A Body Is Never Just a Body

Jenessa Abrams considers Shayne Terry’s “Leave: A Postpartum Account.”

By Jenessa AbramsFebruary 26, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

IN THE MAJORITY OF states across this country, a pregnant person’s life is considered less valuable than the fetal organism growing inside them. After a child is born, the focus remains singularly on the well-being of the baby. Every facet of the baby’s health is logged with meticulous precision: their weight, hours of rest, excretion, and food intake. People want to know whether the baby has hair, whether the baby has smiled, whether the baby is latching well, whether the baby looks like the father. At some point, someone asks: How is the mother? Mom and baby are doing well! is what well-intentioned loved ones announce again and again—and with that single phrase, mother and baby are conjoined, the togetherness that was previously accounted for by their occupation of the same corporeal form now extending into the physical world, where the baby’s well-being remains paramount while the birthing person remains invisible.

Perhaps remains is the wrong word. To put it more precisely, the birthing person’s body was partially visible while it was carrying the baby, because any ailment it experienced had the potential to harm the baby. Now that the baby is outside the body, the birthing person’s pain—their body as its own entity—is no longer relevant.

Shayne Terry’s Leave: A Postpartum Account (2025) tells the story of that very body, ravaged in childbirth—a body tasked with providing nutrients and shelter for a newborn that has now been rendered unable to stand, to defecate without agony, or to hold the baby. While Leave wears the familiar clothes of a memoir about the postpartum period, the baby hardly appears—giving way, instead, for the mother’s story, which is really a story about who in our society is allowed to experience pain.

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The United States has the highest incidence of maternal morbidity among developed nations, which disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous birthing people. “Each year in the U.S., 700 to 900 women die related to pregnancy and childbirth,” according to the CDC (prior to its disintegration by the current administration),

[b]ut more than 135 expectant and new mothers a day—or roughly 50,000 a year […] endure dangerous and even life-threatening complications that often leave them wounded, weakened, traumatized, financially devastated, unable to bear more children, or searching in vain for answers about what went wrong.

Enter Leave. Even when a birth is logged by the medical establishment as “uncomplicated” or “without incident”—as Terry’s was—a human being has still exited a birthing person’s body, either through the confines of the vaginal canal or by cutting that body open and rearranging the internal organs. Ninety percent of people who give birth vaginally have some extent of vaginal tearing. And yet, the most common hospital stay is a mere 48 hours. Regardless of birth complexity, there is no federal mandate for paid leave.

“There are several versions of the birth story,” Terry writes in Leave’s opening lines, immediately upending the notion that what follows will conform to linearity. In fact, much of Terry’s birth experience occurs in reverse, as she is given consent forms to permit the hospital to deliver her baby while the doctor is sewing her vagina back together after the baby is already born.

At first, Terry and her husband “laugh at how backward it all is.” Then an hour passes, and the baby is whisked off for measurements and tests, but the doctor is still stitching and applying anesthetic. “I’m sorry. There was no way to prevent it,” the doctor says, referring to the unspoken wound. When Terry asks about the number of stitches, the doctor replies, “We prefer to think of it as one big suture.” More time passes and Terry asks again, but the doctor dismisses her. Thus begins the silencing around her body’s rupture.

Juxtaposed with the story of Terry’s birth injury is the narrative of her maternal grandmother’s addiction to pain killers—which begins as narratives of intergenerational trauma often begin, with innocuous family lore that is later pathologized. “When I was young,” Terry writes, “my family called my grandmother The Pharmacy […] ‘You look tired,’ she’d say. ‘I have something for that.’ Into your hand she’d drop a large white pill, a small pink one.” Even as the reality of the grandmother’s addiction takes hold, Terry renders her with humanity and care: “My grandmother’s need for something to dull the pain in her life has always been real. It doesn’t matter where that pain comes from. The profundity of pain is that it has both physical and emotional components, and one can feed off—or starve—the other.”

After her wound is finally sewn shut, Terry moves from the delivery room to the Mother and Baby Unit, where she is urged by two nurses to take Percocet. Initially, she refuses. Terry writes, “the kind nurse tells me that the drugs will simply help me get some sleep […] The new nurse leans over my bed, stern. ‘You won’t be able to take care of your baby if you’re in pain.’” Therein lies the reminder: Terry’s body only matters because of its necessity to the baby.

She accepts one pill but is unable to sleep because of the wailing of her hospital roommate’s baby. In the early hours of the morning, “the same nurse who insisted [Terry] deal with [her] pain […] scolds [the] roommate. ‘It’s a baby. It’s crying because it needs something. You can’t just let it cry.’” The new mothers whose bodies have been torn open silently cradle their pain. Terry rejects more pain medicine.

Without the veil of Percocet, Terry begins to feel the enormity of her pain: “The injury runs right through the core of me, front to back, rendering me immobile. I can’t shift my position in the bed, let alone make it to the bathroom without [my husband] practically carrying me there.” She has not been given any diagnosis or formal record of what has happened to her. On paper, she has had an unassisted birth and sustained a third-degree tear, but she cannot sit upright without torment and must dangerously ration her food intake because of the terror of a bowel movement.

“It’s hard to know whether my pain is normal,” Terry writes,

I have never personally heard anyone talk about going through what I am going through, although neither am I talking explicitly about it—not to the family members who are caring for me, not to [my husband], and barely to my doctor. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it; rather, I don’t have the precise language to locate the pain.

This then, is the project of Leave: To tell the story she gleans from message boards on the internet, the story she pieces together from her obsessive online search—revealing a rare and severe injury of the anal sphincter “that is either clinically undetectable or is missed immediately after delivery.” To chart an unsentimental and unselfconscious narrative of the graphic destruction of her body for the birthing person who comes after her. To carve out a place to put her hurt. To name it. To locate the pain.

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In memoirs of trauma—as in oral recounting, in life—the speaker often traces the wound or replays the moment of devastation and spins backward, attempting to plot where precisely things went wrong in order to fix them. In Elizabeth McCracken’s groundbreaking memoir on the stillbirth of her first child, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (2008), she refers to this rupture as the “Superman moment.” The replaying is born of a desire for an impossible entity to appear in the past, to correct all wrongs before tragedy falls. McCracken explains: “I am in the line of danger, but I don’t know it, I am living in the past […] something is supposed to intervene. Superman swooping in, to—what? Deliver the baby? […] But Superman never shows.”

Terry flirts with the possibility of a Superman moment, questioning what would have happened if she had gone to the hospital sooner, or if she’d had a home birth, but she never succumbs to the fantasy. As in Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End (2019)—a novel written in the wake of Li’s eldest son’s suicide that takes the form of a conversation between a mother and her late child—Leave is less interested in the why of what has happened. The book rejects the anticipated paralysis of questioning, focusing more on existing alongside the tragedy. Spending uncomfortable yet necessary time there.

All three books are centered on mothers without children. The children are no longer living in Li’s and McCracken’s work, yet in Terry’s the intentional omission of the living child serves as a radical reclamation of her placement in the narrative. There aren’t moments for the reader to fall in love with the child—which is not to say that Terry hasn’t, but that the devastating nature of her condition foregrounds every aspect of her postpartum experience. Her son’s presence doesn’t heal her. It can’t. This isn’t the child’s story: it is the mother’s.

Leave joins a lineage of complexly layered books about the postpartum period including two recent memoirs, Ayşegül Savaş’s The Wilderness (2024), which explores the speaker’s first 40 days of motherhood alongside the invisible mythological creatures that haunt new mothers, and Leslie Jamison’s Splinters (2024), which is as much about becoming a mother as it is about losing oneself in marriage and finding oneself in divorce. All three memoirs chart the destabilizing transformation of the mind and the body in the wake of motherhood and insist on the reader seeing the person who birthed the new life rather than only seeing the baby.

Because of the severity of her birth injury, Terry relies on “a carousel of women” to help care for the baby. It is during her mother’s rotation that a series of family traumas begins to be unearthed. “This is the kind of secret that poisons a family slowly, over decades,” Terry writes. “The kind that I felt long before I was told. It shaped the way my grandmother raised my mother, the way my mother raised me and my sister. If I let it, it will touch my baby, too.” The secret in question is the sexual abuse Terry’s mother endured at the hands of her great-grandfather, and her suspicion that her mother, Terry’s grandmother, was sexually abused by him as well.

“Newborns are portals to the people who came before them,” Terry reflects, as she and her mother travel through the past while the baby sleeps. The history gets thornier. It involves a mother who abandons her children—Terry’s great-grandmother. If the story ended there, we might view that mother as a monster. But what happens when we learn that she was a teenager when she was made to marry an alcoholic the age of her father? It doesn’t change the fact that the daughter she abandons will be taken in by a man who will abuse her, who will later abuse her granddaughter, but it does matter. Each revelation further reframes the portrait of the opioid addict, the portrait of the woman in pain, pulling the skin back, revealing the hot red center.

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Leave is told in vignettes that mirror the fractured time and sleep deprivation of early motherhood, as well as the kaleidoscope of memory shattered by trauma. There are a few instances in the book where it’s unclear when the speaker has learned something about her family’s history, blurring the timeline. At first, these moments might be read as mistakes, but they soon begin to feel like reflections of the way intergenerational traumas are often felt in the body, registering long before they are ever vocalized. A body is never just a body. A body is the bodies that came before it and, in this case, the body that came after it.

Perception, which determines how we communicate and understand pain, is at the heart of the narrative. Terry responds to friends and loved ones with half-truths about the state of her body, attempting to convey positivity: “Who wants to hear that someone who was in pain is still in pain? Who wants to hear that someone who looks fine is still in pain? The story is supposed to be one of healing; what was torn should be made whole.”

It is only in the latter portion of the book that Terry’s husband interjects to counter the narrative, to remind her that the story she tells about their child being “a good baby” is also untrue. This interjection is followed by others, undercutting the stories Terry tells herself in an attempt to believe that things are okay when they aren’t. As we learn the deeper history of interwoven violence along her maternal line, we can feel the invisible hands of abuse clawing their way at her personhood.

The interjections are among the most compelling aspects of Leave. Perhaps most striking is a series of meta turns about the writing of the book: “‘Your mother can never read this,’ [her husband] says […] ‘She will be devastated.’ My first feeling is shame, but I resist.” Immediately following is an email from her agent: “I wonder about the physicality of the speaker’s mother with her […] [she] feels distant in a way that I’m not sure how to read.”

“If I were somebody reading this, I wouldn’t like my character very much,” Terry’s mother says. Such interruptions shake the text alive, infusing texture into the intensely lyrical language by reminding us that this is being written for our benefit. The writer’s hands enter the book, not invisibly but with observable intention, which forces us to consider her body, to consider the hands that brought raspberries to her mouth in the weeks after her birth injury, consuming only enough calories for survival; the hands that clung to walls for months to steady herself when she was too weak to walk; the hands the ultimately found their way to the keyboard to write Leave.

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Toward the end of the book, Terry recounts a visit to her gynecologist two years after her son is born. She is still experiencing intense pain that will soon nest in her body, providing small relief until it returns in the form of flare-ups for several years before she finally receives a real diagnosis. During the appointment, the doctor tells her that a friend has recently experienced a third-degree tear, “a woman who is a Pilates teacher and understands the pelvic floor.” Terry, the writer, enters the scene here: “Even this woman—and here I wonder if she previously thought my injury was my fault, for not understanding my pelvic floor—could not avoid a long and painful recovery.” That notion of fault has been the unsaid orbiter in the text. Who deserves their pain? Whose knowledge or lifestyle or identity or privilege should prohibit them from experiencing suffering?

Leave ends with the baby, who has since become a child, finally appearing on the page—less so as his own person than as a witness to Terry. A witness to her presence. A witness to her mothering. An extension of Terry who becomes, perhaps, the ultimate witness to her pain.