Cardi B has never been one to hold back on anything, and the way she talks about her birth experience is apparently no exception. On Wednesday night’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the “I Like It” singer sat down for a candid interview and shared what delivering her daughter Kulture Kiari in July was really like.
After Kimmel asked the rapper whether giving birth had been easier or harder than she was expecting, Cardi B responded, without skipping a beat, “It was totally harder. She broke my vagina.” She continued, “Why nobody tells you about those things? Nobody told me they were gonna stitch my vagina. People just be like, ‘Oh, you know, when you give birth it’s gonna hurt.’ But nobody tells you, like, your vagina.”
Though it sounds like she didn’t have the most comfortable delivery, Cardi B shared that she had an extensive support system of friends and family in the delivery room to cheer her on through the pain, including her parents, her husband, her mother-in-law, and (in true Cardi B fashion) her publicist.
Not only can the effects of childbirth be significant, they’re often also a surprise, as Cardi B explained.
“They don’t tell you that you get stitches down there or that your first two weeks you’re constipated. Or that you get contractions because of breastfeeding. I wasn’t expecting that,” she told W in an interview earlier this month.
As SELF wrote previously, far too often these sorts of details and other potential postpartum complications—mental and physical—aren’t talked about beforehand, which makes it impossible to prepare for the possibility of them actually happening. That’s why it’s so important for people like Cardi B to talk about what they experience publicly.