Just as no two babies are exactly alike, no two birth stories will be. Nevertheless, if you’re a first-time mom-to-be, it really does help to hear other mothers’ tales from the battlefield. You can get these from friends and family, from books and birth classes. Or you can get them from our favorite sources of TMI (just enough I): celebrity interviews and celebrity Instagram posts.
We get why moms like Jennifer Lopez, Ali Wong, Kristen Bell and Alicia Keys share the nitty gritty details of their birth stories. When you’ve had the most insane, life-changing experience that is both like going through war and having all your wishes granted at once, you want to tell people about it. And when you’ve been through that, you also want to ask other moms for their war stories. It’s an addictive art form.
For all the first time preggos out there, we do have to give you the caveat that reading the stories of famous mamas having babies will not help you create a step-by-step birth plan. It will, instead, serve as a warning that birth plans are mostly for suckers. You should try to have them, sure. But you should also be aware that so many unplanned things can and will happen. You might have a surprise home birth or an emergency C-section. Babies can come with scary health complications or with eyes wide open, wailing at the world.
With that said, we’ve distilled some of our favorite celebrity birth stories into words of advice for the uninitiated. And if you’ve already had a baby, you won’t be able to resist reading them anyway.
Words Matter: Alicia Keys
“You have to scream, unless you’re totally drugged and, hell, I screamed,” Alicia Keys told the Sun of son Egypt’s birth. “But I followed this particular technique which banishes negative thoughts. So instead of calling it a contraction, it’s a surge. And I think words like that are pretty powerful. … So it hurt, but I think I received it a little better and I can say I really enjoyed it.”
Don’t Wash Your Hair During Labor: Megan Fox
“I had wet hair so I was trying to blow dry my hair before I went to the hospital,” Megan Fox said on Access Hollywood. “I didn’t want to go to the hospital with wet hair!”
It’s Exhausting: Shay Mitchell
“I don’t know how people do this for, like, 36 [hours]. Some people 72 hours, like how? I’m just, I’m just so tired. I didn’t sleep last night,” Shay Mitchell said on her YouTube video during labor. And after all was said and done, she said, “I was 99 percent excited to meet her and 1 percent excited to eat something.”
Get Yourself a Good Soundtrack: Jenna Dewan
“It’s a very peaceful song,” Dewan explained to People of the “Devi Prayer” song she had playing the moment she gave birth her son Callum. “It always puts me at ease. I put that on our playlist and I said to Steve, ‘If I ever start to look like I’m getting anxious or if I was having a rough time, just please play that.’”
Babies Laugh at Your Birth Plans: Pink
“She was in the frank breech position, which is head up with her legs up by her head in a pike position. We tried everything to turn her around,” Pink told People of the birth of Willow Sage. “Turns out this little girl had other plans — she is my daughter, after all.” The pop star is perfectly happy with the way things went down, though. She added, “It all turned out perfectly in the end, even though it wasn’t what we intended, because she is healthy and happy and so am I.”
Epidurals Are Actually Great: Kristen Bell
“My perspective was — as someone who has never experimented with drugs — I really enjoyed it,” Kristen Bell said on Ellen. “It was kind of a wonderful experience for me. While they were doing it, I actually thought, like, ‘What else could we get done down there?’ … Just anything to keep the epidural flowing! … About six or seven hours later, I’m sitting in my hospital bed, and I say to Dax, ‘Well, I think the epidural has finally worn off.’ And he looks over, and I am scratching holes in my face like a meth addict.”
Baby No. 2 Happens Fast: Erika Christensen
“It happened this morning,” Erika Christensen shared on Instagram. “And it will go down in family history because babygirl’s own, incredible dad delivered her all by himself. My fault, as I didn’t know she would come so quickly and didn’t call the doc until far too late. He came straight over and arrived about one minute after she joined us in the world.”
The Adrenaline Fades Fast Too: Jamie Otis
“I kinda felt like a bad-azz super mama for a hot second!” Jamie Otis wrote on Instagram after her son’s birth. “Until the fourth trimester hit me like a ton of bricks! Ahh, the adrenaline soon ran out! My vagina’s on fire, my butt feels like it exploded, and my nipples are back to being cracked and bleeding from nursing. (Didn’t really expect this one since I nursed Gracie for a full year.)”
Don’t Push, Breathe “Down”: Jessica Alba
“It’s about being calm and breathing gently,” Jessica Alba told Today’s Parent of the hypnobirthing technique. “Instead of pushing the baby out, necessarily, it’s breathing the baby down. Your body naturally contracts and pushes the baby out. That’s what labor is. So if you just allow it to do what it’s meant to do, and if you can stay calm and open, then you’ll have an easier time with birthing.”
A C-Section Isn’t Failure: Shawn Johnson
“I went in with such a stubborn mindset of thinking the only way I could bring our baby into the world was naturally,” Shawn Johnson wrote on Instagram. “No meds, no intervention. At 14 hours when I chose to get an epidural I felt guilty. At 22 hours when we were told I had to get a C-section, I felt like I had failed. But after holding our sweet girl in my arms and being told everything went well and she had made it to us safely I could have cared less.”
C-Sections Aren’t So Bad: Jennifer Lopez
“Because I had twins and [it] was recommended for me to have a C-section, and there was a part of me [that] had thought, ‘I didn’t get to do it the way that everybody else does,'” Jennifer Lopez told Wonderwall. “But when I saw my sister pushing that baby out, I was like, ‘Maybe this was all right! Maybe this was a better out.'”
Things Can Rip Down There: Chrissy Teigen
“My vagina was ripped to my asshole giving birth to Luna,” Chrissy Teigen tweeted in response to President Trump complaining about the coronavirus test’s discomfort. “They had to put a garbage bag at the end of the bed to collect my blood before [stitching] me up, where I then had to pee using a water bottle as a pain fountain for 3 months.”
The NICU Will Test You: Danielle Fishel
“This has been the most trying week and a half of mine and @jensenkarp’s lives but we have gotten through it with the support of our incredible family and friends who have shown up for us in unexpected ways,” Danielle Fishel wrote on Instagram after her son was born a month early with fluid in his lungs. “Jensen and I have also become closer than we ever thought possible, and the love between us has grown exponentially as we have leaned on each other during both our highest highs and our lowest lows. We feel helpless and powerless and useless and we wanted so badly to follow our ‘birth plan,’ unsurprisingly none of which involved leaving our beautiful baby boy at the hospital for the first weeks of his life.”
Birth Is a Battleground: Keira Knightley
“To my girl: My vagina split,” Keira Knightley wrote in the book Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies. “You came out with your eyes open. Arms up in the air. Screaming. They put you on to me, covered in blood, vernix, your head misshapen from the birth canal. Pulsating, gasping, screaming. You were pushing yourself up with your arms, furious at your frailty. Wanting to see. Wanting to know … I remember the shit, the vomit, the blood, the stitches. I remember my battleground. Your battleground and life pulsating. Surviving. And I am the weaker sex? You are?”
Don’t Forget About the Placenta: Ali Wong
“Nobody told me about all of the crazy shit that comes out of your pussy after you give birth,” Ali Wong said on her Netflix special, Hard Knock Wife. “You know what happens after the baby comes out? You know what else exits? Her house. Her living room, her pillows, the Bob Marley poster. All the food that went bad in her refrigerator.”
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