It’s been four years, but Allison Williams still hasn’t fully come to terms with her C-section.
During the August 25 episode of her “Landlines” podcast, Williams, 37, got emotional while recalling her childbirth experience with son Arlo in 2021. She previously revealed the “profoundly scary moment” of undergoing an emergency C-section after being in labor for 36 hours.
“My C-Section was almost 4 years ago, and I still have lots of feelings about it,” she wrote via Instagram on Friday, September 5, alongside a clip from the podcast episode with guest Dr. Sarah Reardon and cohosts Hope Kremer and Jaymie Oppenheim.
She continued, “No two birth stories are identical. It’s wild how many infinite ways this one, shared, foundational experience can play out. Mine was a lot, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to process it with some wonderful doctors (including my OBGYN) afterwards. But no amount of processing will ever be enough. I had surgery that I didn’t know I was going to have, while I was awake and tied-down to a table. How do we just move on from those things? Can we? Anyway, to all the other C-Section people out there: my scar is smiling at yours from across the internet.”
Williams shares Arlo with husband Alexander Dreymon, whom she married in 2023. She admitted on “Landlines” that she really never thought about not having a vaginal birth.
“I thought I had thought about, ‘Oh, yeah, I might have to have a C-section, but I never actually walked myself through the moment where a doctor comes in and says, ‘You’re gonna need to have a surgery, awake, that you didn’t know you were gonna have,” she explained. “No one talked to me about my emotional state, about managing that. My PT, she got my full medical file from the hospital and read the entire 200 pages of it, and, like, walked me through what happened. And it was, like, it’s just a really weird … because it was all like, you know, hard for me to remember, super traumatic, and she just … sorry.”
Williams trailed off as she began crying before Reardon — a pelvic floor physical therapist known as The Vagina Whisperer — chimed in to support her.
“You’re not alone,” she said. “You sharing this gives other moms the ability to feel seen, because so many people go through that and they don’t unpack it totally, and we hold it with us for a really, really, really long time.”
The Girls actress has been open about her motherhood journey, telling Seth Meyers on Late Night in 2023 that having a child is “so wild.”
“He’s like a full — when I watch baby videos of him now, it feels like I’m watching him trapped in a body that didn’t perform in the way that he needed,” Williams joked. “I watch him make the sounds newborns make, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, he was trying to tell us so much.’ And we didn’t know! We just thought he was… you know, had a dirty diaper or something, but he was trying to ask very complex questions.”
