Is it normal to not remember the pain?

[Eggplant19]

I’m 8 months PP and when I try and remember my birth it honestly feels like a drunken memory. It must’ve hurt because I was induced at 7:00pm and by 2:00am I was begging for epidural and I just remember waiting for the 20 mins for it to work feeling like hell. My husband said the midwife and him said I was acting psychotic haha!

I started to push at 10:00. He was born at 10:30 and I do remember that but there was NO pain because of epidural .

But at the same time I don’t remember the pain on the whole? Going to the hospital I remember feeling painful contractions but I was barely 2cm dilated (they induced me because I had sky high blood pressure when getting checked out

I’ve had 4 babies and only remember bits! If you could actually remember how bad it was then I probably wouldn’t have 4 😂😂

I think it has something to do with Mother Nature tricking us into doing it again.

I remember every single bit and my son is 17

I have no memory of any pain with an epidural birth, I had it early as soon as I arrived at hospital because I knew I wanted it. I just had a few early contractions but they were just like cramps.

I'm only a few weeks out but I'd be surprised if I ever forget. I went through back labour for over 12 hours and contractions every 2 minutes that felt like someone had set my torso on fire, it took my breath away, was utterly paralysing, and no amount of bloody hypnobirthing breathing techniques helped. Stupidly I resisted pain relief all the way up until a c-section was seen as necessary. I think my body was contracting harder than usual to try and get baby to move position.

However I understand most women do forget the pain, I just think the birth of my child was such a deviation from the birth I had expected / imagined that it's stuck in my memory!

Yes I think our bodies are designed to forget most of it so we are willing to do it all again.

I don't think it's necessarily childbirth related. I can also remember medical procedures that were (briefly) as painful as childbirth and I know roughly what the pain level was but I can't remember the feeling of being in pain at all.

@HumanOfTheWeekyou might be right there as I had lung surgery and can’t remember much so maybe it’s a trauma response 🤷🏻‍♀️

I had an awful birth with my eldest; 36 hours in labour with a 3C tear and 2 hours in surgery as soon as he was born to repair the damage. I then had a second baby 2 years later and opted for a c-section 😂however, that didn't go to plan either as the epidural needle punctured my spine and left a hole so ended up with a few issues there as well. But, as a pp said, it's mother nature blurring out the reality so we continue to have babies. DH did say to me once, getting a kick in the testicles must be more painful than childbirth as he wouldn't forget the pain of that😉

As others said, natures way of letting you do it again. If pain were the only issue in birthing, we'd be doing it a lot more!

For me the complete cock-up of care by NHS meant I can't ever forget and only have 1 child. 1 in 3 women have birth trauma in UK, which says a lot. Not many studies into whether that is impacting the falling birth rate, funnily enough!