Postpartum Stories From Real Moms
Becoming a mother is one of life’s most tender, transformative journeys and yet, it’s often one of the most overwhelming. Postpartum is a season filled with contrasts: joy and exhaustion, deep love and deep uncertainty, moments that feel like pure magic and others that feel impossibly heavy.
If you are pregnant, freshly postpartum, or somewhere in between the waves of new motherhood, this space is for you. These stories are written by real moms who have walked through the sleepless nights, the aching bodies, the rush of emotions, and the unshakable love that comes with holding your baby close.
Because here’s the truth: you don’t have to do this alone.
Through these stories, you’ll see the raw and real moments: the fears, the tears, the miracles, and the small victories that make you whisper, “I can do this.” You’ll be reminded that no matter how messy or magical your own journey feels right now, you are already enough.
As you read, take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. Each story is unique, just like each mother, but all are shared with the hope that you’ll feel less isolated and more supported in your own postpartum chapter.
1. Mom 1:
Pregnancy was a wild ride for me. I was simultaneously ecstatic yet deeply nervous. After years of dealing with mental health struggles, I carried the quiet fear of passing them down. Thoughts like, “If my baby is messed up, it’ll be my fault,” swirled constantly in my mind.
Two weeks before my due date with my daughter, I was jolted awake by my water breaking. Everyone tells you that your firstborn will probably be late, so I wasn’t mentally ready; though my go-bag had been packed for a month. I tried everything to get contractions going: dates, spicy pineapple curry, coconut water, curb walking… nothing worked. That night, I went to bed knowing I’d be walking into the hospital the next morning. Ready or not, she was coming.
Tears of anticipation rolled down my cheeks as I walked through the hospital doors. They induced me with the lowest dose possible, expecting it to be a slow process, but my body had other plans. Within minutes, I was thrown into the transition phase, all-consuming pain taking over. After 90 minutes in transition and 2 hours of pushing, my sweet girl finally arrived Earth-side.
The early postpartum days with her felt almost surreal. I was blessed not to feel the baby blues right away. Instead, I lived in a blissful haze, soaking up snuggles, finding my rhythm at baby yoga, and connecting with other new moms. Breastfeeding had its hurdles: first she refused the breast, then she refused the bottle, but I learned quickly that motherhood is about going with the flow.
Around month 8 or 9, the glow shifted. My hormones went haywire, leaving me feeling off balance and withdrawn even as other moms around me seemed to be hitting their stride. There were moments I felt like I wasn’t myself, but with the support of my circle, I found my way back. And by her first birthday, I truly felt grounded again.
Then came my baby boy. His arrival was a completely different experience. I labored at home for most of it, questioning whether it was false labor or the real thing. Good thing we left for the hospital when we did because he was born just an hour after I arrived. The hospital had been renovated with water birthing tubs, and I gladly took that option. It was a much smoother, gentler experience, and compared to the 2 hours of pushing with my daughter, I held him in my arms within 20 minutes.
This postpartum journey has been joyful, though layered with more ups and downs. Soaking in his newborn sweetness has been beautiful, but it comes with a bittersweet edge. Every time I hold him, I see flashes of my daughter at that same age and then I look up at her, suddenly so big. The nostalgia hits hard. Balancing both has been manageable, but not without guilt. When I see the longing in my toddler’s eyes for more of me, my heart aches. I remind myself that guilt doesn’t mean failure, it means I care deeply. And even when doubt creeps in, I whisper back: I am enough.
Two babies, two births, two postpartum seasons, each wildly different, yet both shaping me into the mother I was always meant to be.
– Lauren M.
(click the picture below to download a free set of affirmation cards for moms to remind yourself how amazing you are.)
2. Mom Two:
My six month old son loves bathtime. He kicks and splashes and squeals. I fill the little blue rinse cup and then slowly tip its contents creating the tiniest of waterfalls. He watches in stern concentration as the water materializes and then wonderously disappears into the surface of the bath. His pudgy hands stretch out to the cascade, ten tiny tinticles dancing in the stream. Gently grasping, hoping to catch what they can feel, what he can see, hear even – but never hold.
This, is motherhood. A thing that is omnipresent and impossibly fleeting. Wonderously joyful and achingly wounding.
My pregnancy and delivery were sweet and tender times. In wonder we watched my belly grow, and throughout labor my partner and I found moments to laugh and cry at the miracle of birth. Classes were taken, a birth plan prepared and the nursery decorated with care. But what I’d never seen coming was the postpartum depression that sideswiped me around the six week mark.
My son was born healthy, but premature – so we were put on an intensive feeding plan that left little time for much else. The lack of sleep and many hours alone, either attached to a breast pump or deseperatly trying to get my baby to eat, swifty led to an immense sense of isolation. I was slipping into a carvass that no one else could see and I didn’t know how to communicate. That coupled with the societal expectation to ‘love every moment’ of parenting only added to the shame of somehow feeling nothing.
For someone who’d always enjoyed her own company and was comfortably selfsufficient, I found myself longing for connection and company that understood the world I’d just entered. I needed to find fellow travellers in this parallel universe of new parenting!
Thus began my journey from the darkness. Though the exhaustion was crippling I drug myself and the stroller to the park, to storytime, to coffees and walks, to baby yoga, to online meet ups – and slowly began to form friendships that brought light to my days. I started exercising, and talking about my feelings, taking supplements and asking for help. And slowly, as the weeks wore on, I started to feel better and the gnawing loneliness retreated. I was finding my feet as a parent and finding joy in my days with my ever growing little boy.
I learned that it was in the pouring out of myself that a community swelled around me, bringing buoyancy to my harder days. And so, this is now the unsolicited advice that I give to every expectant parent! It’s never to early (or too late) to find a community that will be your buoy through this passage.
-Anonymous
3. Mom Three:
MotherBirth
Becoming a mother transformed me. I had prepared for the pregnancy, labor, and birth, but what came after was, to my pre-birth self, what I referred to as a “future problem”, for I was much too busy trying to stay afloat at a new job and grieve my own mother’s recent death, while also eating enough protein and wrapping my head around how I was going to get the baby out of my body. But birth and what came after were everything I’d secretly hoped and also feared they would be: Complete and utter annihilation of self, complete and utter love and devotion to another, complete and utter disregard for things I thought I cared about before.
- Annihilation of Self: Noun. surrender, abnegation, or immolation of the self in mystic contemplation of or union with God.
I found myself in those trancelike first few days after birth weeping with love over the form of my sleeping newborn son, awash in the cocktail of oxytocin and prolactin that flood a mother’s system after birth. My usual self care essentials were replaced with even less than the bare essentials. No shower in five days? No worries, the baby didn’t care how I smelled or looked. I wouldn’t have eaten at all those first few weeks if not for the loving meal deliveries of friends and coworkers. As for sleep, a seven hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep became a distant memory. (It still is, almost four months later.) These things were wrested from me and I had no say in the matter, nor can I really complain. But even before these relatively trivial sacrifices, there was the greater act of pushing a human being through the narrow portal of my pelvis into the world, unaided by pain medication, an act that required a denial of every fiber of my mental and physical self that said it was not possible, and a surrender and release of ego, of mind, even of body, like a trust fall that might end in oblivion.
- Love and Devotion to Another
And into oblivion I landed, for babies are their own kind of drug. Rivka Galchen in her book Little Labors writes, “On many days I think of the baby as a drug. But what kind of a drug? One day I decide that she is an opiate: she suffuses me with a profound sense of well-being, a sense not attached to any accomplishment or attribute, and that sense of well-being is so intoxicating that I find myself willing to let my life fall apart completely in continued pursuit of this feeling.” My new life with my son (and it very much does feel like a new life for me just as his life is actually new), is richer and lovelier than I ever imagined it could be. You think you know love, but then you become a mother and you realize there are many different kinds of love, and that it might not be wrong to create a hierarchy of human love where a mother’s love is at the very top.
- Disregard for Things I thought I Cared About Before
Above, Rivka Galchen likens a baby to an opiate so intoxicating that she finds herself “willing to let my life fall apart completely in continued pursuit of this feeling”. No words have ever felt truer. So true are these words to my experience that I feel I have embodied them totally. At some point I picked my head up high enough from the fray of the postpartum period and wondered how in the world anyone expected me to go back to work and leave my son for eight hours a day. I knew deep in my center that returning to my full-time position could no longer be the path forward. The job that I had worked so hard for, that was perfectly tiered to my very specific Master’s thesis topic that I diligently researched and studied for two years, held literally zero interest to me anymore. Though the postpartum time was not the beginning of the nagging feeling that the job wasn’t quite the perfect fit I thought it would be, the time with a new baby sealed the deal. Even though the numbers do not crunch, the logic is a little murky, and to an outside observer there is an uncanny resemblance to letting one’s life fall apart, a stronger impulse whispers the truth I know in my bones.
As my body slowly stitches itself together again, another part of me is breaking open. A process that began in pregnancy, of learning to trust myself and my body, continues on after birth. I am more in touch with my intuitive side than I have been in a very long time, or maybe ever. For much of my life I told myself I was ambivalent about becoming a mother, even at times thinking motherhood was not for me. I spent a cumulative year and a half of my life hiking long distance trails, two and half years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Southern Africa, another two years doggedly studying international environmental politics in graduate school, and even landed my “dream job” just prior to learning I was to become a mother. I thoroughly enjoyed much of the time spent doing these things and have immense gratitude for every experience that has put me where I am today. But none of them, not summiting Mount Kilimanjaro or Katahdin, nor falling in love in far-flung places, and certainly not the accumulation of degrees, awards or jobs, can compare to the joy and sense of well-being I get from holding the small warm body of my son and gazing with a new kind of love into the eyes of my son’s father. But more than that, more than the new configuration of my family and the leveled-up mother-love, motherhood is opening up paths I did not allow myself to imagine were possible before. I am reading for pleasure for the first time in years, painting and writing and exploring for the sheer joy of it, saying no and setting boundaries, and having more compassion for myself and my body.
In this way, the birth of a baby is also the birth of a mother.
-Hailey H
4. Mom Four:
The year I became a mother was the best year of my life, despite being a very unstable time of my life. I had just quit my job as a dentist to relocate to Florida when I was in my third trimester of pregnancy. I moved in with my mom and my husband commuted from her house to his new job. I had a substantial amount of student debt and felt pressure to find a new job, but was unable to due to pregnancy. We knew we would need to buy a home closer to my husband’s work territory too, so the anxiety of that massive decision loomed ahead. But when my son was born, the best year of my life began.
The beginning was not glamorous. My labor was intense and unusual. I had severe back labor and contractions in my rectum, and I was releasing all my fecal matter with every contraction (imagine experiencing 10/10 pain, sitting on a hospital toilet while the IV in your arm is tugging at a machine that’s beeping at you). It all started at 11pm so it was a dreadful experience, with very little rest. By 7am I asked for the epidural, but it was unavailable until 10am. I had believed that having the epidural too soon would stall my labor so I held off as long as possible (I’m not sure if this is even true!). Finally my son was born via vaginal delivery at 4pm that day, and he was absolute perfection. I barely noticed when I almost bled to death from a missed blood clot in my uterus, because I was enjoying staring at my newborn’s peaceful little face.
After giving birth, it’s a whole new set of trials. Nursing might hurt at first. I was lucky it came fairly easily despite a lot of ripped skin and pain when he would latch at the beginning. The exhaustion of the early days is unbelievable- it’s simply not something you can prepare yourself for. And by day 2 or 3 you might feel intense emotions of anxiety and dread- this is often referred to as the “baby blues”. If you expect it, you’ll be more prepared for it, and just think to yourself “oh yeah, this is the baby blues” and just cry it out. Everything’s going to be okay! Not to mention, your body might feel like jello for a while. Then, after the first few weeks the baby’s sleep might improve, and the jello-body might tighten up, and the anxiety of being a new mom will lessen with your newfound routine.
Every experience is unique, of course. I do believe some people will have babies who are naturally better sleepers (like my son) and others will be more irritable babies (ahem, my daughter). If you have an irritable or gassy baby, the feelings of depression or anxiety might linger, and that’s just the nature of the beast. I had post-partum depression with my daughter and I attribute it to the stress of managing her endless crying and the lack of sleep, combined with continued work pressure and emergence of my chronic illness (which includes sensitivity and agitation with sounds-go figure!).
The takeaway is this: despite all the apparent suffering and the absolute carnage on your body (albeit mostly temporary) becoming a mother is the only thing that makes it all worth it to me. I hope you feel the same joy when you see the peach fuzz on your new baby’s skin, and when your baby shoots poop or pee across the room, you and your partner can laugh about it. I hope you accept the changes in your body, and love yourself even more for having endured this huge feat. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have the opportunity to experience motherhood, and to be able to take on this challenge is an absolute privilege. It’ll be some of the longest days, but somehow it goes so fast. Take it all in, but also take breaks. And don’t forget these words: You’ve got this, mama!
-Annie W
Each of these stories is different….
Some filled with joy, some with struggle, most with a mix of both. And that’s the beauty of motherhood: there is no one right way to walk this path. The sleepless nights, the hormonal waves, the moments of bliss and the moments of doubt, all of it is part of the tapestry of being a mom.
If you take anything away from these journeys, let it be this: you are not alone, your experience is valid, and you are enough. Motherhood is messy, magical, and everything in between, but through it all, you are doing an incredible job.
