07/15/2025
The beginning of July always sneaks up on me.
This whole messy, holy path I’m on – of trauma healing, doula work, reclaiming my voice – starts here, with the birth of my first child on July 3, 2014. I was overdue, swollen, and so so hot (it was July after all)...and completely unprepared for what was about to happen.
I gave my power away without even realizing it.
I remember shaking on the operating table. They told me to hold still. That’s the moment that’s still stuck. It sums the whole experience, the full set of expectations: Be quiet. Be small. Don’t move, let the doctors do what’s best. Because they know what’s best – not you.
I’ve carried the weight of that ever since.
My first birth is why my fourth – almost exactly five years later, on July 4, 2019 – felt so loaded. I had a plan that time, and I clung to it like my life depended on it. Because in a way, it did. I didn’t know it then, but I see it now: I needed that birth to be redemptive. That was how I thought I’d get my power back.
But it didn’t work.
Near the end of my pregnancy I was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition. I had to give up my plan for our safety. Hooked up to monitors, restricted to my room, relying on synthetic hormones to force labor is not what I wanted. I was angry and uncooperative.
When my baby was finally ready to come, he got stuck. Three minutes. My midwife was screaming. I was pushing with everything I had, and it wasn’t good enough.
When he finally slipped earthside he was silent. Blue. Not breathing. I thought he was dead.
Last week, he turned six.
***
Usually around this time of year, I write something about my birth traumas. Ever since I found the strength to talk about these truths, I’ve written about them – because people don’t understand what trauma actually is. “At least you have a healthy baby,” is about as far as most people can go. Not because they’re cruel, but because it hurts to think about. So they placate it away.
But if thinking about someone else’s pain hurts you, imagine what it feels like for the person trying to live with it – trying to make sense of what happened, to find any kind of solid ground. And the only thing they hear is: “Well, your baby didn’t die – so what are you complaining about?”
I’ve done so much inner work over the last ten years, trying to survive my brain in the wake of those traumas, that I barely recognize that mom shaking on the OR table. I love her. And I revere her. Honestly. But I’m not her anymore, because I don’t need to broadcast my pain to prove it was real.
Still – I want to keep healing out loud, because it makes the world a little softer for the next woman who’s still in the dark. Still thinking she’s the one who’s broken and wrong, simply because the world doesn’t know how to hold her pain.
But this year…I’m just so damn tired.
I was invited into a “real” position at a hospital, about a year and a half ago – a seat at the table, they said. A chance to speak for the patient’s experience. I was ecstatic. I wanted to create change, and I brought my full self to that table. But I know a lack of integrity between words and actions when I see one. I resigned from that position in March – not because I didn’t care, but because I cared more than they did. I had to fight too hard to be heard.
When a pregnant client tells me she wants to switch providers because her OB made her feel small or dismissed – I secretly thank god I’m not pregnant. Because I don’t know where to send her. I don’t know where any of us can get care that sees us as whole people, not just bodies on a table.
This year, my trauma anniversary didn’t hit so hard. I spent a couple of days in nervous system freeze. Smiled. Cut the ice cream cake. And tried not to let my kids think any of it had to do with them.
But your mom being sad on your birthday is a hard thing to understand when you’re six.
***
Last week, just as I was coming out of the fog of those trauma days, Dadu had a stroke.
Dadu – Bengali for “grandfather” – was my husband’s grandfather by blood, mine by marriage. The patriarch of the Bhaduri family. And an amazing human being.
He was born in Kolkata, India in 1922. He studied medicine and worked around the world as a surgeon before settling with his wife and children in southern Maryland in the 1960s. There, he practiced family medicine until he retired – at age 76.
Dadu loved medicine. His favorite pastime was reading anatomy books and sketching little organs and systems on napkins while he explained them to you. That and cooking, which is where we connected. He taught me to make traditional Bengali dishes – meat and vegetable curries, puffy luchi flatbreads, and all kinds of dal – recipes that are now staples in my household. There was a little sign in his house that summed him up well: Go everywhere. Talk to everyone. Eat everything.
Dadu passed away yesterday. He was 103 years old.
The stroke was terminal, so we knew the end was near. His daughters – three nurses and one chef – kept vigil, and he passed peacefully.
We wore white. Because in Hindu tradition, death isn’t an ending. It’s just a transition.
And transition is a space I know well.
So I cooked food. I listened to stories. And I held space. Because even through my own tears I’m fluent in the landscape of grief – where everything familiar falls away and something raw and holy begins.
Birth and death live close to each other. Both ask us to loosen our grip. To bear witness. To stretch and grow in ways we don’t think we can, but we do. Because that’s what it means to be human.
Dadu wasn’t just a human, though. He was a legend.
Dadu was a doctor who practiced before hospitals were allowed to make profit – before care was dictated by billing codes and insurance companies. He treated people. And he remembered them.
They remembered him, too. He’d run into former patients at the grocery store. On airplanes. In totally random places, on the regular. At his 100th birthday party more than 100 people showed up – not because he was Important with a capital I, but because he had made them feel important. Like they mattered. He saw them. He cared.
It’s that simple. He was a doctor who cared.
***
This is all I’ve got today – aside from a pile of unanswered emails, unwashed laundry, and a schedule unexpectedly wiped clean to make space for a bereaved heart that’s still learning how to keep beating.
There are threads I could pull, but I’m not ready. Not yet. Because I need to sit in this space a little bit longer. So I can keep remembering what it felt like to be seen and held by someone who understood my body but didn’t use it to dismiss my humanity.
