What "normal" actually means - and why it's costing women so much.
Leaking after childbirth. Pain with sex. Pressure and heaviness "down there." A persistent ache you've learned to work around, or a sensation you've quietly filed under just part of being a woman.
We've been told these things are normal for SO long that most of us have stopped questioning it. We mention it to a doctor, get a shrug and a "that's pretty common after having kids," and we leave feeling like we're supposed to be grateful it's nothing serious.
But here's the thing I want you to sit with for a moment:
Common is not the same as normal.
The Word That Changed Everything
Common means it happens a lot. Normal means it's how the body is designed to function.
Headaches are common. That doesn't mean your head is supposed to hurt.
Leaking when you sneeze, jump, or laugh is incredibly common - roughly one in three women experience it at some point in their lives. But that doesn't mean your pelvic floor has given up on you, and it certainly doesn't mean you're supposed to just buy the absorbent underwear and carry on.
When we collapse "common" into "normal," we rob women of the possibility of something better. We train them - we train ourselves - to accept suffering as baseline. And that acceptance has a cost.
What It Actually Costs
It costs you the hike you stopped taking because you're not sure there's a bathroom close enough.
It costs you the moment of connection with your partner that you brace for instead of enjoying.
It costs you the years you spend managing symptoms instead of understanding them - the pads, the painkillers, the positions you avoid.
It costs you the appointments you never made because you assumed nothing could be done. Or because you were afraid of being told, again, that this is just what happens after kids. After menopause. After a certain age. After being a woman.
And it costs you something harder to name: the quiet disconnection from your own body. The way you learn to override sensation, to push through, to not quite trust what you feel. That disconnection doesn't stay neatly contained to your pelvis. It tends to spread.
What I Actually See in My Practice
After seventeen years of working with women in their bodies - in birth, in postpartum recovery, in the long aftermath of surgeries and losses and stories they'd never told anyone - here's what I can tell you:
Most women arrive having already normalized something that was costing them enormously.
They arrive apologizing for bothering me with something so small. They arrive having done years of kegels that made things worse. They arrive having never been told that their C-section scar might be connected to the bladder urgency they've had ever since. That the pain with sex after their hysterectomy isn't just psychological. That the heaviness they feel at the end of the day has a name and a reason and a path forward.
They arrive not knowing that their body was still trying to communicate with them. They'd just stopped listening because no one had ever told them it was worth listening to.
The Difference Between Fixing and Listening
I want to be honest about something: I don't think of this work as fixing broken women.
Your body isn't broken. It's been doing its best with everything it's been through - the births, the losses, the surgeries, the stress, the years of pushing through. The symptoms you're carrying aren't failures. They're information.
Holistic pelvic care, abdominal bodywork, scar tissue remediation - this work isn't about making you perform better or bounce back faster. It's about restoring the conversation between you and your own body. It's about clearing the static so you can actually hear what's being said.
And what I find, again and again, is that when women are given that kind of attention - when someone finally sits with them and says let's actually look at what's happening here - something shifts that goes well beyond the physical symptom they came in for.
They remember themselves a little more.
You Don't Have to Earn the Right to Care
I want to say this clearly, because I know how many of you are reading this while quietly wondering if what you're experiencing is "bad enough" to do something about:
You don't have to be suffering severely to deserve support.
You don't have to have a diagnosis, or a referral, or a birth story dramatic enough to justify asking for help.
Mild leaking counts. Discomfort counts. A vague sense that things don't feel quite right counts.
Your body's signals don't need to reach a certain volume before they're worth listening to.
A Different Question
Instead of asking "is this normal?" - I'd invite you to ask something else:
"Is this how I want to feel in my body?"
If the answer is no, that matters. Not because something is terribly wrong, but because you deserve more than a life spent managing symptoms that were never actually inevitable.
There is, so often, another way through. And you don't have to have it all figured out before you start looking for it.
Lacey Nedjelski is a women's wellness practitioner based in Saskatoon with over 17 years of experience in birth, postpartum support and shifting now into holistic pelvic care, abdominal bodywork, and scar tissue remediation. She works from a consent-centered, trauma-informed framework at Rise Within, helping women reconnect with their bodies across all seasons of life.
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