You’ll most likely want to take it easy after giving birth to your tiny humans because you won’t be able to get back to your regular routine. You won’t want to run, or even walk too fast… you’ll want to stroll, very slowly. You also don’t want to be sitting in uncomfortable chairs or doing too much (any) squatting.
Everyone’s experience is different though. I’ve heard of some women feeling great the next day and are back to their [almost] regular.
My Experience
I couldn’t be out and about for long AT ALL, for at least 6 weeks after giving birth to my first. My mom came to help with him a few days after he was born and she stayed for 2 weeks. While my mom was visiting, I didn’t want to just have her cooped up in the house, so we planned to go to a few stores in the same shopping plaza. If I’m going to a store like Ross, I like to take my time. We were probably in that Ross for about 30 minutes and way before I hit 30 mins, I had already started to feel my stomach cramping. Although I was cramping, I pressed on and hadn’t said anything to my mom at this point. After leaving Ross, we walked down to TJ Maxx, very slowly might I add and were in there for about 5 minutes before I told my mom I had to go.
My stomach was aching and it literally felt like my vagina was falling out. It was so uncomfortable. I did look this up and while others are way more censored in their explanations and experience i.e. “the feeling my bottom was falling out,” it’s all the same. If you get this same feeling, just know you are not alone.
I suggest maybe taking a 10 minute walk every day, if you can stand it, and gradually increase from there. The longer you walk, the more pain you’ll be in… at least that was the case for me.
With my oldest, the amount of tearing I experienced during birth was crazy, so this uncomfortable feeling lasted a lot longer. It was over a year and everything “down there” just wasn’t right. The tearing was so bad that I had to go to the operating room and go under anesthesia in order to get stitched up. My doctor and nurses weren’t prepared…they didn’t have everything set out for my delivery…like, the lidocaine, so that I could get an episiotomy, so as I was pushing, it BURNEDDDDD, so bad, because my vagina was literally ripping. I feel that if I had an episiotomy, yeah, I would’ve probably been in pain for a FEW weeks and still had to get stitches, but I it wouldn’t have lasted over a year.
Lidocaine: A local anesthetic that works by causing temporary numbness/loss of feeling in the skin.
Episiotomy: a surgical cut made at the opening of the vagina during childbirth to aid a difficult delivery and prevent rupture of tissues.
[When I had my second child, I did have to get stitches, but the tearing was not nearly as bad and he literally fixed everything…I’m back to normal down there and I can move about freely.] Before I delivered him I was literally so worried that it would make my vagina worse because of how bad it went with my oldest, but nope!
Movement Matters After Giving Birth
Squatting can be very uncomfortable, and you may feel like your vagina is stretching while you are down there, or you may not even feel the pain until you stand up, which happened to me all the time because I can usually squat as I please, but I had to be cognizant of what I was doing. Squatting was even more frequent because I have a toddler, who is obviously shorter than me, so it’s just like second nature to come down to his level. It could just be me, but I feel like whenever I got this stretched feeling from squatting that I was drawing out the healing process.
- My experience will NOT be the same for everyone. Some people have a very similar experience to me; some women’s healing will be shorter, meaning they are back at their regular routine the next day or within 2 weeks, and some longer, maybe even as long as a year later and you still may not feel like yourself.
- It took over a year and a half before I felt fine after my first child, but not really. I can’t tell you exactly when I would completely feel fine because then I had my second child, so the results are skewed if that makes sense.
If you had this same experience as me, let me know in the comments. Also, if you were blessed enough to just get back to your life with no postpartum concerns, I’d like to know that too.
Until my next post…
