It’s 3 am. You’re scrolling through your Facebook feed and you see post after post showing your friends looking happy, poised, put together, and normal. You think, “everyone else has got it together except for me.” Sound familiar?
Here’s a truth: I sometimes feel guilty or inadequate when I see other moms enjoying the postpartum period. When I think back on the early days of parenthood it seems like the most difficult time of my life. I felt like every day was a reckoning of my worth as a person, and that I continually came up short. Knowing that other mamas have had stressful postpartum experiences helps me go a little easier on myself, but I often wish I could get a do over.
As most of you know the British royal baby Charlotte was born a couple of weeks ago. There was tons of media coverage, most of which I was blissfully oblivious to, but I did see one article by Amber Robinson over at Essential Baby. It is all about how Kate Middleton’s natural birth allowed her to leave the hospital 10 hours after her baby was born looking fabulous and pain free. By all accounts it was a pretty innocuous article, but it did leave me with a little bit of uneasiness.
Are you anxious or worried about the future? Are you unsure of what to do today? Does every decision about your baby seem to carry more significance than the last? If you are like me you quickly answered yes to all these questions. Let me tell you about my early days of motherhood to help you understand my relationship with anxiety and worry, and why this secret was so powerful for me.
You’ve just had a baby and everybody wants to visit! Who you choose to invite into your home, and how soon you do this after your baby is born, is a very personal decision.
One thing many women worry about is what will happen to their body during pregnancy, birth, and after baby. It would be easy for me to say, “don’t worry about this, focus on the new baby and don’t make your body image such a priority,” but actually following my own advice would be hard. The reality of our society is that women are constantly judged for their appearance.