Postpartum Stories From Moms
These postpartum stories from moms are meant to help provide support to those currently in the depths of this chaotic yet magical time.
No matter what stage you’re at, being a mom is both beautiful and challenging. If you’re currently pregnant or have you recently entered the postpartum new mom phase, this is for you. Obviously a lot of changes, both mentally and physically are occurring. A rush of emotions are swirling about. There’s anxiousness, love, fear, etc. The most important thing to remember is, YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
As soon as your baby is born, you realize what moms before you went through.
The trials and miracles.
The life-changing moment you hold your baby for the first time.
The thoughts of “being a mom was everything I was meant to be.” to “How am I going to keep this child safe forever?”
The baby blues may hit you out of left field, so these stories from real-life moms are meant to support you and hopefully help you feel less isolated.
Just remember, you are an amazing mama. You are enough just as you are.
As you read each story, remind yourself that they are deeply personal to each author, and that it may not be your experience.
STORY ONE
Pregnancy was a wild ride for me. I was simultaneously ecstatic yet deeply nervous. After years of dealing with mental health issues I was terrified of passing on my genes. Thoughts of “If my baby is messed up it’s all my fault.” swirled my head constantly.
Two weeks before my due date, I was awoken in the early morning to my water breaking. Everyone tells you that your first born will probably be late, so I was not mentally ready. Physically, I had the go bag packed a month earlier. That whole day I was anticipating consistent contractions, but they never came. So I tried everything I could to ignite the process, dates, spicy pineapple curry, coconut water, curb walking, etc. but nothing worked. I went to bed knowing I would be walking into the hospital the next morning. The baby was coming whether I was ready or not.
Tears of anticipation came over me walking through the hospital doors. I had to be induced, so they gave me the lowest dose possible expecting not much to happen, they told me they’d be back in a bit to give me more meds. Well, my body reacted quickly and I was immediately sent into the transition phase (aka excruciating pain). At least the process was getting started and I would not have to wait much longer. After 90 mins in the transition phase and 2 hours of pushing, my sweet girl arrived Earth-side.
Now onto the postpartum journey.
I feel blessed that the baby blues didn’t hit me right away. I was on cloud 9, to be honest.
I felt nothing but joy, grace, excitement, and confidence knowing being a mom was my true path.
It all seemed too easy, minus breastfeeding. My daughter would not breastfeed at first, so I was solely pumping. It was a bit straining, but being a first-time mom I didn’t know any other way. After 2 months she did a 180 and refused a bottle, solely breastfeeding. Being a mom means going with the flow.
I lived in a blissful state, soaking up baby snuggles, going to baby and me yoga, meeting up with other new moms for over 7 months.
Somewhere between month 8 & 9 postpartum, I started to feel more down. I wouldn’t say entirely depressed or anxious, but definitely more hormonal and all over the place. I felt kinda different because most other moms I talked to were the opposite, they were NOW feeling their best. My hormones were so wild that I literally thought I was pregnant again in month 9. I had all the symptoms I had the first time, yet everything kept testing negative.
During meet ups I felt withdrawn and almost uncomfortable because I didn’t feel like myself.
Luckily, I have a fantastic support system that makes me feel more at ease.
I would not change a thing because I’m proud of my journey.
As I write this, I’m currently 11 months postpartum and am navigating myself out of the funk.
Everything is temporary, except for having the mom title.
And for that I am eternally grateful.
– Lauren M.
STORY 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
STORY 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
STORY 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
