Pelvic floor shield, or why I cry all the time postpartum

Since becoming a mother, I have become a crier. This is not new, it’s just more dramatic. I was a crier before — during my pregnancy I would have weekly sobbing sessions for no reason at all, just to clear out whatever I was feeling. But after the baby arrived I reached a new level. In our first days home from the hospital, I would spontaneously burst into tears every night at around 9 pm. It was a vulnerable moment: I had survived the day with the tiny human still intact, but the night was still ahead. Nothing helped but crying. 

I felt so shaky and weak. As a yoga-obsessive I had become extremely reliant on my pelvic floor for embodied safety and security, in part through control. Years of involved vinyasa transitions had made me hyper-attuned to it. I spent astonishing amounts of effort trying to lift myself up from a cross-legged position without engaging the strength of my arms. In moments of tension, I consciously sucked the bottom of my pelvis up toward my navel as a way of reconnecting with my body. This discipline and control reassured me and I followed other yogis in considering it a virtue.

During pregnancy, I relied on that virtue, and on that muscle (is it even one muscle?), to protect me against a constant fear of miscarriage. If I felt for a moment that the baby was unsafe, I visualised a closed cervix, a strong base to my body, a secure container for him to safely spend forty weeks in. I convinced myself that my carefully cultivated muscle tone would prevent anything bad from happening. At the same time, I let other muscles slacken, slowing down my practice to fifteen minutes of gentle stretching. I cultivated receptivity everywhere except my pelvic floor. 

When I went into labour after more than forty-one weeks of pregnancy, I thought that my close relationship with this region of my body would make it easy. I spent a week contentedly observing mild contractions pulse through my body, quietly praising my own preparedness as I shut out outside influences. It’s not an exaggeration to say I took up residence in my lower abdomen. (You will not be surprised to hear that this did not make me pleasant company). The day before the birth, I woke up to strong contractions early. They were painful in a slightly pleasurable way.

I went to the hospital at ten o’clock in the evening with my husband and our mothers. We laughed on the short drive to the hospital. Predictably, I was sent home to let my labour advance a little more. I was not about to experience the pleasurable labour I had read about. My attempt to sleep devolved into a profound encounter with my pelvic floor. Contractions came at me one after another and I could feel the baby pressing down at the hammock of muscle that I had worked so hard to keep taut. No, my body said. No way.

We went to the hospital again at three o’clock in the morning. I asked for an epidural. I knew numbness was the only way to override my pelvic floor resistance. I dismissed my natural-birth fantasy and let an unskilled resident stuck a series of needles into my spine. After six attempts (or more, or less, I was not counting) I got the trickle of drugs that put me to sleep. I woke up at eight o’clock in active labour. I dozed in between interventions until one o’clock, when my doctor told me the only way to progress was to push.

As I screamed and whimpered and grabbed at supportive hands, my doctor pressed down on my perineum. “See?” She told the resident. “I’m pushing down on it but it isn’t going down.” She complimented me on my strength. “You yoga people, you have so much strength here! My last yogi patient pushed for two hours.” I laboured to get the baby out, visualising his ears stuck just above my vaginal opening. After ninety minutes I pushed his ears out and the rest of him spilled out instantly. “You didn’t have any tearing,” my doctor said, complimenting my pelvic floor again.

Afterward I expected to find that space floppy, vacant, ineffective. It was not. Instead it was bruised, stretched, frightened. Instead of releasing it had fought a tough battle and lost. When I reflexively returned to that inner strength, I found it battered. This made the crying uncontrollable. There was nothing to stop the flow of tears, no internal wall to provide a secure container. There was no baby there to protect anymore, but I still needed it. After all, the baby was never the one frightened of miscarriage. I felt my own raw bottomlessness, and wept and wept and wept.

I had one notion of maternal sentimentality from watching my own mother get weepy about nothing. Something entirely unlike that notion emerged from my body. You could have called me sentimental after the birth of my son, but this was quite beside the point: I was simply beaten up. The muscle I had trained to protect me had been beaten, by me. There was nothing there to stop the tears. So I cried, about sad movie plots and my intense hunger and the baby’s screams during the bath. My tears left wet patches on my sleeves multiple times a day.

My pelvic floor is back. I did every imaginable exercise to rebuild it and now it holds me in place again. It’s skittish, though, or maybe I am, and anything tender or tragic can reactivate the feeling of being bruised, defeated. So news headlines bring on sobs, war movies need a box of Kleenex, the baby smiling leaves my cheeks wet. Since I became a mother I realised how quixotic my body-armour was. I also saw how my everyday normalcy relied on it. I cry differently because I have less power to stop my feelings. I also have less will.