This Is Gonna Hurt

They will lie to you. Your best friends, your female relatives, even your mother will not tell a pregnant woman just how painful childbirth will be.
They'll drop hints about epidurals and breathing exercises. They will use euphemisms like "contractions" to describe a sensation that is more like being run over by a bus, every few minutes, for several hours or even days.
What they don't tell you is that every vestige of civilization will be lost during labor. You will be a mammal, an animal. You may vomit, or shit, and you will not care. You will be too busy grunting and breathing and writhing to try to alleviate the resounding pain that shudders through your body like thunder.
I thought I was a pretty tough chick until I went into labor. I grew up with three brothers and all the requisite torture. I played contact sports, broke bones, had stitches, ran a marathon. But nothing had prepared me for this. And nobody had told me the truth about how much it was going to hurt — although my sister-in-law did reveal that the forceps that the doctor used to pluck her son into the world caused her perineum to tear all the way to her anus.
So let me be the one to break it to you: This is gonna hurt. A lot.