Looking Back at My Postpartum Three Years Later
What Still Lingers Long After my Birth
Trigger Warning
This piece includes discussion of childbirth, birth trauma, postpartum complications, hospital readmission, mental health, gaps in care, and maternal health risks. If any of these topics feel heavy, seek support through Postpartum Support International (1-800-944-4773 or postpartum.net) or a trusted provider. This article is intended for informational and educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your physician, OB, or qualified healthcare provider with any questions or concerns about your physical or mental health and seek immediate medical attention if you are experiencing urgent symptoms.
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Before you keep reading, if anything in this article lands for you, I made something to go with it.
Years Later: A Workbook is a framework workbook for women who are ready to look back at their birth experience, what their mind is still holding, and what has never fully resolved.
The Lived Experience
Three years ago, I was in it… the thick of it. Postpartum. The emotional and mental gauntlet I never knew existed. It felt like being underwater and still trying to wave.
I didn’t have language for most of it yet. I just knew that something had gone wrong in my birth, in my body afterward, and in the gap between what I expected recovery to look like and what it actually was. I knew I wasn’t okay, I knew the healthcare system had missed things, I knew I was drowning in something that had no name on my discharge paperwork.
What I didn’t know was that three years later, I would still be finding pieces of it. This is my story about what postpartum actually looked like when you’re honest about the timeline, not the six-week version.
What Happened
My postpartum was not one thing. It was several things happening at once, compounding each other in ways that took years to untangle.
There was the birth trauma, the experience of a birth that happened to me more than with me, that left me with a body I didn’t recognize and a story I didn’t know how to tell.
There was the postpartum preeclampsia, which came after I was already home, already supposed to be recovering. A condition that is underdiagnosed, underscreened, and underexplained and that my body carried the effects of long after the numbers normalized.
Then, there was the postpartum depression and anxiety (PPD/PPA), which didn’t look like what I had been told to watch for. It wasn’t just sadness; it was an all-consuming rage and then a bottomless numbness. It was a body that wouldn’t power down and a brain that ran worst-case scenarios on a loop. It was the creeping, persistent feeling that something was still wrong even when everyone around me told me I’m alright. All of these were happening at once, and none of them were fully named until well after the fact.
What Three Years Looks Like
I want to be honest about this part because I don’t see it written about enough. Three years out, I’m not the same person who walked into that birth. Some of that is growth, some of its loss, most of its both at the same time, bound together in ways I’m still separating.
What has healed: I have language now, and that alone changed everything. Being able to say birth trauma, PPD/PPA, postpartum preeclampsia, being able to name what happened instead of just carrying the weight of it, gave me somewhere to put things that had no place before.
I’m not in the acute phase anymore. The loop doesn’t run every night, and the anger has softened into something more like clarity. I know what I know now, and I have built something from it.
What still lingers: My relationship with the medical system is permanently changed. I walk into appointments differently. I advocate louder and earlier and with less apology, because I know now what happens when you don’t. That’s a gift that came at a cost.
There are still moments though, maybe a sound, a smell, a birth announcement that lands wrong, where something in my body remembers before my brain catches up. Trauma lives in the body longer than it lives in the story. There’s grief that I’m still metabolizing. Grief for the birth I expected, for the postpartum I deserved, and for the version of new motherhood that was taken from me by a system that didn’t have time to look closely enough. I’m not done with that grief, and I don’t think I have to be.
What I Want You to Know
If you are three months out or five years out and something still doesn’t feel resolved, you’re not supposed to be over it by now. Postpartum doesn’t end at six weeks, and the research is clear on this.
The experience of birth trauma, PPD/PPA, and postpartum preeclampsia can leave marks that surface long after the acute phase has passed. It can live in your body, in your relationships, in the way you move through the healthcare system, in the way you feel about your own story.
What helped me was naming it, then finding people who could hold the weight of it with me. Then eventually, slowly, imperfectly, building something from it. That’s still in progress. This work, this platform, my book, all of it came from a birth experience and a postpartum that nearly undid me. That’s not a redemption arc, it’s just what happened, and I’m still figuring out what it means. If you’re still figuring it out too, you’re in the right place.
If This Is You, Here’s What’s Next
If you read this and recognized yourself somewhere in it whether it’s in the timeline, in the grief, in the thing that still hasn’t fully resolved, the workbook I built is the next step.
Years Later: A Workbook walks you through five sections (1) what your body is still holding (2) what your mind is still carrying (3) who you became after (4) what remains unresolved (5) and what moving forward actually looks like for you specifically. It’s not a quick fix, but it’s a place to finally put things down and look at them honestly. Grab it below ↓
Stay golden,
Casey 💫