Congratulations! You just birthed a tiny little human that took months to grow. And now that this tiny little person is out of your body, it’s important that you eat right, get a full night’s rest, breastfeed, pump so your partner can feed the baby, start taking care of the rest of your family as soon as possible, be ready at all times to receive guests, start planning your return to work and the gym…
And halt.
New moms, what are we doing to ourselves and how did it get this way? We almost willingly partake in society’s obsession with “getting our body back” and doing all the things we used to do pre-baby as soon as possible after having a baby, and then we wonder why we’re struggling with feeling adequate or worse, we struggle with postpartum depression.
The real question that we need to be asking ourselves is why?
Why do we carry these children, which affects every aspect of our health and mental well-being, and then think that we need to turn it all around within 6-12 weeks and be back at the gym, work, and taking care of all the things with the home and family? I want to know which man set the standard for us to do all of this because honestly, after evacuating a small human out of our bodies, it’s BS.
And then we have all of this pressure to fit back into our pre-baby clothes right away and look perfect… and for what? It takes nearly a month (or sometimes longer!) for our uterus to shrink back to its pre-baby weight of 3.5 ounces. The average working mom would clock roughly 98 hours per week between work and home – why are we rushing back to all of that? And further, why are we adding to it running back to the gym as soon as we can because we don’t look the same? Of course we don’t look the same! Between the stretch marks and other changes in body structure, we will never look the same – and the sooner we accept that, the better.
We should be focusing on the things that truly bring us joy as we recover.
We literally are nursing a wound where our placenta sat on our uterus, and we need to be prioritizing what needs to be done actually by us the most so we’re not trying to pour from an empty cup.
On the top of that list is taking care of the needs of the baby and ourselves, and that means resting more when baby naps instead of struggling to clean the entire house silently from top to bottom in the duration of one nap, asking your spouse to handle dinner duties or getting delivery or takeout, and to stop stressing about when we’ll be back to doing all the things we’re used to. (You’ll know when you’re ready to get back in the game, stop rushing it.)
It’s time we actually start treating the postpartum period more like a vacation – in our culture, people treat it like we’re taking one anyway.
If you’re a working mom, you’re likely getting between 6-12 unpaid weeks off, unless you have a really awesome employer or a lot of sick time accrued that you can use to help ease the financial burden of taking time off from work. If you’re not working, you’re still taking time off from taking care of your family, so either way, you’ve earned a mini-vacation after birthing another human from your body.
Between people making comments about our bodies, trying to find a place to pump, and taking care of ourselves and this new tiny little human that literally eats, sleeps, cries, and poops around the clock, we have earned it. Let’s grab something to eat, a tall glass of whatever the H-E-double hockey sticks that we want to drink, and put our feet up. If anyone asks, we’re preventing postpartum depression.