After an emergency delivery, Lauren Bosworth says complications reshaped her motherhood experience — and forced tough choices around career and balance.
Lauren “Lo” Bosworth Natale was preparing for a planned C-section at 39 weeks for the birth of her first child after developing insulin-supported gestational diabetes.
But at her 38-week appointment, her doctor saw signs of“I call my husband outside the doctor’s office, and I’m like, ‘Well, it looks like we’re not gonna be working this week. We’re gonna be at the hospital having a baby,’” she recalls.
“It definitely caught me by surprise,” she says, adding that she “barely” had a hospital bag packed. , and Bosworth Natale’s C-section was “relatively uneventful. ” But the weeks that followed were anything but. A month after giving birth, the— placental tissue left behind in the uterus after birth — which led to surgery, a chronic infection and a frightening pathology report that briefly raised concerns about a rare tumor.
“What has happened since has been a series of unfortunate events,” Bosworth Natale says. “I retained placenta, and after you give birth, your body immediately recognizes that as a foreign body, so it creates an immune response. You can die from retained placenta.
” Now three-and-a-half months postpartum, Bosworth Natale says she is beginning to feel better physically, but the experience has reshaped the way she thinks about motherhood, medical trauma and the lack of support for women in the fourth trimester. Here she talks with me about the importance of sharing her postpartum experience in real time — not to diminish the joy of becoming a mom but to make space for the grief, fear, fatigue and healing that can exist alongside it.
Now the baby sleeps in the room next door. It’s so crazy. You’re very open about how complicated postpartum has been for you. I had never heard of retained placenta before.
How did you find out you had it? So I gave birth, and then a month later I started bleeding really heavily, and then over the next few weeks, we found out that I had retained placenta. Ultimately, I had surgery a couple of weeks ago, and I thought it was finally over.
Then the pathology came back on the lining of the uterus that they got out, and it turns out I had a really bad chronic infection of the uterine lining. When you retain placenta, the inside of your uterus can't fully close up and heal. The uterus is not sterile, and so it's very easy to get an infection. The actual placenta itself, the cells in it, were still growing at a pretty alarming rate.
To see that activity still happening in tissue that was assumed to be dead was alarming and raised flags for my medical team, because there is a certain type of tumor that can grow in this placental tissue. , which is a hormone produced by the placenta during pregnancy that supports progesterone production] is above zero, then that is a malignancy marker. Thankfully, my HCG was zero, so it hadn't gotten that far, or it just wasn't turning into that.
But pretty scary experience to have the pathology come back, and we have to consider, is cancer on the table? That hasn't been the case, but now I have to do monitoring and make sure that nothing else is happening. I'm starting now to feel a lot better, but it has been a very wild postpartum ride.
It's so much about me and not about my incredible, beautiful daughter when I talk about this stuff, because my relationship and identity shift into new motherhood has been so profound for me, despite everything that has happened physically. She's so perfect and so beautiful and laughing and talking and all these incredible things.
It's just really remarkable to me how much we can carry and do as women, even when we're sick and recovering from surgery and discovering how to be a mom for the first time. Pretty shocking. It’s incredible. Women are such powerhouses, and then this really just takes it to a whole other level of appreciation.
What has the mental load of new motherhood felt like for you? It feels like my brain is constantly firing, and I have come to accept that that is probably the new normal. Even when I'm resting, and I have an hour for myself, my brain does not stop — whether it is thinking about what the baby needs, what I need to buy, what I need to do, what I need for work.
I think that has been a big shift for me. I'm an entrepreneur. I own and operate all of these businesses, but this has taken the brain output to another level. And at some point, I have to find the off-ramp because doing this forever is not sustainable.
I feel like a lot of moms say this — that after they’re a mom, maybe for the first year or two years, they realize that something has to give so that they can dedicate themselves more to what they really care about. So that, I think, is probably looming for me. I'm too scattered right now, as a new parent, to figure out what the most important thing is among all these things. We prioritize our daughter, of course.
But my social life has fallen by the wayside, exercise has fallen by the wayside, sometimes eating healthy is falling by the wayside because it's just like, “Oh my gosh, we're on the 90-minute schedule or the three-hour schedule, and I have a call,” and the things and the things and the things. … I don't think that's a unique experience. You already had so much going on in your life, particularly with your business.
How does the restlessness feel different from that now? It feels just supercharged. In these moments where I'm doing 19 things at once, because women are the ultimate multitaskers, I sometimes stop and think to myself, “You really should take a rest day because you actually need to heal from your C-section,” “You should take a rest day because I want to do something new with Nelle today.
”You have these additional responsibilities, but you also have the responsibility to yourself to take care of yourself so you can do all of these things. I think that specifically has been one of the biggest challenges for me. I'm acutely aware that I need to be doing more for myself, but I'm just not doing the things for myself that I should be doing yet.
I'm trying to massage the schedule every day so that I can do that a little bit more. Because of the physical challenges, I hadn’t been cleared to exercise or start trying to become one with my body again, until very recently. My doctor just cleared me after this surgery to start doing breathing and pelvic floor exercises.
I’ve just hired this incredible woman to help me with that for four to six weeks, and once I graduate from that, I can think about actually exercising again. But my body has just been in this state of upheaval. Now that I’ve gotten the thumbs-up, I will be putting more focus on that. I'm so eager to reclaim my body, feel strong again and not feel so fatigued.
I think a lot of that comes with making not even big shifts but micro shifts in what I'm doing every single day to focus on my sense of self and well-being. We have a night nurse, and so I have been able to sleep overnight. We’re so blessed and privileged in that aspect.
But given how complicated my recovery has been, I think if we didn’t have that help, my recovery would beYou’ve been open about the emotional toll of fertility and pregnancy, in addition to this postpartum experience. How are you processing it? Never being done with the next medical thing feels really exhausting. It's like a roller coaster that you're so desperate to get off of, but you just cannot get off the ride.
Specifically with this whole retained placenta thing and all the appointments and all those scans and just the weird stuff that happened. It just felt like, “What's the next thing? ” And then the next thing would happen. Emotionally, I'm very ready to be done with that.
It's been so exhausting to go from egg cycles and injections to a surgery to getting pregnant to delivering your baby and then having more medical issues follow it. It feels never-ending, and that is emotionally very tough. I don't really know how to recover from that kind of medical trauma. I have a lot of fear of getting pregnant again now and giving birth.
I had all these weird things happen, like the diabetes and hypertension. I'm scared to do it again, but I want to have another kid. And I don't know how to make peace with everything that's happened. It’s tough — it’s hard to explain.
You’re so grateful to be at the finish line, which is that I have my incredible baby. But then on the other hand, you’re like, “Do I ever get ‘me’ back after this process? ”, you acknowledge that there’s a lot of duality in motherhood. What does that mean to you?
One of the very first things I like to point out is the duality we experience in motherhood: Gratitude and grief can coexist. That narrative that you have to be just one thing or the other thing is incorrect.
The more that we talk about the fact that gratitude and grief can coexist, the more that especially new moms can understand that what they experienced is really challenging, but at the same time, I am so thrilled that I was able to have that experience because my family has grown as a result and I have a child as a result, and this is what I wanted. We're told this story that all of this is supposed to be so joyful, and so much of it is, but there's a big part of it that is also very, very challenging, and we're not telling those stories enough.
I am someone who is outspoken and speaks my truth, so I’m just telling my story, and as a result, I am seeing so many women tell me theirs. That’s the point! I wanted to make it in real time so it feels very authentic. I recorded an episode called “I'm trapped in my postpartum body,” the day I found out that I had retained this placenta.
I’ve watched it back, and I’m like, “Damn, girl. You were really going through it. ”It feels extremely cathartic because all of this stuff that hurts, I'm getting out of my body, and then the audience is hearing it and understanding that it’s actually safe to share these stories. So then they're getting it out of their bodies.
It's this back-and-forth thing that’s happening, and I think it's very healing for a lot of women. I'm getting a lot of moms that are sharing their postpartum experiences with me, and they're really getting into how abandoned they feel, above all else. The postpartum experience is such a unique human experience because of the hormone shifts, the healing that has to happen, and the identity shift on top of that.
People don't have an outlet to talk about this stuff. My husband has been my greatest source of support. He is such an incredible partner and father. When you really love somebody and you see them struggling deeply, you show up or you don't, and he has shown up to the max.
And he has done that in addition to his own huge identity shift and his own feelings about becoming a dad. Then I have worked to cobble together experts — a psychiatrist, a pelvic floor expert, somebody who helps with lymphatic massage — but I haven't been able to find a medical professional that can really support me postpartum yet, which is pretty shocking. Where's the postpartum doctor? That person doesn't exist.
The fourth trimester is a moment in a woman's life when she is most underserved, because I have felt that way. It is the most underserved moment in my entire life, when my needs have not been met. Again, I’m mostly talking about medical stuff. There's a stunning absence of medical care for women in this stage, and I think that’s because it's understudied, it's not researched, and it's not funded.
Who would specialize in that when you don’t even have good research to go off of? How can you provide care? There is no balance in my life currently, but I am only three and a half months postpartum. I think the expectation that new parents in the first year can find balance that reflects what their old life looks like is just not a reality.
I never really went offline. I think as a business owner, you can't really do that, you can't really walk away, you can't really take a break. And I don't expect any sympathy for that, but that experience alone — that your maternity leave is not a true maternity leave — is definitely unique. My team has been great.
The moments I’m there are well received because I have been able to step far enough away that I have gained a new perspective. I've been very good at establishing a set routine every day, and I sort of hold sacred that routine. I spend the first many hours of the day with our baby, and then I try to work in the middle of the day.
Then I step back in in the late afternoon and do until bedtime. There are many days of the week when we don’t have any child care, so on those days, I’m a full-time mom.
I saw enough videos before I gave birth that were like, “You better not be on your phone around your baby because they're not gonna be able to connect with you emotionally,” that I really have established pretty good guardrails, and I'm like, “I'm with my baby. ” We're reading, we're going on walks, we're singing, whatever it is. I don’t want to be an absent parent simply because I have a phone.
That would be unforgivable and very consequential for my daughter. If I can’t pay enough attention to her because I’m TikToking, that is stupid. That is a failure. I'm really happy to be a mom.
I know my life has changed in very meaningful ways. And in those ways, I’m so excited that I’m not the person that I used to be. I’m just trying to run from the fatigue. I’m not trying to run from the new identity.
I love my new identity. Do I love my new body? No, but I’ll work on that. I’ll figure that out.
I’m just running from the physical exhaustion of, like I said, a series of unfortunate events. Weird stuff happens to me. My whole life, medical oddities have happened to me. I feel like people like that exist, and I am one of them. It's so weird. I'm so over it.
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