Postpartum revelations while watching Zack Snyder's director's cut of Rebel Moon

I love action movies. I don’t care if that make me a philistine. Sometimes you just want to escape into a movie jam packed with fight scenes and explosions. I’m often in the mood for a thrilling movie with a well thought out plot. I could get lost in Mad Max Fury Road any day. And I am willing to die on the hill that The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is a perfect movie- the storyline, the fashion, and Henry Cavil? Perfection! I will watch anything Guy Ritchie puts out. I thoroughly enjoyed Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon movies, and was really looking forward to his director’s cut. I noticed in the trailer that the movies were a little more gory and sexy, but I was more interested in the expanded backstories and the lore of the world he created for the films. I felt like the first two movies, while entertaining, left me with questions.

My husband and I sat down to watch the first director’s cut, while our three month old kicked and squealed on his activity mat on the floor. He had just started rolling over that week, and was still getting the hang of it. I was happy he was content as the beginning of the film unfolded- it left my husband and I to absorb the new details. The opening sequence was intense, and I quickly realized why the movie had an R rating. It was a lot more violent than the original, and much to my chagrin, had a lot more gore.

The gore in action movies never bothered me before the birth of my son. I usually viewed it as having a purpose to the story line. But as I watched the feared Admiral Noble pick up a bloody chunk of a man’s brain and sift through it as he terrorized the man’s wife and daughters, my stomach turned. It was that chunk that he held- it reminded me so much of the blood clots that exited my body in the hours following my son’s birth when I was hemorrhaging.

The extensive details of son’s birth and my postpartum hemorrhage are stories for another day. The summary is that after a perfectly straightforward, peaceful, beautiful labor and birth, I started to slowly hemorrhage several hours later. I had no risk factors for a hemorrhage, and my body responded very slowly to the medications I recieved to stop the bleeding. I wound up losing 2000 ml of blood. The official diagnosis was “uterine atony”, which means my uterus stopped contracting and couldn’t clamp down on postpartum blood loss on its own.

When bad things happen to me, I try really hard not to feel like a victim. A victim mentality is very limiting. Being a victim brands you with a new identity. It allows whatever happened to you to define who you are. It puts a label on you. I tend to see myself as a victim of circumstance, which is entirely different. When you’re a victim of circumstance, you’re still you- you don’t define yourself by what happened to you. You’re just someone who happened to have something bad occur in their life. For me at least, having a victim of circumstance mentality allows me to pick myself up and focus on moving forward, since the situation I experienced was only temporary.

This was the exact mentality I had after the hemorrhage. I let myself have a few days of “wtf just happened to me”, and I had a good cry about expectations not meeting reality. Then I had a hard reset moment where I was like “I’m done- I’m moving on”. I tried to remember all of the beautiful moments from my son’s birth instead of dwelling on the scary parts of the hemorrhage. I didn’t want the good memories from the happiest day of my life to be overshadowed by a situation that was completely out of my control. I couldn’t change what happened, but I could shift my perspective. I focused on healing myself and taking care of my newborn.

People were pleasantly surprised that I seemed to be rocking my postpartum experience after having such a serious complication. And I genuinely was rocking it. I found so much joy in the little day to day moments with my son. My husband and I were figuring things out as we went along, and we were the postpartum dream team. My mom and sister were helping us, and everything was pretty great. It helped that my son was (and still is) an awesome baby- he breastfed well, never lost an ounce, and slept like a champ. It was like God looked at my postpartum situation and was like “Cool, since you’re having a rough couple weeks after losing such a large quantity of blood, here’s the most chill and awesome newborn I can give you.” I genuinely felt so lucky.

However, despite my cheerful disposition and grateful attitude, I had (and still have) feelings bubble up. I’m not a #blessed robot Stepford wife. Since I went through a situation that could be put under the umbrella of “traumatic experiences”, I have had little moments that make me pause. Seeing the bloody brain chunks in Rebel Moon was definitely a “hey I’m going to need to close my eyes for this” moment. I also had to fast forward through the scene in the first season of Bridgerton where Simon’s mother dies in childbirth. She quickly bleeds out, and even though my hemorrhage was much slower, it’s not something I want to see. It has not escaped my attention that if I were living in the olden days before pitocin, I would have most likely suffered the same fate.

Healing isn’t linear. Memories are going to creep in, and I know I will have bad days or moments when I just need to pause and breathe. I think a big part of moving on from an experience or event and garnering resilience means that you know your limits. I might not close my eyes or fast forward through gory scenes for the rest of my life, but since it was only four months ago that I was, as my midwife so aptly put it,“one big blood clot away from the ICU”, that’s my current reality. I don’t want to see blood onscreen because I saw enough of it come out of me in real life. I don’t feel traumatized and I’m not haunted by my hemorrhage, but I have to acknowledge that what I went through was tough. Day to day, I feel grateful to be alive and I’m so happy I’m a mom, but I’m choosing to skip gory scenes for now.

This essay was originally posted on my Substack