Did 'Nobody Tell Me' or Did I Just Not Ask?

Who was supposed to tell me about the nosebleeds?

Sometimes I end up in TikTok neighborhoods and I have no idea how I got there. I, like everybody who uses the curséd video app, was caught in a downpour of Alabama sorority rush content, despite never having been in a sorority nor having any desire to visit Alabama in the foreseeable future. For awhile, the algorithm believed that I was interested in recipes that contained enough cheese to kill an entire Wisconsin village, or recipes that contained a barnyard's worth of different animals that underwent a cooking process that appeared to break several laws of thermodynamics. Berries & Cream and Couch Guy also took their turn on my feed, for reasons that I still do not understand.

But I do know how my browsing and social media habits must have pushed me to the harrowing corner of TikTok that is "Things nobody told me/things they don't tell you about pregnancy/birth/postpartum." And now I can't look away.

Part warning, part let-me-let-you-in-on-a-little-secret, part indirect criticism of those who could have told, but didn't, part signal flare that seems intended to connect with a sympathetic audience during a fundamentally isolating time, Nobody Told Me TikTok stars mothers who were surprised by some of the unpleasant things that happened to them during this whole having-a-baby process and immediately after.

One mother Was Not Told about how difficult it would be to sleep late in the third trimester. Another Was Not Told about the hormone hurricane that accompanies a new mother's milk letdown, a few days after birth. A few Were Not Told that breastfeeding can be difficult to impossible for some mothers, and that it isn't the right choice for everybody. Several Were Not Told that they were allowed to decline things like cervical checks, or request intermittent fetal monitoring rather than constant fetal monitoring at the hospital. A lot of mothers Were Not Told about various things that can happen to the human vagina after a whole baby is pushed out of it, and that the remedy for those things might involve something called a "pad-sicle."

Here's something that bothers me a little about that framing, though: when were people supposed to tell us these things?

Before I got pregnant, I knew a fair amount about the process of pregnancy, since part of my job has been to write and talk about public policy as it relates to reproductive health, but I did not need to know about some of the day-to-day discomforts of pregnancy, and so I did not know about them, just as I currently don't need to know about the quirks of public transit in Paris. Friends and family who had given birth before did not volunteer this information to me, because I did not need to know it at the time, and some of it is very personal, to the point where it might be considered rude to share it with a person who didn't directly ask about it.

Whose job was it to tell me, before I even knew for sure that I wanted to have children, that an epsom bath can help soothe a sore postpartum taint? My mother's? It would have been weird if she'd brought that up, unprompted. Who dropped the ball by not explaining to me what "cluster feeding" is, when I didn't ask? Who was supposed to explain the need for lube during post-partum sex? When were my college gal pals supposed to describe "back labor" to me?

Pregnancy has opened up lines of communication with close friends and family that weren't open before. Now, to my loved ones who are parents, I know I can bring up questions about things like how to keep a baby from peeing on you while you're changing a diaper to good brands of stool softeners for the days your digestive system is trying to work in a pelvic cavity recently blown up by childbirth. But before, if I'd randomly texted say, my friend Molly to ask about say, what strength of Depends are best for absorbing postpartum bleeding, she would have probably found it odd. Because it would have been very odd to ask my friend that question out of nowhere. I am learning things that nobody had told me because now, these pieces of information are now relevant to my specific set of circumstances.

Another odd thing about the Things Nobody Told Me-sphere is that a lot of the Nobody Told Me information was available through medical professionals or books. My OB-GYN has been harping on the physical and emotional difficulty of the postpartum period since my fetus transitioned from looking like a pulsating bean to looking like a furious alien on the ultrasounds. Every fact-centric pregnancy book I've read mentions unpleasant things that can and do happen during labor, like vaginal tearing and epidural wet taps. (But then again, opening an informational book is a form of asking.)

I wonder how much of Nobody Told Me-tok comes from the fact that our collective expectations of pregnancy and childbirth come from unreliable sources. For people who have never had children and don't work directly in health care, their closest encounter with what pregnancy and childbirth look like probably either occurred during their childhood when their mother was giving birth to their younger siblings or through the lens of lazy Hollywood writing. If it's the former, moms don't usually pass on the unvarnished truth about their reproductive experiences to their older kids, especially not people who were kids 20-30 years ago. If it's the latter, most well-known Hollywood depictions of pregnancy and childbirth were written by men who have never birthed a child, and seem now to be written around what audiences expect to see rather than anything resembling reality. Besides, postpartum depression isn't very cinematic.

I sympathize with mothers who feel broadsided by the enormity of childbearing and the ensuing loneliness that can conjure. I can understand why a person might express those lonely surprises by dispensing what they personally learned from their experience as universal advice on social media. But there's also a danger in universalizing your own experiences. Many of the Things that No One Tells You or Nobody Warns You About don't end up being something that happens to every mother. For audiences for this advice, worrying that it will definitely apply to them only serves to increase anxiety during an already uncertain time.

I'm glad that social media provides expectant and postpartum parents a platform to speak up and hear each other, but having a baby is already difficult enough without characterizing the experience as something deliberately shrouded in mystery. It's not that nobody told us these things on purpose. We just didn't know the right questions.

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