Postpartum Quotes

Again, women who experienced childhood trauma are 80 percent more likely to experience painful endometriosis.[4] They’re much more likely to develop premenstrual dysphoric disorder. More likely to develop fibroids.[5] It may affect fertility.[6] They’re at greater risk for postpartum depression[7] and depression in menopause.[8]

Our relationship maps are implicit, etched into the emotional brain and not reversible simply by understanding how they were created. You may realize that your fear of intimacy has something to do with your mother’s postpartum depression or with the fact that she herself was molested as a child, but that alone is unlikely to open you to happy, trusting engagement with others.

Postpartum depression makes you suddenly feel like a stranger to yourself, but knowing the clinical facts are the first step toward wellness.

Many psychologists whom I spoke with think the erosion of the extended family is a root cause for the high rates of postpartum depression in the U.S., as well as the rising epidemic of anxiety and depression among children and teenagers. Moms, dads, and kids are simply lonely.

I'll remind you of that someday , Maura says. "when you're married to a man who once looked into your eyes and promised to forsake all others. I'll remind of that after you've just had his baby and you have postpartum depression and feel as fat as cow and you are pumping milk into a plastic containers in the middle of the night while he's running around with some twenty-two-years old named Lissette. I'll remind you of that. Maura to Jess.

The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don’t, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again.

A photograph of a disposable diaper floating in the arctic miles away from human habitat fueled my daily determination to save at least one disposable diaper from being used and created. One cloth diaper after another, days accumulated into years and now our next child is using the cloth diapers we bought for our firstborn.

Very Important: During this sensitive postpartum time, you must be very careful not to say anything negative about your wife’s appearance. On the other hand, you must not say anything positive about your wife’s appearance, because she’ll know you’re lying. And whatever you do, do NOT give her the impression that you’re deliberately avoiding talking about her appearance. This might be a good time to enlist in the navy.

There is hope in knowing this about postpartum depression: You are not the only one to experience this confining, crazy making inner chaos within yourself.

When they're pregnant, women may find their symptoms blamed on pregnancy, and then, after giving birth, on the normal postpartum healing process, and then simply on motherhood itself.

Motherhood seems to be a no-win battle: however you decide to do (or not do) it, someone’s going to be criticizing you. You went to too great lengths trying to conceive. You didn’t go to great enough lengths. You had the baby too young. You should have kept the baby even though you were young. You shouldn’t have waited so long to try and have a baby. You’re a too involved mother. You’re not involved enough because you let your child play on the playground alone. It never ends. It strikes me that while all this judgment goes on, the options available to women become fewer and fewer. I’m not even (just) talking about the right to choose—across the U.S., women have less access to birth control, health care, reproductive education, and post-partum support. So we give women less information about their bodies and reproduction, less control over their bodies, and less support during and after pregnancy—and then we criticize them fiercely for whatever they end up doing. This

Hold your newborn as much as you want to. Show affection to your newborn. Reassure your newborn. Do not listen to those who tell you not to. 

Being a new mother is supposed to be the happiest time of your life, but postpartum depression and anxiety strip that away for a time, but trust that it will not last forever.

I admit I am an unnatural thing for not loving my child. But I hardly know my child. How can anyone love a thing that reveals nothing of itself. . . except for its unending screams?

It only takes one person to recognize the beautiful quality in another, buried beneath the burden of life, and soon it rises to the surface and becomes recognizable to the soul it belongs to.

Apparently, as long as I continue to feed my children, there’s nothing wrong with me. A functional mom is one who can change a diaper and remember bedtimes. I’m not falling apart, so I’m fine.

Let’s invent a ritual where women celebrate the transition into their postpartum bodies. I mean, it’s not just its appearance that changes, it’s what your body means, to yourself and to the world.

In 1970, when Dr. Edgar Berman said women’s hormones during menstruation and menopause could have a detrimental influence on women’s decision making, feminists were outraged. He was soon served up as the quintessential example of medical male chauvinism.12 But by the 1980s, some feminists were saying that PMS was the reason a woman who deliberately killed a man should go free. In England, the PMS defense freed Christine English after she confessed to killing her boyfriend by deliberately ramming him into a utility pole with her car; and, after killing a coworker, Sandie Smith was put on probation—with one condition: she must report monthly for injections of progesterone to control symptoms of PMS.13 By the 1990s, the PMS defense paved the way for other hormonal defenses. Sheryl Lynn Massip could place her 6-month-old son under a car, run over him repeatedly, and then, uncertain he was dead, do it again, then claim postpartum depression and be given outpatient medical help.14 No feminist protested. In the 1970s, then, feminists

Two years later, my daughter, Alice, was born. I was inconsolable for the first two weeks. “Postpartum depression,” my husband explained to friends. But it wasn’t new-mom blues. It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time.

No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. This was not simply hard to do no, it was truly impossible, for how I choose me againse myself?

Postpartum depression,” my husband explained to friends. But it wasn’t new-mom blues. It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time.

It strikes me that while all this judgment goes on, the options available to women become fewer and fewer. I’m not even (just) talking about the right to choose—across the U.S., women have less access to birth control, health care, reproductive education, and post-partum support. So we give women less information about their bodies and reproduction, less control over their bodies, and less support during and after pregnancy—and then we criticize them fiercely for whatever they end up doing.

Fifteen years ago, before we met, Daniela was a comer to Chicago's art scene. She had a studio in Bucktown, showed her work in half-dozen galleries, and had just lined up her first solo exhibition in New York. Then came life. Me. Charlie. A bout of crippling postpartum depression. Derailment. Now she teaches private art lessons to middle-grade students.

1 ounce dried comfrey leaf 1 ounce yarrow blossoms 1 ounce dried sage leaf 1 ounce dried rosemary leaf 1 large fresh bulb of garlic ½ cup of sea salt

كان عليّ أن أعيش هذا الاكتئاب لكي أجمع شظايا نفسي من جديد.

I want to kill you!!!’ said crazy mommy of newborn baby!

Love is the reason we grieve darling...and love is what will bring you back," Lindsay Gibson, Just Be

Other uses are: for tonifying the lungs, for shortness of breath, for frequent colds and flu infections; as a diuretic and for reduction of edema; for tonifying the blood and for blood loss, especially postpartum; for diabetes; for promoting the discharge of pus, for chronic ulcerations, including of the stomach, and for sores that have not drained or healed well.

Part of becoming a mother is learning the fine art of dispassion. This is the ability to step back and evaluate what is going on with your child. It is a particularly useful skill to develop and will come in handy when your child is 6 and whining and crying over that toy she really wants in the grocery store or the cute kitten she wants to adopt. In a sense, you learn when to take the crying seriously and when to let it roll over you even as you provide a steady source of support and comfort. It requires the art of knowing your child’s cues and having confidence in your own judgment.

Paid parental leave is associated with fewer newborn and infant deaths, higher rates of breastfeeding, less postpartum depression, and a more active, hands-on role for new fathers. Mothers are much more likely to stay in the workforce and earn higher wages if they can take paid leave when they have a baby. And when men take leave, the redistribution of household labor and caretaking lasts after they return to work.

Somehow, a pervasive idea has spread in modern times that the mom who is out and about soonest with her baby is somehow the strongest, like an episode of Survivor. For some type-A parents, it's almost a badge of honor to say you made it to yoga after two weeks, snuck off to the office for a meeting, or flew with your infant across time zones. But that's all upside down—in a healthy postpartum period, it's she who stays still that wins the prize.

Saturday, November 4, 2006 Get bleeped to see a postpartum patient at 1:00 a.m. The OR staff relay to the bleeping midwife that I’m in the middle of a cesarean. I get bleeped again at 1:15 a.m. (still doing the section) and 1:30 a.m. (writing up my operation notes). Eventually, I head off to assess the patient. The big emergency? She’s going home in the morning and wants to have her passport application countersigned by a doctor while she’s still in here.

This is a cultural black hole. We do not take care of our women, especially our mothers. If a woman with a mood shift after birth actually admits to it, she finds herself under the catchall label postpartum depression. It is not always accurate. Some women weep. Some women rage. Some women go blank. Some women cannot shake anxiety. We are nuanced creatures. We don’t fit one category. Depression doesn’t always look like what we think depression looks like.

But this is the power of storytelling, isn’t it? To make sense of the things we can’t figure out ourselves. We make up gods and monsters and origin stories and archetypes and tell each other it’s all explainable so we don’t have to feel the weight of the unknown. That’s the theory anyway. The practice is that we’re all so much better at seeing the faults of others, at watching them make their mistakes and judging from afar, our social telescopes so much more powerful than the microscopes we forget to use on ourselves.

Everyone has had the experience of suddenly feeling intense physiological and psychological shifts internally at trading glances with another person; such shifts can be exquisitely pleasurable or unpleasant. How one person gazes at another can alter the other’s electrical brain patterns, as registered by EEGS, and may also cause physiological changes in the body. The newborn is highly susceptible to such influences, with a direct effect on the maturation of brain structures. The effects of maternal moods on the electrical circuitry of the infant’s brain were demonstrated by a study at the University of Washington, Seattle. Positive emotions are associated with increased electrical activity in the left hemisphere. It is known that depression in adults is associated with decreased electrical activity in the circuitry of the left hemisphere. With this in mind, the Seattle study compared the EEGS of two groups of infants: one group whose mothers had symptoms of postpartum depression, the other whose mothers did not. “During playful interactions with the mothers designed to elicit positive emotion,” the researchers reported, “infants of non-depressed mothers showed greater left than right frontal brain activation.” The infants of depressed mothers “failed to show differential hemispheric activation,” meaning that the left-side brain activity one would anticipate from positive, joyful infant-mother exchanges did not occur — despite the mothers’ best efforts. Significantly, these effects were noted only in the frontal areas of the brain, where the centers for the self-regulation of emotion are located. In addition to EEG changes, infants of depressed mothers exhibit decreased activity levels, gaze aversion, less positive emotion and greater irritability. Maternal depression is associated with diminished infant attention spans. Summarizing a number of British studies, Dale F. Hay, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, suggests “that the experience of the mother’s depression in the first months of life may disrupt naturally occurring social processes that entrain and regulate the infant’s developing capacities for attention.

And how are . . . Mummy’s stitches?” This, I was slightly thrown by. I knew my mother had had forty-two stitches after the birth, and that she was washing the stitches every day with warm salty water—she made me go and get the warm salty water—but she hadn’t passed on much more information about her vagina than that. I knew from Spiritual Midwifery (Ina May Gaskin, Book Pub Co., 1977) that postpartum women were often loath to share the details of their births with the virgins of the tribe, so I wasn’t unduly concerned about it. Still, I did have some info, and I was going to share it.

The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world.

The murder of a child by a parent is horrific and is usually complicated by serious mental illness, as in the Yates and Smith cases. But these cases also tend to create distortions and bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and a presumption of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly. Despite America's preeminent status among developed nations, we have always struggled with high rates of infant mortality—much higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world. The criminalization of infant mortality and the persecution of poor women whose children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first-century America, as prisons across the country began to bear witness.

Most of all, at the beginning of depressive episodes when everything is still internal, I have wished that my illness were not invisible; that depression manifested as a series of scars, or extra fingernails growing up my arms. I have envied, sickly, the people I have known who were anorexic or bulimic, for the way in which their illnesses have been legitimated and recognized, visible, while mine manifested only as a lack.

From this collection of evidence, Donath concludes that, while some women experience post-partum depression without this having any effect on their deep desire to be mothers or any compromising effect on their future happiness, among others, the birth of a child is a shock from which they cannot recover. Donath calls for wider recognition of this experience and that we allow women to be more open about what they are living through.

good listener whom you can talk to about anything, as many times as you need to, and confidentially   Time and space for solitude and reflection   Someone who is willing to guard your privacy   To feel protected, honored, and nurtured   Reassurance that you are doing a good job   Noncritical support and advice   Praise and encouragement   Time-out now and then for a bath, a shower, or a quiet moment   Good, healthy food   Plenty of rest   Respect for your emotions

It’s not for the weak or faint of heart. It will take a toll on you. Your body will hurt. Your soul will ache. Your family life will suffer. No one will understand what you do or why you do it, but you do it. You will work nights. You will work weekends. Holidays. You will bathe the elderly, the weak. You will clean their body, their bodily fluids. You will have to know every medication, what it does, when to stop it, when to give it, and how to get it into people. You will have to know how to interpret blood tests, when the doctor must know. You will have thirty seconds to start an IV, how to hook up an EKG machine. You will need to know how to interpret tracing or when you should give or take away oxygen. You will experience joy, grief, and sorrow in a day, sometimes within the same hour. You are the glue between the patient, the family, the doctor. It’s you who will keep everyone happy, as comfortable as possible. Code blue. Trauma evaluation. Labor. Delivery. Surgery. Babies. Postpartum. Psychology. These and more will all need to be learned. And when you think you know everything, you don’t. You’re just starting. I was asked to write this essay on why

Paula Nicholson, a psychologist who has studied women's transition to motherhood, makes the case that it is taboo to mourn in the postpartum context, though motherhood can be many women's first experience of grief. Whereas death or divorce or other life changes usually involve a culturally and socially sanctioned period of mourning, Nicholson argues that mothers are not allowed to experience loss, and if they do, they are pathologized. 'So strong is the taboo,' she writes, 'that women themselves frequently fail to admit their sense of loss in a conscious way.' Motherhood, the ultimate "happy event", Nicholson declares, seems antithetical to loss. And yet Nicholson lists a whole host of losses inherent to having a child: loss of autonomy, identity, work, time, friends, relationship patterns, sexuality, health, comfort. Each woman may experience any one or several of these. Nicholson makes the somewhat radical claim that "some degree of postpartum depression should be considered the rule rather than the exception. It is also potentially a healthy, grieving reaction to loss.' Postpartum depression might be the only ritual American mothers have to express their grief.

We need so desperately to believe in a forever love--so much so that there’s an entire genre of entertainment dedicated to young lovers who persist against all odds, medical or fantastical or otherwise--that when it doesn’t happen, we fall a little bit to pieces. The spell is broken. Evil wins. Because that’s a true representation of reality, that loss of hope, that perversion of purity. That’s what we’re all living with anyway and seeing it represented in our entertainment reinforces what we already know to be true: there is no perfect love or life or quest or character. We’re all just fumbling along, trying to make the best of whatever it is we can find, whatever small comforts we can take, whatever compromise seems the least devastating.

Rather than limiting postpartum to an arbitrary 6 weeks, many midwives, childbirth educators, and postpartum doulas are encouraging women to see the postpartum as a fourth trimester, thus allowing themselves at least a full 3 months for physical recovery, spiritual integration, and emotional assimilation. Even 3 months, many experts agree, may be too short a time. Many mothers say it was closer to 8 months before they began to feel more settled in their role as mother, and able also to regain a sense of personal identity and clarity.

But right now, I felt depressed. This must be what that postpartum shit was all about. I’d given birth to a masterpiece, and now I was bored.

The shimmering tarmac of the deserted basketball court, a line of industrial-sized garbage cans, and beyond the electrified perimeter fence a vista that twangs a country and western chord of self-pity in me. For a brief moment, when I first arrived, I thought of putting a photo of Alex - Laughing Alpha Male at Roulette Wheel - next to my computer, alongside my family collection: Late Mother Squinting Into Sun on Pebbled Beach, Brother Pierre with Postpartum Wife and Male Twins, and Compos Mentis Father Fighting Daily Telegraph Crossword. But I stopped myself. Why give myself a daily reminder of what I have in every other way laid to rest? Besides, there would be curiosity from colleagues, and my responses to their questions would seem either morbid or tasteless or brutal depending on the pitch and role of my mood. Memories of my past existence, and the future that came with it, can start as benign, Vaselined nostalgia vignettes. But they’ll quickly ghost train into Malevolent noir shorts backlit by that great worst enemy of all victims of circumstance, hindsight. So for the sake of my own sanity, I apologize silently to Alex before burying him in the desk alongside my emergency bottle of Lauphroaig and a little homemade flower press given to me by a former patient who hanged himself with a clothesline. The happy drawer.

Finally, the nonimmune rubella status should alert the practitioner to immunize for rubella during the postpartum time (since the rubella vaccine is live attenuated and is contraindicated during pregnancy).

It's not about WHO is right, it's about WHAT is right.

Communities based on merit and passion are rare, and people who have been in them never forget them. And then there is the sheer exhilaration of performing greatly. Talent wants to exercise itself, needs to. People pay a price for their membership in Great Groups. Postpartum depression is often fierce, and the intensity of collaboration is a potent drug that may make everything else, including everything after, seem drab and ordinary. But no one who has participated in one of these adventures in creativity and community seems to have any real regrets. How much better to be with other worthy people, doing worthy things, than to labor alone (

Postpartum depression and anxiety that 11-20% of women experience is not at all the same as the more commonly experienced 'baby blues' 80% of women experience for a few weeks.

I saw all my new mom friends go through a sadness other than postpartum depression: it is grieving the loss of your old self, of who you used to be.

The risk of acute appendicitis in postpartum women over the age of thirty-five—otherwise known as a “geriatric pregnancy” or “advanced maternal age”—is 84 percent greater than the risk to the general public.

Things in life can hurt us; circumstances we wouldn’t wish on anyone. They cause us to say with the Apostle Paul, “our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted at every turn—fighting without and fear within” (2 Cor. 7:5). Within a community of shrieking circumstances survivors howl with rationality. A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more. (Matt. 2:18) Even the beauty of wonder like childbirth can originate words that can’t get out of bed, words such as “post-partum.” “Who is there of our race that is quite free from sorrows?” Charles asks us. “Search the whole earth through, and everywhere the thorn and thistle will be found.”2

Motherhood seems to be a no-win battle: however you decide to do (or not do) it, someone’s going to be criticizing you. You went to too great lengths trying to conceive. You didn’t go to great enough lengths. You had the baby too young. You should have kept the baby even though you were young. You shouldn’t have waited so long to try to have a baby. You’re a too involved mother. You’re not involved enough because you let your child play on the playground alone. It never ends. It strikes me that while all this judgment goes on, the options available to women become fewer and fewer. I’m not even (just) talking about the right to choose—across the U.S., women have less access to birth control, health care, reproductive education, and post-partum support. So we give women less information about their bodies and reproduction, less control over their bodies, and less support during and after pregnancy—and then we criticize them fiercely for whatever they end up doing. This seems not only unfair to me but a recipe for societal disaster. I don’t have answers here, but I wanted to raise questions about what we expect of mothers and who we think “deserves” to be a mother and who doesn’t—and why we think that question is ours to decide.

I remembered the syndrome, a thing I would describe as a “Mission Accomplished Fatigue,” a singular condition that often follows the successful completion of a protracted construction project. Officially undiagnosed, its common manifestations include depression, lassitude, and fatalism. Comparable to postpartum depression in its singularity of cause, the best evocation of its effect is suggested in the Jerry

depression isn’t weakness. It’s a matter of brain chemistry. Postpartum depression is no different. Pregnancy and childbirth are immensely taxing on a woman’s body and it’s not at all uncommon for a new mother to develop depression

If Dulac is right about the link between these urocortin neurons and postpartum depression, she hopes that her work can help identify drugs that could act as blockers to treat such disorders.

With no proof whatsoever, just somehow knowing as 1,000 percent fact - I come from a long line of women who stayed in bed all day. Or who dreamed about it when society forced them to a luncheon or crop event. I can see in the pictures of the women on either side of my parentage that their eyes were searing fuck this into the camera, both in the fun-wink and the yikes-Reaper ways. I've always had a little postpartum sheen to my style, a little matted tangle and stained Henley for your nerve. There is a constant low voice encouraging me to untie the raft and drift out to sea. To float through space braless, the day's only assignment pretzels, porn, and regret.

No," she says. "No, I can't. How can I? I've started seeing someone." My heart stops. "A counselor," she adds, and it starts beating again, relieved. Of course. Of course she wouldn't have a bloody affair. "Once a week. I go during work time so Theo doesn't know." So that's where she's neem going, and probably why she wasn't in the shop, and where she was driving to the other day. "But he'll want me to go to the GP and I'm- I'm worried they'll put me on meds and the meds will numb me. I already feel so numb, Noelle. And I'm scared. Of being that mother who needs pills to get through what's supposed to be one of the best things that ever happened to her. I'm a shit mother.

I spoke to this woman in the supermaket," Charlie barges in again, "and I said I was tired and finding it hard, and she said, 'Ah, you wouldn't change it thoug, would you?' and I had to of course say no. But I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say, 'Actually, Brenda, I would.' I want to go back sometimes. And I do, Noelle. I don't want to be Charlie of then." Charlie bursts into sobs.

But Harper was born so close to Ruby, and when she came into the world, I suffered terrible postpartum depression, making even the most basic tasks beyond keeping myself and my girls alive feel impossible. I’m still shocked we even had a tree or gifts that first year, since we all know Todd was never going to do anything.

A Letter to Grandparents Dear Grandparents (and other family members), Congratulations on the birth of your new grandchild! This birth marks the continuation of your family into a new generation. Your support and love can ease your own child’s transition into parenthood. If your children invite you to come and help, recognize it as an honor. Ask what you may do to help: Prepare meals? Do laundry? Shop? Keep the house clean? You will work hard, sleep little, and leave tired and appreciated. But please avoid the mistakes that some new grandparents make—monopolizing the baby, criticizing the parent’s decisions and actions, and giving unwanted, out-of-date, or opinionated advice. Of course, if they ask you for advice, feel free to give it or to check recent books in areas where you are uncertain. What your grandchild needs most from you is a nurturing support of their parents. The parents need you to support and honor their thoughtful decisions about and style of parenting, even if different from yours. Discover what books they are reading on newborn care and feeding and read the same books yourself. You are needed to support them as they learn about and care for their new baby. The new parents need to hear that you think they are wonderful parents and the very best parents your grandchild could have. They need to hear from you that parenthood is always challenging and tiring and, at the same time, one of the most important and rewarding things they will ever do. Let them know you have confidence in them. If your relationship with the parents is strained or difficult, think of what you can and cannot do to support this new family. If being with them is too difficult for you, or for them, your presence might worsen your relationship and make this adjustment to parenthood more difficult. Instead of visiting right away, you might send help in the form of costs of a postpartum doula, diaper service, meals, or the presence of another family member. Reaching out in this way could go a long way in healing your relationship. Be gentle with your expectations of the new family and forgiving if they forget to thank you for your presence and gifts. Memories are made in these first weeks following birth—ones never forgotten. Your children will always remember your unconditional love and acceptance. With best wishes for joyful grandparenting, Penny Simkin

So maybe I am still a bit of a diva. If I need to spend a hundred grand to get my post-partum cuddles, so help me God, that’s what I’ll do.

At the risk of sounding extreme, let me give you an example from my own case files that sets the tone for this chapter. Kate had never been on an antidepressant and never suffered from depression, but she felt overwhelmed and frazzled after the birth of her first baby. At her six-week postpartum follow-up appointment, her obstetrician prescribed Zoloft. Within one week of starting it, she had written a suicide note and was planning to jump off of her fifteenth-floor Manhattan balcony. She said to me, “It just made sense at the time. And I felt really detached about it, like it was nothing.” Kate’s experience is not an outlier. She is among millions of women who are reflexively prescribed medication for symptoms of distress. She’s also among those who have serious side effects that may seem like part of the depression—not a result of the drugs. Rather

Furthermore, he may see you in new and profoundly different ways now, and his sense of responsibility to his growing family can be overwhelming. All in all, he might need some support, too, and may not be as quickly responsive to your needs as you’d like. He also can’t entirely understand the feelings you’re going through, either emotionally or physically, as you recover from birth, your hormones skyrocket and plummet, and you integrate your experience of birth and new motherhood.

Early postpartum period • Immediate contact with your baby (including breastfeeding) • Minimal postpartum pain • Good health (you and your baby)

Women who gain more weight than the recommended range during the pregnancy tend to be heavier at 3 years postpartum than women who gained weight within recommended range during pregnancy, and this applies to both obese and nonobese patients.

about one-fifth of the cardiac output goes through the uterus at term increasing the risk from postpartum hemorrhage substantially.

Lucille: I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I went off my post-partum medication. Michael: You were still taking that? You had Buster 32 years ago. Lucille: And that’s how long I’ve been depressed about him.

As it stands now we are all told that breastfeeding is the ONLY option for feeding your child, if you actually love that child and ever want them to have more than a third-grade level reading ability. If you don’t breastfeed your baby you might as well just drop it off immediately at your local prison, because that is where it’s going to end up anyway, with such a horrible start to its life. Breastfeeding is beautiful and natural and the best and only socially acceptable way to nourish your baby. It is the most natural thing on the planet, you see. Fast-forward to a severely sleep-deprived, hormone-riddled new mom whose baby is not latching on correctly. If maybe perhaps she had been warned that breastfeeding would not necessarily be easy-peasy, then maybe perhaps she wouldn’t have to add “severe guilt” and “feelings of extreme failure as a woman and mother” to her already long list of postpartum difficulties. So say it with me now: “Breastfeeding is really f’n hard.” Repeat it to yourself, even as you attend classes and read books.

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) refers to glucose intolerance identified during pregnancy. In most patients, it subsides postpartum, although glucose intolerance in subsequent years occurs more frequently in this group of patients.

realistic: The postpartum period is difficult—a rocky terrain. All but a rare few stumble along the way. (More about Mum recuperating during the postpartum period in Chapter 7.) Believe me, I know that the moment you get home, you’ll probably feel overwhelmed. But if you follow my simple homecoming ritual, you’re less likely to feel frantic. (Remember,

Most new moms, depressed or not, tend to be sensitive to criticism. So, when you add in PPD, new moms are often even more sensitive, which means you need to be particularly careful that you say only positive things to her. Praise her as often as you can, and keep criticism to yourself, even if you feel it’s justified.

Postpartum depression makes a woman feel like she is in the grip of something dreaded and dark, and it's scary. . . but she's likely ashamed to admit it because she can't explain it!

Miscarriage is a predictor for postpartum anxiety and depression. Of course you feel out of control: Your hormones have been all over the place. You’ve been heartbroken, wrung out, exhausted, and scared. You can’t make your body do what it should, and now you can’t make your child do what he should.

Postpartum mania due to the hormonal changes following childbirth can occur in women who do not have bipolar disorder, but women who do have it, or who have a family history of it, are twenty to thirty times more likely to have a manic episode triggered by childbirth.

After all, family dynamics aren’t independent clusters of choice and consequence, but rather a tapestry of intricately woven threads of action and reaction, passing over and under each other, knotting together time, emotion, and experience as one.

Reconozco que soy una persona antinatural por no querer a mi hijo, pero apenas lo conozco. ¿Cómo puede alguien amar algo que no revela nada de sí mismo... excepto sus gritos interminables?

I have mild postpartum depression like lots of other new mothers. It doesn’t mean I harmed my baby. I want nothing more than to get her back.

Postpartum is a quest back to yourself, alone in your body again. You will never be the same; you are stronger than you were.

I wish there were more awareness and empathy for women who experience postpartum depression.

Just as it reins in profuse discharges of mucus, Nettle is useful for postpartum hemorrhage, bleeding piles, bloody diarrhea, bloody urine, and excessive menstrual flux.

She acted like she had post-partum depression before she got pregnant, so you can imagine what she was like after. I just couldn’t believe how disappointed she seemed to have this tiny miracle, Louisa, in our lives all of a sudden. That’s why I initiated the divorce.

WomanCode by Alisa Vitti.

The diaper bag slipped from the handle and her bottle fell out and rolled across the floor. I collected it and decided I would not wipe off the nipple. I felt a rush if power when I made clandestine decisions like this, decisions other mothers would not make because they weren’t supposed to, like leaving a wet diaper on too long or skipping her overdue bath again because I couldn’t be bothered.

Perhaps because pregnancy and birth get all the magazine covers and headlines—no surprise, as these events sell more stuff—we’ve overlooked this last part of the childbearing story. A woman’s postpartum experience might be given a brief nod at the end of a pregnancy book, or thirty seconds of footage at the end of a TV show, but a deeper look almost never occurs. Rather than get invited to take a sacred time-out after delivering her child, the new mother is more likely met with pressure to “bounce back”—back to her pre-pregnancy productivity, back to her pre-pregnancy body, and back to her pre-pregnancy spirits. But when it comes to becoming a mother, there is no back; there is only through. After birthing her child, every woman must pass through this initial adjustment phase. It is a strange and beautiful limbo zone that is both exhausting and exciting, mysterious and monotonous. When she arrives at the other side of the postpartum phase after roughly a month and a half, she will most certainly be facing forward, prepared to take her next steps into motherhood.

To be with another in this way means that for the time being you lay aside the views and values you hold for yourself in order to enter another’s world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside yourself and this can only be done by a person who is secure enough in himself that he knows he will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and can comfortably return to his own world when he wishes. Perhaps this description makes clear that being empathic is a complex demanding, strong yet subtle and gentle way of being. (Rogers,

The postpartum period places women at risk for retaining baby weight,1244 and a study of hundreds of new moms followed for the first five months found that inadequate fiber intake during the postpartum period appeared to increase obesity risk by 24 percent.

Serving as a reference that parents can refer to before, after, and beyond delivery, this resource is invaluable, both educational and practical. . . this guide expertly anticipates the concerns parents will have and deftly addresses them. The author has assembled an authoritative yet humble primer to this essential topic. . .A much-needed companion for mother and child as they venture through the postpartum period.”—

Serving as a reference that parents can refer to before, after, and beyond delivery, this resource is invaluable, both educational and practical. . . . This guide expertly anticipates the concerns parents will have and deftly addresses them. The author has assembled an authoritative yet humble primer to this essential topic. . . A much-needed companion for mother and child as they venture through the postpartum period.

This publication is a rare resource with invaluable information about mom and baby care during their hospital stay and for things that might pop up shortly after returning home. It ably covers everything a parent needs to know when anticipating the birth of their baby. The author’s experience is remarkable, and her explanation of tests and medicine is very informative. The book also incorporates illuminating Q&A sections that depict the real image of inquisitive parents as well as some of their most common uncertainties. "Karen L. Brewer’s “The B.A.B.Y. Book: Best Advice for Baby and You” is simple to read and easy to digest. It is a game-changer that will remove a new parent from the sea of confusion and a maze of conflicting opinions by authors with little to no postpartum experience. The author has included everything about mom/baby care, which makes this the perfect gift for the expectant mother. Her masterstroke is in her candidness and comprehension of the transformative journey into motherhood.

Globally, most women have babies, and it seems that a high percentage of them are still suffering postpartum injuries long after their births. Urine leakage starts with the pelvic floor. One doctor told me that families commonly give up on caring for their aging loved ones when they lose bladder control. Kids don't want to change their parents' diapers. Urinary incontinence is a leading cause of nursing home admissions for women. This means that whether or not you can live your final days independently may come down to what's unresolved from giving birth, in a part of your body you don't really understand or might not even know is there. The healthcare system isn't just failing postpartum women. It's failing women of all ages for their entire lives.

You listen to me, Holmes, and you listen good. I did not exit a child out of my body to just sit here and raise it without a best friend by my side. Do you understand what a postpartum woman goes through?” “Ehhh . . .” “Underneath this pretty pink blouse I’m wearing are raw nipples. Yeah . . . raw. They are chapped and have been sucked on and tugged on and brutalized to the point that I’m not sure I even have feeling in them anymore. And my stomach.” She clasps her hand to her stomach. “It is jiggly but not, but also . . . jiggly. Explain to me how that works? It’s as if when I got pregnant, an extra layer of skin was added but never fully attached to the underneath layer so it just moves around freely. And my feet . . . they fit in nothing,” she whispers in a scary tone, and I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise. “Nothing. All I can say is thank God for my generation creating the casual but professional look by incorporating sneakers with trousers because I wouldn’t have anything to wear on my feet if it weren’t for the fashion trends right now. And don’t get me started on the underwear I have to wear now.” She grips my jersey, coming in closer. “They are . . . enormous. I could wrap your head and Posey’s head together in one pair. So you can understand I need my best friend. Therefore, find your balls, man, because you are going to make my friend fall for you so fucking hard that she won’t know what to do with herself. Got it?

Though it is becoming an increasingly popular area of advocacy, the United States continues to top the list of nations that are disconnected from the basic concept of relieving a mother of overwork and giving her dancing hormones the time and space to regulate through rest and proper nutrition. It's a grin-and-bear-it moment (complete with dark circles and wan complexion). And, these days, with more and more women literally and energetically holding the home together as the primary breadwinner, and very often as the emotional center of the home as well, the postpartum period becomes a pressure cooker. The unconscious message beamed from all angles is, "Get back at it. You can't afford to rest." But it seems we can't afford not to. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that when deliberate physical care and support surround a new mother after birth, as well as rituals that acknowledge the magnitude of the event of birth, postpartum anxiety and its more serious expression, postpartum depression, are much less likely to get a foothold. Consider that the key causes of these disturbingly common, yet still highly underreported, syndromes include isolation, extreme fatigue, overwork, shame or trauma about birth and one's body, difficulties and worries about breastfeeding, and nutritional depletion, all of which suggests that when we let go of the old ways, we inadvertently helped create a perfect storm of factors for postpartum depression.

Mindfulness-based prenatal classes have also proven to be beneficial, leading to lower rates of opioid analgesia use during labor and new parents had fewer symptoms of postpartum depression.18

The differences between general depression and postpartum depression are, however, highlighted as such: 1.​Postpartum depression can be very abrupt. 2.​There is a newborn child who needs care, and so a woman and the people around her are concerned about caring for the child. 3.​Becoming a mother carries such significant meaning that when the experience does not go exactly the way that one expects it to go, it can be absolutely devastating.

But depression or postpartum psychosis or any kind of mental illness is a rabbit hole. It’s a whole other world down there. The decisions you make in that place don’t hold up in the real world. No one understands that.

Additionally, prenatal chiro care helps with postpartum recovery by reducing tension in muscles surrounding the uterus which speeds up healing after delivery.

Considering these facts, it is unsurprising that one out of four new mothers return to work ten days after having their baby (Major, 2020).