Your experience of pregnancy doesn’t end when a baby leaves your body. Whether vaginally or via cesarean your labor and baby’s birth don’t magically mean that one thing has stopped, and something new is starting. There’s no record scratch, or quick page turn.
Let’s think about this physically first-
During birth, the baby and placenta leave your uterus. There’s a surge of hormones as you get to greet your little one. But the process continues. For someone who just gave birth:
- your uterus is still adapting
- your hormones shift from supporting pregnancy to creating milk (whether you choose to nurse or not) and fluctuate for a while after
- there’s fluid and other weight that your body has taken on
The way that you think of yourself is making a huge change after birth as well.
It’s not uncommon for a client who’s just received labor doula support to look up at us after her birth and say “I can’t believe the baby is really here.”
In the midst of all of this shifting and changing a troubling thing can happen, if we’re not careful- all of the attention that’s been given to the person recently in labor switches to the baby. What has been a process of ensuring the safety of you and your baby, switches to focus completely on the infant.
It can feel lonely a little bit unsettling after you give birth, to watch the attention shift.
- It might start as soon even during pregnancy. When people ask “how are you”, and the real expectation is that you give them an update on how the pregnancy is going, or when you think the baby is coming.
- It’s definitely present in the labor and delivery room, if your baby is taken to the warmer for measurements, and everyone is so busy cooing over her that no one offers you food, water and congratulations.
- We see it in the reality that there are often 6 weeks between when you leave the hospital and when your OBGYN or midwife sees you for an appointment. Meanwhile, your baby has had at least two appointments with their pediatrician (commonly more).
- When people ask to “visit the baby” as though the baby doesn’t need a parent to put them on zoom, or open the door.
- It shows up in the reality that many new mothers have pictures of their babies, but not themselves.
But what we know is that just like your baby is adjusting to life on the outside world, you’re adjusting to raising that child.
You’re still becoming for a long time after the baby arrives. Postpartum isn’t the time you spend in a hospital room (2-3 days), or the six weeks between birth and the next OBGYN visit. It’s a whole process.
Traditionally, many cultures observed 40 days of intentional rest for mothers. Science tells us that for a year, your brain isn’t quite the same.
And since many of our clients are Black women concerned with maternal mortality, we have to be honest- concerns about discrimination, postpartum pre-eclampsia and perinatal mood and anxiety disorders don’t just go away because the baby is here.
For us as doulas, it’s so important to be sure that support for new parents does not stop at birth.
That’s why at DC Metro Maternity, we are labor and postpartum doulas.
A part of every single labor package is a postpartum check-in. We want to know that you and your baby are healthy and whole, and find out what resources you need next.
We love to work with you longer than that though.
Our very favorite doula work to do with clients is to continue on with them, from pregnancy, through the early days of their baby’s lives, and beyond. I have vivid memories of:
- A single mom by choice, who we got to support at her birth, through her son’s first birthday. When the stress of working from home with a baby playing next to her gets to be too much, we’re by her side.
- A couple hired us as their birth doulas, and then reached out for regular consultation as the baby grew. We talked about healing after a long induction, sleep changes, right on up to the shift in hormones that may come with weaning.
- A pair of moms that attended a childbirth class with Sam, and called us after the birthing mother had a surgery soon after birth.
We believe that birth is a beginning, not an ending.
We want you to make it through birth safely (physically and emotionally). Then, we want you and your baby to thrive for the rest of your lives.
