onto it. Wanting sleep, routine, and normalcy again… while also feeling this quiet ache at the thought that this chapter might be closing for good. It’s a lot to hold at once.
For anyone who hasn’t read it, I’ve linked the full birth story below but please read it with a very real, across-the-board trigger warning.
Physically
Much like my first C-section, the physical recovery this time has actually been surprisingly smooth ... and dare I say, easy. Without question, both recoveries were 1,000 times more manageable than the end of pregnancy. Honestly, I don’t think my body and I are very pregnancy-compatible 😅
That said, there was one major curveball this time that I didn’t experience the first time around. That being severe anemia. It probably peaked around five to six days postpartum, and I knew immediately something was off. I was waking up to a level of exhaustion that felt very wrong. Not normal and not “I have a newborn” tired. I know newborn tired. Our first was a preemie who had to be woken every two to three hours to eat. This time, our newborn was giving us four to five hour stretches from night one. My husband was doing most of the feeds, I’m not breastfeeding, and I was getting decent chunks of sleep. So when I say this wasn’t newborn exhaustion, I mean it. This was “I feel like I might faint walking to the bathroom” tired. When I was in the hospital, my hemoglobin dropped to 7.1, which is considered severe anemia. For context, many hospitals will give a blood transfusion below 7, and some even at 7.5. I was never offered a blood transfusion or even an iron infusion. So… yeah. No wonder I felt like absolute shit.
Around six days postpartum at my incision check, they re-ran my labs and my levels had come up to about 10. That is still anemic, but not in the danger zone anymore. For context, it should ideally be at minimum 12. I started a high-dose iron supplement, and I’m not exaggerating when I say the next day I felt like a different person. I still have occasional moments where I stand up too fast and feel a little faint or lethargic, but overall it’s night and day compared to that first week. After losing about 1,000cc of blood, it’ll realistically take a month or two for everything to fully normalize.
But aside from that physically I feel really, really good. I don’t say that lightly. At the end of pregnancy, even a 10-minute walk around our apartment complex felt like a marathon. I was counting down the seconds until it was over, and I’m typically a very active person. Now I’m doing 20–30 minute walks with the stroller, and it flies by.
At the end of pregnancy, I couldn’t even carry two gallons of milk up one flight of stairs. I had to call my husband down every time because I was that wiped out. Now, groceries are no problem. Cases of water are no problem. I actually have to catch myself sometimes and go “Hey… you are still one month out from major surgery. Maybe don’t go lift weights just yet.” But honestly… I can’t wait to get back to that.
For everything my body went through, I’m incredibly grateful that physically i’ve recovered the way I have. While I will never call a C-section “the easy way out,” I can say that both of my recoveries have been, physically speaking relatively smooth, and after everything else, I’ll take that win.
Body Image
This is the part I almost feel guilty even talking about for two reasons. One, it feels superficial and like I should just be grateful that my daughter and I are both alive, and leave it at that. Two, objectively speaking, I know I “bounced back.” My stomach is mostly flat. I’m nearly back to my pre-pregnancy weight. For context, I started at 147 lbs, got up to about 175 lbs at the end of pregnancy, and as of now I’m sitting around 150 lbs. I’m 5’5” with a generally lean athletic build. On paper, that sounds like a success story, but my body doesn’t look the same.
There’s a small C-section shelf this time that I didn’t have before, and realistically, there’s a good chance it won’t fully go away without cosmetic surgery. The incision itself is at least three inches larger than my first C-section scar, and it looks just so different. It’s way less neat, less clean and more like something that had to be done lightening fast, because it did. There have been moments where I’ve looked in the mirror and just completely broken down. Full, uncontrollable sobbing because I don’t recognize the body staring back at me.
I’ve asked my husband through tears how in the fuck he can still find me sexy, how he can still want me, and how he can still look at me and see beauty. And he does. Consistently. He tells me none of this has changed his attraction to me. If anything, he says watching what my body went through to bring our daughters into the world makes him more attracted to me. I believe him. I just wish I could see even 10% of what he sees. Because right now… I don’t. Right now I feel like I’m living in a body that is almost mine, but not quite, and that disconnect is harder than I expected it to be.
I do want to be transparent about this, though. Below I am going to share photos of my scar and its healing progression. The first was taken two days postpartum, the second at one week, and the third at four weeks. I’m not sharing these for shock value or for validation, just to show what this actually looks like.
Scar Progression -
Sex
Anyone who has followed me for even a second has probably picked up on the vibe that I have a libido that could power a rocket ship, and am married to a man who manages to turn me from zero to drenched by merely existing, even after eleven years together. My desire never changed really during either pregnancy or postpartum. Sex did slow down after around 37 weeks this time, but not for a lack of libido on my end, simply because the physical pain of pregnancy had become full blown agony at that point.
When I had my first baby in 2024, my due month group hardly had any posts from women expressing a desire for intimacy early postpartum. Sadly, there were a concerning number of posts from women saying their husbands were pressuring them for sex as early as one week postpartum, which is a separate and genuinely awful issue in its own right. Much to my surprise, the energy in my due month group this time has been different. I’ve seen a significant number of posts from women asking whether they really needed to wait the full six weeks because they missed physical connection with the person they loved. Other women asked about the safety of solo pleasure, or external-only intimacy with their partner. The tone was rarely graphic or vulgar; it was usually tender, frustrated, lonely, or rooted in wanting that sense of connection & normalcy back.
Some had experienced difficult pregnancies, had been placed on pelvic rest for months, and/or had gone a very long time without any form of sexual intimacy at all. Almost without fail, beneath nearly every one of these posts, the comments flooded in with shame. Some included:
“You really can’t wait JUST six weeks? Why is everyone so obsessed with sex?”
“Disgusting. Does anyone keep anything private anymore?”
Comments implying the husband must be pressuring her.
The infamous “dinner plate wound” medical risk line repeated like scripture.
With my first daughter, we did not make it six weeks. This time, we tried. We really tried. Especially since this time it wasn’t just a “normal” csection but an emergency general anesthesia csection + uterine rupture. I knew the risk, he knew the risk, and there were quite a few nights very early postpartum where he turned me down during “everything but the main event” nights on the couch. Oh yeah, those “everything but the main event” nights started around six days PP, fully initiated by me.
But then a particular night came along. A night not long after a particularly traumatizing week involving our first daughter being hospitalized. She was ultimately okay, but once she was home and both babies were asleep, we found ourselves on the couch after midnight. One thing lead to another and I swear the weight of the prior weeks just caused our minds to go full RadioGaGa. I initiated it. Bluntly. “Please fuck me. I need you”. This time he didn’t reject me ... until about two minutes in when I was abruptly asked “... hold up, how long ago did you have her? Remind me again how long are we supposed to wait?” Suddenly my mind came somewhat online and I was like “.... oh shit”.
We genuinely became so lost in one another that the fact that I definitely still had some time to wait just slipped our minds. At this point we resumed the “everything but the main event” intimacy for an hour and a half or so. It was genuinly beautiful and healed me on a cellular level. It was everything I needed and more. I don’t care that the actual sex was only a few minutes, those few minutes of being one reminded me that through trauma, near loss and whatever life throws at us, we are still one ... in every way, in this lifetime and every one to come. The world has a way of dissolving with him and to reduce that cosmic magic down to “just sex” ... I just can’t. It unfathomable to me.
Again, I want to be upfront that this was extremely medically reckless. I am intentionally not sharing the day it happened because it was very early, and I am really not trying to get hung at the stake and executed. What’s done is done, and if anything medically had gone wrong, I would have known weeks ago. That said, this was dumb on our part, so please do not take this as advice from my feral ass horny self. Thank you.
Around 3 weeks postpartum, I had a Telehealth visit with my OB where I was upfront about my desires and what had happened. She was extremely kind, reassured me she was not here to judge me, and said that most of her patients do resume intimacy before the six week appointment. She said that her non negotiable is that bleeding must be fully stopped for at least a few days, and to her, that is much more important than an arbitrary six week rule (as some people stop bleeding well before six weeks, and some well after). She said that she would be willing to “cautiously clear me” so long as I was done bleeding, I took things slow, and would stop right away if anything felt even 1% off. By the time of this phone call, I had already been done bleeding for a few days …
… and despite my husband having only slept about 2 hours the night before, I immediately hung up that call, woke him up and ravished him like a dog in heat. 10/10 no regrets. Since being “cautiously cleared”, I would say full blown PIV sex has probably happened about eight to ten times, along with many more nights of external play.
For additional context, there are a few factors that I know have influenced how this postpartum period has felt for me so far. One, I’m not breastfeeding. Two, I’ve always had a naturally high sex drive. Three, I have a truly equal partner, not a dad who “helps,” but a parent who shows up fully. All of that matters and it’s part of why this is my experience.
This month has been messy, raw, painful, healing, beautiful, and completely unlike anything I could have prepared for.
Some days I feel strong and some days I feel shattered. Most days I feel like a little bit of both. But at the end of it, I’m still here, my babies are here, and .y husband is here.
For now, that’s the only ending I need.