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The Birth I Never Expected

  • Writer: Paola Carrillo-Bustamante
    Paola Carrillo-Bustamante
  • Jan 23
  • 6 min read

What no one told me about labor, trauma, and the moment I became a mother



2 AM: When the Pain Came Back

It was 2 AM when I woke up to a pain I hadn’t felt in a very long time. The cramps I’d had since I was thirteen, the ones that arrived every month, had been gone for nineNow they were back. Familiar. Insistent.

I was past my due date. Every day, the same question arrived from friends and family: “Is the baby here yet?” Ten days after my due date, I was still waiting.

I went to the bathroom and saw a bit of blood. The mucus plug had come out, but my water hadn’t broken. I remember thinking: I guess it’s showtime.

When I got pregnant, I didn’t know what to expect. My mother always told me pregnancy was wonderful. She loved it—always glowing, never tired. And, strangely, my pregnancy was similar. No morning sickness. No swollen ankles. No major discomfort, just the normal adjustments to a growing belly.

Birth, though, was uncharted territory. I came into it with an idea I did not know I had absorbed. That birth was something managed by doctors. Something you scheduled. Something you endured with a plan.

I believed I was prepared.


I Thought Waiting Was the Hard Part

My mother had three C sections. Many of my friends had planned C sections too. In Ecuador, if you belong to the middle or upper middle class, birth is often scheduled. Doctors tell women they are too young or too old, too weak or too small, or that the baby is too big. Then surgery is booked somewhere between week thirty seven and thirty nine.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, cesarean section rates are among the highest in the world. In some private settings, they approach universality. I did not know these numbers then, but I knew the feeling. Birth was something that happened to women, not something women did.

In Germany, my partner and I took a birth preparation course over two weekends, but honestly, it didn’t help much. I walked away with only one rule lodged in my mind:

Go to the hospital only when contractions are close together and consistent.

So I waited.

At first, I did not even wake my boyfriend. This did not feel real yet. Let him sleep, I thought. He would need the energy.

The pain kept building. I tracked the contractions. They became regular. Eventually, I woke him and said we needed to go.


I Was Prepared. The System Was Not.

On the way to the hospital, I breathed through the contractions the way I had learned in pregnancy yoga. During my last weeks of maternity leave, I had practiced almost every day. I walked constantly. I had gone to yoga that very evening, at forty one weeks pregnant. I was healthy. I was fit.

I kept telling myself I had this.

We arrived at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, a place known for excellence. I expected care. I expected guidance. What I encountered first was a wall.

I was told I was four centimeters dilated. There were no rooms available. I would have to wait.

Hours passed. Shift changed. The answer stayed the same. They told me I should not be in so much pain yet.

Pain. There are no words for the kinds of pain that happen during childbirth. Pain doesn’t cover it.

For the baby to descend, it isn’t just the vaginal opening that stretches—the entire pelvis shifts. Bones that aren’t supposed to move begin to separate. It felt like tectonic plates grinding. A deep earthquake inside my body.

I tried to relax my jaw. I tried to breathe. I tried to make sound the way I had been taught. A scream came out. A midwife told me to be quieter because people were trying to rest. In the middle of a crowded hospital, surrounded by professionals, I had never felt so exposed or so alone. My boyfriend had never seen me like that. Nothing he did helped.

I was terrified.


When I Asked for Relief

Eventually, I was moved into a birth room. By then, I could barely stand upright. Someone mentioned paracetamol. I remember thinking this could not be real. I asked for an epidural. I did not ask politely. I begged. Even then, the focus drifted to small things. My hair. A hairband. Explanations shouted across the room while my body was folding in on itself.

When the epidural finally came, relief poured over me. I could breathe again. I could rest. But what no one explains clearly is that birth becomes a chain reaction. Epidurals can slow labor. To compensate, synthetic oxytocin is introduced. Monitoring increases. Intervention stacks upon intervention. The body, an ancient hormonal system, is pulled into a modern machine. Stress matters. Fear matters. Safety matters. Oxytocin rises in quiet and trust. Adrenaline rises in threat. Every adjustment intensified something else. The cycle repeated.


When Everything Accelerated

In the afternoon, the main doctor arrived. They told us the baby was not tolerating labor well. His oxygen levels were dropping. He was stalling. If he did not come soon, they said, I’d need either a C-section or vacuum extraction.

Then the shift changed again.

A new midwife arrived and everything shifted with her. She made eye contact. She spoke softly. She helped me move. She guided my body into positions that made sense, coaching me rather than commanding. She said we were going to practice pushing. I thought it was a rehearsal.

She told my boyfriend that when she gave the signal, he should press the button. She gave the signal almost immediately.

The room filled with people. Doctors. Midwives. Students. I saw scissors and I knew what that meant. Even with the epidural, I felt pain. I heard the cutting. My bones were still shifting. The baby was still high.

I felt exposed, ashamed, and thought I could not do this. Hands pressed down on my belly. Instructions came fast. I pushed when I was told.

After fifteen or sixteen hours of labor, at seven in the evening, my son was born.


The Moment that Changed Everything

Despite everything, the moment he came into the world was the most beautiful I have ever known. That first high-pitched cry was the purest ectasis pill in the world.

My body collapsed into relief and wonder. And while the room was still bright and clinical, the world around me stopped. I remember only the weight of him on my chest and my boyfriend’s hand in mine. 

But then they told me I was bleeding too much. So, they took my baby away to examine me further. A doctor explained there was a deep tear in my cervix that needed stitching. Another doctor was called. I lay there for another hour while they worked on me.

I was exhausted beyond anything I had known. My blood pressure dropped and the doctors worried they had missed an internal bleed. I was moved to the ICU and I spent the first night of my son’s life without him. He was with his father. I was alone.


The Question That Haunted Me for Years

For months—and years—afterward, I asked myself the same question: Why did everything fail? Why did my body fail at the moment it was supposed to rise? I had done everything right. I was strong, healthy, prepared…or at least I thought I was. 

But birth isn’t a test you can study for. It’s biology, yes, but it is also context and timing and fear and history and the systems we move through while our bodies are breaking open.

At the time, all I could feel was shame. It felt like my body had betrayed me. Like I had failed at something natural, something women have done for millennia. That belief settled into me quietly and stayed for years. It made the weeks that followed heavier. It made recovery slower. It made early motherhood lonelier than it already was.

I could not yet see that my body had done something extraordinary. Or that I had been moving through a system that did not know how to hold me. Or that both of those things could be true at the same time.

Years later, when the guilt finally began to loosen its grip, a different understanding started to form. One that had nothing to do with strength or weakness. One that made room for what had actually happened.

I thought birth was the hardest part.

I was wrong.

Because after the labor, after the stitches, after the ICU, something else began. The slow, disorienting process of becoming of a mother. The part no one had warned me about.

Postpartum came next.


To be continued.


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