Healing from trauma: find your village

In our latest blog post, in honour of Caesarean Awareness Month, Sonia reflects on how you heal from your trauma - mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

TRIGGER WARNING: Please read this story with care. If you’re finding the content challenging, please give yourself permission to step away. If you need support click here, if you need urgent help click here.

Let’s skip the bit where you make your birth plan and you have that discussion with your birthing partner and then it doesn't go to plan. I’m Sonia, born and bred in the UK, and throughout my pregnancies and recovery of three c-sections, my entrance into motherhood, has been very much rooted in my South-Asian heritage. I am also a peer supporter with the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers.

All my births were classed as emergencies, but the last two didn’t feel as much of an emergency as the first time. After I had dedicated nine months (actually three years prior to that going through IVF to get to where I was) to yoga, hypnobirthing, researching how to bring spirituality into pregnancy and into motherhood, how did it all go wrong? Why couldn’t my body ‘perform’ yet again? Just like having assisted conceptions, I needed assisted births.

Channeling female ancestors
But I want to fast forward to that fourth trimester. How as a South-Asian family and community you are wrapped up, nurtured and healed. The first 42 days are seen as sacred. It’s the time your mother, your sisters, your aunts help your body heal, whether you have a ‘natural’ birth or a birth by ‘operation’ (as my nan/grandma would say). Each time I went into labour, I managed to get to around six centimetres each time, I would channel my female ancestors, their strength. After all, they did this without medication, without scans, in a house, or in a made-up labour room with just a doctor and nurse to assist them. But waiting behind the wings was the army of women ready to receive the mother and child.

To cook the warming meals their body’s needed to nourish and repair. To ensure the new mother had enough energy to feed and nurture her child.

Magic window
I was lucky enough to get this support from my mother, my mother-in-law and my aunts. From my Nan and auntie making me ‘panjiri’ which is made from jaggery, linseeds, nuts, ghee and flour (looks a bit like refined granola) or my mother-in-law making me a nut-based brittle and giving it to me before bed with a mug of milk, or the long chats with my aunts, my mum, my sister, on the phone talking – you know, just talking. Why 42 days? It’s that six week magic window to heal, it also means not leaving the house for 42 days. There is no expectation for you to ‘bounce back’ like in Western cultures.

“My recovery took its toll on my journey into motherhood”

Snatched time
Even though this care and support from my village continued beyond the 42 days, it took me five months to acknowledge the trauma of the birth, to articulate how it had changed me and not being able to cope, to not just my female support system, but also my husband – who had primarily fixed me, nursed me back to health. Even with all the support of my village, accepting an assisted birth, recovering physically was taking its toll on my journey into motherhood. It snatched time, moments were blurred. My emotions were wrapped up in breastfeeding. I was never prepared or told how much having a caesarean birth, and losing blood affects milk production and supply.

A journey into motherhood is personal, it’s individual, you don’t realise how strong you are, and it was leaning on the women and the traditions that helped me heal. We have almost forgotten these traditions, allowed to fade away to google, baby sleep books and routines. There is so much truth in ‘It take a village to raise a child’. I say: accept that help, talk and heal, whatever journey you’re on.