An Honest Look at My Postpartum Experience
Throughout my pregnancy, almost everyone “warned” me about postpartum, or the fourth trimester, if you will. Most of these warnings were well meaning, and some of them (mostly random followers on Instagram who could have just not spoken up) were fear mongering and drenched in a trauma perspective. I get it - there are some horrific birth and postpartum experiences out there, and many women have valid reasons to carry baggage from their season as a new mom. While I firmly believe that it is important to be prepared for a change in plans or the potential of a rough start to motherhood, I also believe that we need to be careful about the way we speak to new moms about something they haven’t experienced yet, and something that may or may not be full of negative experiences.
Now that I’m living through my own postpartum journey, I’d like to give an honest look at my experience, in hopes that it might be both encouraging and helpful to new moms or moms-to-be. More than that, I just want to remind any reader not to project my experience or anyone else’s onto their own. As I repeated to myself frequently during pregnancy, her story is not my story.
Here’s the truth: postpartum has been much more difficult than I wanted it to be for a plethora of reasons that I could have never prepared for. And the vast majority of fear-driven warnings I received? They didn’t prepare me for this experience, nor have I found them to be true. So, let’s unpack that a little bit.
The “advice” I could have lived without.
I will be upfront by saying that I do not feel like I have dealt with any big hormonal swings in postpartum. No baby blues, no depressive thoughts or feelings, and no crazy emotions. These things are very real for a lot of women, and they are emotions that I can’t personally speak to, but I’m not invalidating those who have real struggles with them. To help combat PPD (postpartum depression), I will say that I did some things prior to having Sully, including:
upping my Omega 3 intake
getting my placenta encapsulated and taking these pills (some people feel that placenta pills have an adverse effect on their emotions, but I didn’t experience this)
setting up extra help in advance
being honest with Ross and friends when I was feeling anxious or overwhelmed, so that it wasn’t a hidden topic
asking for prayer a lot during labor and in these early weeks
clearing my calendar (I prepped my team for a year for this transition) so that I had no other responsibilities that required anything of me
So, now that that topic is off the table, here are the “warnings” that everyone gave me that I haven’t found to be necessary. All of them boil down to one thing: this season is temporary, and if you can’t remind yourself of that, you will feel like you’re drowning. So, when you’re limping around after birth, wearing adult diapers, and bleeding like the worst period of your life? Temporary. When your baby is fussy and you haven’t slept in weeks? Temporary. When you haven’t left the house in days, smell like body odor, and don’t recognize your body? Temporary.
I think for a long time, women didn’t feel seen at all in postpartum, and now we tend to blow some of the normal (and temporary) things out of proportion. Yes, it’s really difficult and emotional, but in all of the warnings about physical and emotional healing, I rarely heard people say that YOUR BABY IS FUN! You can enjoy your baby and love your baby and marvel in the fact that you created a human that you get to keep forever. In the moments of frustration and fatigue, there is some really big joy there too, and I wish more people would preach that to new moms. It’s okay to be happy AND exhausted, to feel nothing like yourself but really like this new iteration.
So, to my moms to be, please don’t dread this season. Do your research, listen to your trusted friends, and don’t assume that you’re going to get dealt every difficult hand in the book because you might not. Be realistic and hopeful because dreading it won’t do you any favors.
The things I couldn’t have planned for.
Sully is a happy, dreamy little baby, and I love him so much it hurts. If you’ve followed along with my Instagram updates since he was born, you know about his tongue and lip tie journey and feeding issues. To give you a short recap, we found out 3 days after Sully was born that he had lost 17% of his birth weight (babies shouldn't lose more than 10%), and he wasn’t pulling out colostrum from my breasts at all because of his tongue and lip tie. Tongue and lip ties can be very common and have long term effects if they are not fixed, but they don’t hamper every baby’s breast-feeding journey as badly as they did for Sully. I had researched this topic prior to birth, but man, I never knew it could be this intense.
Upon discovering his weight loss, we immediately were connected to a lactation consultant (Pikes Peak Lactation, I cannot say enough good things about Mary), who assessed him and put us on a strict 3 hour feeding schedule where I would breastfeed him for 5 minutes, pump for 30 minutes, and have my mom or Ross feed him a bottle from my last pumping session. Because Sully hadn’t pulled out any colostrum from me, he hadn’t triggered my milk to come in, so we had to give him formula about 7-10 times on top of what I pumped, and we went through a few bottles of donor milk before mine actually came in. Usually, a new mom’s milk comes in between days 3-5, but mine was day 11. It was brutal, and I felt like I was failing my baby in every way. I’m really not a fan of the ingredients in formula, but the donor milk bank was out in town for the first 4 days of our triple feeding schedule, and we couldn’t wait and risk him losing any more weight. The formula thing definitely upset me because I have tried to be so intentional about populating his gut bacteria well, from my nutrition in pregnancy to natural birth to breastfeeding. I know he’ll be okay, but it really made me sad because it’s not what I wanted at all.
Following that first week, we had to set up an appointment with a tongue and lip tie specialist in Denver to get his ties removed with a cold laser (Colorado Tongue Tie, Dr. Whitkoff is phenomenal), he had to have multiple cranial sacral massage appointments to help with his latching, and we had another lactation consult. After his procedure, he was so sore because his tongue tie ran pretty deep, and we were urged to give him Tylenol to get ahead of the pain. I am very, very much a hater of Tylenol because of the effects acetaminophen can have on babies, so this was another one of those, “I said I’d never do this” moments where I had no choice, unless I wanted to see my kid literally writhe in pain. We gave him 2 half doses that night, and thankfully that was all we had to do, but I also came down with a fever and a cold that day, so I was emotionally not in a good spot. That day, every choice felt bad to me because he was constantly uncomfortable no matter what we did. He really struggled to feed well for a few days, I cried my eyes out every time, and I got to a point where I worried I would have to exclusively pump because he was struggling so hard to feed with his scars. There were many days that I did feel like I was drowning because I just wanted to feed my child and not see him struggle, and it’s so difficult to learn early on that you can’t make the world easy for your kid.
Where we are now
Almost a month into life with Sully, I’m so happy to report that he is doing really well. He turned a corner with breast-feeding during the week after the procedure. We’re exclusively breastfeeding now, and he’s gaining weight steadily! My mom left town this morning, and she was here for 5 weeks total, which was such a gift to us, especially considering all of the feeding challenges we encountered. Ultimately, I wanted to write this post to make a couple of points (and again, for my own memories).
First, there will always be things you cannot prepare for that will require you to make tough decisions and feel the weight of motherhood, but there is also no benefit in assuming that postpartum will be the most difficult time in your life. Yes, every day brings up new challenges, and to be honest, I do feel anxious imagining a future where I’m as “productive” as I once was and still a great mom to Sully. I don’t know how to do that yet, so I don’t have any answers in that department. But, I also have to trust that God called me to both my family and my work, and He will provide for both. I get to learn how to change and thrive and grow during this season, and sometimes, that is going to mean a lot of tears and sleeplessness, but I’m still so grateful for a healthy baby that I adore.
If postpartum is in your future, I’ll be the first to say that it can be really hard and really good at the same time. I hope that you’ll pray about this season before you live it, and I hope you’ll see the temporary things as temporary and have good people to cry to on the days that feel like too much. And more than anything, don’t waste your time Googling things you are afraid of or listening to horror stories from people you don’t know - I did both, and I honestly wish I’d just tuned it out.
If this encourages you, share it with a friend who is about to be a new mom - I hope it makes their journey a little bit less stressful.