Nearly 15 months ago, I gave birth to my daughter and my whole world changed. I am 100% mom material now, and I make no apologies for it. However, I am also 100% frank and gross, and I’ve discovered that I’m one of the only people who talks freely about all of the fucked up shit that happens to your body after giving birth.

I know that every pregnancy and childbirth experience is different, but here are some things I discovered the hard way.

1. Lochia is the most disgusting thing on earth.

Ask any childless woman who isn’t in the healthcare field what lochia is, and you’re likely to be met with a blank stare. It’s like the most disgusting, best-kept secret among mothers. I’m here to change that.

According to Wikipedia, lochia is vaginal discharge after giving birth containing blood, mucus, and uterine tissue. Makes sense, right? All that goo that your body creates during pregnancy has to go somewhere. It’s just so much worse than I expected. It’s so. much. blood. I even joked with my husband that my first postpartum shower was going to look like the shower scene in Gone Girl.

Source: 20th Century Fox

Before I left the hospital, my nurse told me to call my doctor if I passed any blood clots larger than an egg. A FUCKING EGG. That means that everything up to the size of an egg is totally normal. And pass eggs I did. They weren’t kidding one bit.

Most women have lochia for 4–6 weeks. I was one of the lucky ones who fell on the upper end of that range.

My advice to expecting mothers is this: Load up on cheap cotton granny panties (I bought some in bulk on Amazon) and some massive overnight super long pads that cover you from navel to tailbone. They’re awkward as shit, but still 100x better than the cotton bricks the hospital hooks you up with.

2. Despite your best efforts, your body will never be the same.

If you’re a cocky little shit like I was, you probably think that your pert body will be wholly unaffected by pregnancy and childbirth. Christ, was I wrong. For starters, I gained a lot of weight when I was pregnant. I was always blessed with a great metabolism and a smaller bone structure, but pregnancy completely wrecked that. My metabolism slowed to a halt, and stayed that way until probably six months after giving birth.

And my petite bones? Completely destroyed.

The effects are most obvious in my ribcage. I carried high and experienced a ton of back pain, which I now believe was my ribcage getting stretched to its limit. Everyone claims your bones eventually fall back into place after giving birth, but I’m not seeing it. If it did happen, it wasn’t enough.

3. Your cute boobs are ruined.

Here’s another area in which I was a cocky little shit. I’ve always had a compact rack, which I assumed meant I was immune to sagging. Guess what? I was so damn wrong.

When your milk comes in, it hits HARD. I woke up one morning and accidentally punched myself in the boob because it suddenly took up so much more space than it did the night before. And when that happens, your skin has no choice but to accommodate the mass.

The stretch marks appeared a few days after my milk came in. The only way I can explain it is that my boobs looked like bloodshot eyeballs. I was lucky enough to escape stretch marks on my stomach during pregnancy, so this caught me completely off guard. Luckily, they faded within a few months, but the constant back and forth of full/empty did irreparable damage to my skin. There’s just no way around it if you’re breastfeeding.

(Personally biased side note: Breastfeeding is 100% worth it.)

4. Sex hurts. A lot.

You’re probably thinking, “Duh. You just squeezed a watermelon out of your vagina.” And yeah, you’re right. But society conditioned me to assume that I’d be ready to hop on pop as soon as I got cleared by my doctor at my six week postpartum checkup. And unfortunately, my husband was conditioned to expect the same.

Bluntly put, it feels like you’re losing your virginity again. Except it’s not just once. It’s every time you have sex.

The reason behind it is pretty simple. Breastfeeding causes estrogen levels to drop, which causes vaginal dryness. Pair that with sleep deprivation and you have the ideal recipe for abstinence.

The good news is, it all returned to normal after I stopped breastfeeding.

The bad news is, I got my period in earnest after I stopped breastfeeding. Which leads us to…

5. Your first postpartum period will make you think you’re bleeding to death.

Remember when you were an early teen and would wake up in a pool of blood? No? That was just me? Oh, well, just shut up and listen to my experience.

My period returned about a month after I weaned off the breast pump. The first day it was pretty light, and I thought, “This is no big deal!”

Après moi le déluge.

It hit hard and it hit fast. My normal old “light” tampons were a joke. Finally I grew weary of tending to business every hour and purchased some super mega hardcore tampons. Those enabled me to tend to business every four hours.

Things seem to have returned to normal now. That first one was just a doozie.

Bonus fact: You’ll pee yourself when you sneeze FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

I’m including this as a bonus fact because, luckily, it didn’t happen to me. But it happens to a ton of women and is completely normal. Pregnancy is hard on your pelvic floor muscles, and up to 50% of women experience some degree of urinary incontinence years after giving birth.