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TW: Some details of giving birth

My main social circle is a mixed group of guys and gals, most of whom are in relationships with each other. Some of us have known each other since our school days (we are all in our early to mid 30s) but as a group we have been solidly hanging out for about a decade. We banter a lot an give each other a hard time about different things all the time, all in good fun and nothing malicious, we have never had a falling out in the group because of it.

A few years ago the whole "getting kicked in the balls hurts more than childbirth" thing started coming up pretty regularly. Now for the record I knew that they weren't being serious, I know these guys pretty well and it was written all over their faces when they were saying it. It was simply to get a rise out of the women of the group, and it pretty much always worked. They thought it was very funny. I honestly tried to not rise to it, but for some reason it really pushed a button in me and seemed to in the other women too (4 women total, me and one had kids the others didn't).

One evening we were hanging out again having a few drinks and it came up again, and for the first time I wasn't good naturedly/jokingly pissed off, I was actually irked by it. I realised that, while the men of the group clearly didn't actually think what they were saying was true, they actually had no concept of the actual scale of what women go through in childbirth. No clue. Because if they did, they wouldn't think this conversation was funny.

So I did something I had never done in a group that included any men before. I opened my mouth and, calmly and without emotion, absolutely trauma dumped my sons birth story, in glorious technicolour detail, all over them.

I told them everything, the induction using petocin, the painful "sweep" of my uterus by the midwifes fingers, when the pain started, the panic when my sons heartrate started dipping with every contraction and they rushed me through to the birthing suite thinking they may have to prep me for an emergency c-section (thankfully not), how the pain got worse, how my labour progressed too suddenly to get anything more than gas and air (which they took away for the actual birth meaning I gave birth with no pain relief at all), how pushing felt like my body took over and I had no control, how I pissed and shit myself in front of a room full of medical staff, how my son got stuck and I had to have an episiotomy, how I was in so much pain already i didn't even feel the episiotomy, how despite the episiotomy I still tore, how my sons heartrate started dipping again and they were preparing to remove him with forceps but the midwife wanted them to let me push one ore time, how they said we didn't have time to wait for another contraction so I pushed him out myself without a contraction to help me, how they sewed me back up right there with my new baby in my arms ...

I unloaded all this in its most unvarnished realness to their stunned faces. They were mostly quiet throughout except for the occasional question or horrified reaction. And I ended the whole thing with "and that's why you saying getting kicked in the balls hurts more pisses me off so much, because even if you don't really mean it, you are using belittling one of the most traumatic and painful experiences I have ever had as a punchline for a joke, and if you had a single clue what it was actually like I don't think you would do that."

The other woman who had kids chipped in at this point with her birth story. She didn't go into as much detail, but it gave the guys more examples and the evening transitioned into a really interesting conversation around how a lot of the awful stuff around pregnancy and birth isn't openly discussed, even amongst women you don't hear a lot of the bad stuff until you're pregnant and it's already too late to avoid it!

I'd avoided talking about any of that with the guys in the group before because .... well who wants to talk about shitting on a bed in front of a group of midwives, or having a doctor take a scalpel to your vagina when you're trying to have a nice time with your friends? I didn't want to be impolite, and I didn't want them thinking about me in that way, but because they didn't know the extent of it all they thought it was a fair target for poking fun at.

Anyway, it seems like the message landed. Its been probably 4 years since then and it's not come up again even once since!