09/10/2026
Sometimes births are hard.
Often it isn’t because anyone intended harm… it’s not necessarily because someone did something wrong.
Birth can be unpredictable. Emergencies happen and sometimes everyone in the room does their very best and a family still walks away shaken.
But what happens afterwards matters. Families need truth. They need orientation. They need someone willing to name what happened answer their questions. Hear how they experienced and acknowledge where things could have gone differently.
In my work with families and birth stories, I see how healing it can be to create a coherent narrative around an experience that has lived in fragments.
I believe that can begin with the people who were in the room during the birth. Sadly, that is not often how it goes.
We may be afraid that acknowledging someone’s experience will create blame, but silence doesn’t erase what happened.
It just leaves families alone to make sense of a really huge experience, while also tending to their own healing and taking care of their brand new baby.
We owe it to families to help them to begin to organize and integrate their experiences after birth. 💗
