If You're Putting Pressure On Yourself To Be "Over" Your Birth — Read This

A conversation with Calgary psychologist Kayla Pearen on birth trauma, the postpartum anxiety nobody warned her about, and why processing your story was never supposed to be on a timeline.

Kayla Piren is a psychologist in Calgary, Canada. She works at two practices, both grounded in mind-body approaches to mental health. She's specifically trained to support people through anxiety, trauma and the kinds of moments that quietly reorganise a life.

And she still got blindsided by her own postpartum experience.

Kayla and I connected through Instagram after she bought one of the Birth Story Reflection Journals. We had walked very similar paths — both first-time mums, both with complicated births, both clinicians who thought, at some level, that we knew what we were walking into.

This conversation is the one I wish I'd been able to listen to in my own first year of motherhood.

Kayla's son had just turned one when we recorded. She'd just gone back to work. There was a birthday party to plan, transitions everywhere — and she was still, in her words, deep in the work of processing her birth.

Someone close to her had said the line above, and it had landed like a permission slip she didn't realise she'd been waiting for. Because somewhere along the way — without ever consciously deciding it — she had set herself a deadline. The bow had to be tied by the first birthday. The journal had to be done. The healing had to be complete.

I think a lot of mothers do this. I did this. We absorb a quiet pressure that says: the baby is one now, you've had your time, the story is supposed to be over.

It isn't. It was never going to be.

The professional who didn't see it coming

Going into pregnancy, Kayla felt some confidence that her clinical background would help her notice if she started struggling. On a logical level, she understood that some women have a harder time with the transition. She knew the warning signs.

The problem, she told me, was which warning signs she'd been trained to look for.

"All we were really taught," she said, "was kind of just look out for postpartum depression. Look out for the baby blues. Postpartum psychosis was thrown in there, but those were really the only three things."

So that's what she scanned for in herself. Depressive symptoms. Low mood. The classic flags.

What she actually experienced was something different. Simple tasks felt overwhelming. She was overthinking everything. Worrying constantly about whether her baby would be okay — not just in the moment, but five, ten, twenty years from now. She was high-functioning. To everyone around her, she looked like she was holding it together. And underneath that, she was completely depleted.

Eventually, Kayla reached out to a postpartum-specific therapist of her own. And that therapist gave her two words she had not been given before: postpartum anxiety.

Read that line again, because it's the part of this conversation I keep coming back to.

A trained mental health professional, in a country with a structured postpartum care system, did not know about postpartum anxiety until she experienced it herself. The standard screening at the nurse check-ins didn't catch it. She was never warned about it in pregnancy. And yet — in the practice of one specialist clinician — it was showing up more often than the condition everyone was actually screening for.

If a clinician can slip through the system, an exhausted new mother absolutely can.

Why postpartum anxiety hides

Part of why postpartum anxiety so often gets missed, Kayla and I both see in our work, is that it disguises itself as competence.

An anxious mother is often a hyper-organised mother. She's the one who's read everything. Tracked everything. Planned everything. Her house is clean. Her baby is fed. The bag is packed. From the outside, she looks like she's killing it.

And society rewards that. People say things like, "You're such a perfect mum, you're really doing so well." Which feeds the inner perfectionist. Which feeds the anxiety. Which keeps the whole loop turning.

The other reason it hides is that, on the surface, a lot of it makes sense. Of course you're worried — you have a baby. Of course you can't sleep — you have a baby. Of course you're overwhelmed. So the genuine, debilitating, thieving-of-actual-life experience of postpartum anxiety gets brushed under the rug as just being a new mum.

The birth that didn't go to plan

Kayla's labour was over fifty hours from the moment her water broke.

She was sent home from the hospital twice. The first time she went back, they said they didn't have a room. The second time, the same thing. The third time, she ended up labouring in a triage room before they finally found her a space.

She'd hoped for a natural birth. She'd done the prep classes. She'd been encouraged toward the no-medication path. But after days of contractions, an induction, an epidural, and four hours of pushing, she was told there was essentially no other option: an emergency C-section, immediately.

And then the hardest part — the part that, more than any other moment, has stayed with her.

The medication in her spine for the C-section developed complications. She had to go under general anaesthetic. And just before they put her under, she was told her husband couldn't be in the room.

Her son arrived healthy. They were eventually surrounded by family and friends and love. From the outside, the story was complete: baby is here, mum is alive, everyone go home and move forward.

But inside Kayla, something hadn't been put into words yet. The grief of the birth she didn't get. The disappointment in the support she didn't receive. The disorienting feeling of having missed her own son's first moments.

That's the thing about birth trauma that the system so often misses. It isn't about the medical event being labelled "traumatic." It's about the emotional and psychological weight that gets carried forward — silently, into every midnight feed, every milestone, every quiet moment when the noise dies down enough for the questions to start.

What if it had been different? Would things be different now? Did I do something wrong?

Those questions don't go away on their own. They wait.

What healing actually looks like (and what it doesn't)

One of the most honest moments in our conversation was when Kayla started a sentence — "for a long time, it was…" — and immediately corrected herself.

"Sorry, I keep saying was. The year is done. My healing is not done."

Her healing is current. Active. Still happening. And as a clinician using her own voice publicly, she wanted that to be clear — because she knows how easily mothers absorb the message that healing should be linear, complete, and ideally on a polite timeline that ends before the first birthday photos.

Real processing doesn't work that way. It loops. It surfaces. It quietens for a while and then the first birthday hits, or a friend announces her pregnancy, or a smell or a song lands you straight back in the moment, and there's more work to do.

That isn't a failure. That's how the brain processes something significant.

The journal as the thing that holds you between sessions

Kayla bought the Birth Story Journal months after she first saw it. She'd had it saved. Her sister-in-law sent her birthday money — explicitly for "a treat" — and Kayla asked, sheepishly, if it would be okay to spend it on the journal instead.

"I just want to put that out there to other listeners," she told me. "You're not alone if it feels weird to spend the money on something for you."

I love that she said that. Because the gap between knowing self-care matters and actually receiving it is a real gap, and a lot of mothers spend a long time stuck in it.

Once the journal arrived, what Kayla noticed wasn't that it replaced therapy. It bridged the spaces around therapy.

You can't see your therapist every day. Often you don't see them on the hardest day. The journal was there on the hard days. It held her thoughts when she didn't have a person to hold them. It let her sit with one moment of her birth, properly, before moving on to the next one. Sometimes she'd write about a prompt and bring what she'd written into therapy as the next thing to talk through.

She'd also, gently, given herself permission not to finish it by any particular date. Because the journal isn't a deadline. It's a companion.

Kayla's message to other mothers

I asked Kayla, at the end of our conversation, if there was anything else she wanted mothers listening to know.

She said:

• Be kind to yourself. You're probably doing the most amazing job.
• Surround yourself with people who will remind you of that.
• Send other mothers in your life the message that they've got this — those small reminders mean the world.
• Don't go to Instagram and decide you're doing worse than everyone else. Behind the screen, that person is probably struggling too.
• There is real strength in reaching out for support. It might be a friend. It might be another mum. It might be someone on the other side of the world who's been through what you've been through. It might be a therapist.

"We don't need to idolise mums who hold it all together and lean on nobody," she said. "That isn't going to help mum or baby. Mum and baby deserve a village."

Yes, they do. And the first person in that village is sometimes you, deciding — finally — that your own story deserves space too.

Jade x