The birth I
remember, and
The One She Tried To Re-Write
(Labour photog by the Doula)
Imagine labouring for days - open, primal, beyond language - and later when you finally speak of what hurt, being told that maybe your memory is blurry and fragmented. Imagine standing there as mother, no-way-near fully healed yet hearing your truth rewritten in real time by the person who was meant to protect it.
That's where my story begins - or rather, where it split.
The birth I
thought I knew
I went into labour believing deeply in women's wisdom; in continuity of care, in the sanctity of being held through birth. I hired a doula for that reason - someone to hold the line and guard the energy. To bridge the gap between the 'system' and the sacred.
I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I'd end up applauding hospital midwives and feeling devastatingly disappointed by a doula. it went against everything I thought I understood about birth work and support.
What happened inside those hours is something my body will always remember. The way the atmosphere shifted. The subtle but unmistakable sense of being unseen will never be forgotten.
When I reached out afterward to share my heaviness,
the ache in my heart about how I'd felt myself and how my husband and my baby were held,
I expected accountability (or at least space for reflection).
What I received instead was a quiet, condescending dismissal:
"After six intense days
of discomfort and exhaustion,
I completely understand how memories can feel blurry or fragmented.
But I would like to gently remind you to take a moment and reflect on how I stayed by your side those six days. Barely sleeping, making sure you were comfortable, cleaning and tidying your birth space, massaging you and providing.."
As if the vividness of my recollection and the very imprint of my own experience around some very serious things could be waved away as hormonal haze.
What're You 'Waiting' For?
She told me she had been 'waiting' for me/us to communicate.
WAITING - while we were in hospital -- labouring through the night, recovering, baby being transferred to a specialist hospital, us trying to navigate seperation as well as all the newborn chaos?
WAITING - as if the responsibility even lay with us as the birthing family to manager her postnatal protocols, not the other way around?
To whom does that responsibility fall?
To my mind, when you hire a doula - when you entrust someone with the most sacred threshold of your life, is it reallllyyyyy the mother's role (in her exhaustion and vulnerability) to manage communication or to chase emotional closure? OR does the birth worker hold the duty-torch out and check in? To ensure that the container they helped create is safely closed?
I know my answer.
The Break!
There were moments in my labour where I found myself emotionally regulating the very person hired to support me.
Imagine that: A birthing mother consoling her doula mid-contraction. That's how wild and distorted the dynamic became!
The person meant to hold the space for my husband, baby and I became a source of emotional instability inside it.
There were words said that should never be said in birthing room or on any paid job - words about feeling unliked; about being "out of tools and at capacity", about taking our birth on as "one last job"..
Words that should never have been mine to hear in labour. And yet, I did hear them. Clearly. So did others.
Birth doesn't erase memory - it etches it.
Gaslighting in the Birth World
Gaslighting isn't always loud. Sometimes it's a soft smile and a sentence like "I completely understand how memories can feel blurry or fragmented."
It's the quiet rewriting of someone's lived experience into a narrative that's easier for the other person to carry.
But when a mother is told that what she remembers is not real, it cuts deep. It tells her that her perception (the same intuition that will have guided her through labour) is not one to be trusted - and that's what hurts most birthing mothers the most.
They talk so much in birth work about 'holding space', about being trauma-informed, about honouring women's wisdom, but what happens when that same space becomes the source of silencing?
Or when the person meant to protect your story starts reshaping it to protect their own?
It's a kind of betrayal that lingers.
Not just personally but philosophically, because it shakes the belief that the birth world is inherently safer, softer or more attuned than the medical system - or, at least in my lived experience, I had made that presumption.
I was totally over-prepared to not feel those things in a hospital setting and was not prepared to ever be compromised with a natural, physiological, home/water/free, not at all.
Boundaries, Contracts
and Care
When I tried to resolve things privately, I was told that all services had been 'fulfilled in accordance with the contract' (they hadn't); that there was 'no obligation to respond further to messages' and that my attempts to seek accountability were distressing and harassing (I only responded to one email and then followed up as a chaser because I was met with radio silence).
What's crucial here though is this: To see something as sacred as birth support be reduced to a transaction was sobering for me.
Birth isn't a box-ticking service so much as a human exchange of trust and reverence. When a doula tells you that the work ends when the invoice clears, you realise the 'holding space' has become a marketing phrase than a lived ethic.
Silence and Legal Threats
When I persisted - assertively but also factually - I was told that my emails were '"hostile" and that legal action might follow -incredulous!
I know I'm not alone in being a mother trying to process her birth experience, being labelled as a liar, exaggerator or worse: a threat! It's the same pattern that echoes through so many women's stories: silence them, pathologist them, warm them into submission, silence, retreat.
And it seriously made me think... How many others share this story?
what my body remembers
The truth is, and always has been, my body remembers. It remembers the faces, the voices, the witnesses. It remembers the shift in tone, the moments of tension, the way my instincts were overrides. I may not 'remember' the exact time but I do remember the feeling - and feelings don't lie.
Birth doesn't make our memories fuzzy; it etches them in the deepest strata of our being. It carves clarity into the bones.
So when someone tells me I might not be remembering correctly, who are they to say that? I know better. I know what I lived!
I am not naive. I am not uninformed. I am trauma-informed, grounded, and have spent years studying how trauma shapes the body and how women's voices have been historically denied.
Still, this got to me!
All I keep thinking (not in an arrogant way at all, but..): if this treatment got to me. If it could shake me, I then think about all the mothers who don't have the same grounding or language to speak back?
The ones who swallow their discomfort because they don't want to be or seem 'ungrateful' , 'confused' or 'stupid' (a word a mother used in my Birth Memory Survey).
The ones whose experiences never make it into a blog or Instagram birth debrief. What happens to their stories? How many truths are quietly rewritten, under the guise of poor 'memory'?
I've realised that these are absolutely not isolated incidents. I truly, genuinely see that they are part of a pattern. One that asks women to be both silent and grateful at the same time.
I'm reclaiming my birth story because when a mum comes forward - whether she's trembling, bleeding or just tender - and says something didn't feel right, the only correct response is to listen.
To hold.
To witness.
Not erase.
This is my story,
my birth memory.
After my son was born,
I found myself confronting a question
I couldn't let go of: Why are mothers so often told their memories of birth are different to what we ourselves remember with extraordinary precision?
Not only mentally, but physically. Viscerally. Somatically.
reclaiming my birth story
and because I couldn't leave a review in the true way I wanted, with what I did write being blanketed over, I have shared my truth here!
I can say that I went into labour believing I'd be held and instead I found myself defending the legitimacy of my own felt experience.
I can say that I saw more humility, care and presence from the midwives than from the doula I thought would be my advocate.
And I can say this: Birth work needs accountability, not excuses. It needs listening, not 'waiting.'
Many women can still locate moments of birth in their bodies, years later. This is because birth is not only remembered cognitively. It's often carried bodily - and my survey was created as a living archive of that maternal memory. A space to name what other mother's remember; what was dismissed. What became encoded. What still lives in the body.
If you feel called to contribute, click the link to my anonymous birth memory survey.