Hello to all our faithful followers, and hopefully hello to some new readers. I’ve been thinking a lot about new mamas this week as a neighbor recently gave birth and I am wondering how she is doing and how I could be supportive to her and her family. We are also a couple days into our First Peaceful Postpartum Online Retreat which has me hearing from and sharing with other new mamas. All this really has me thinking about how I fared during the first several months of motherhood. I was wondering if things were as challenging as I remember. I was wondering if I was worse off than I thought. I also can’t help wondering how other mothers compare. I still find myself wanting to know if I was normal. This made me remember why Taylor and I started New Mama Project.
At it’s core this project is about helping mom’s feel normal. Many new moms are so unprepared for motherhood that they are blindsided by their experience. Caring for newborns is deeply demanding. Becoming a mother also means a significant identity shift that can be accompanied by some emotional ups and downs. Because we’re all trying to do a good job and we feel pressure to put on a happy face we aren’t talking to each other about the more challenging parts of motherhood. NMP is dedicated to sharing all the ups and downs of motherhood and normalizing the postpartum experience.
We want our site to be a place where every new parent finds some value. We want to create a true community of parents supporting each other. We want our content to validate your experience.
Who is New Mama Project for? New Mama Project is a place for you if:
You are a new mama and this experience is harder than you thought.
You are an experienced mama and you want to share your wisdom.
You are expecting a child and looking for real talk about what it’s like to become a mom.
You are wondering why your partner doesn’t seem to be enjoying their new role as much as you expected.
You are a healthcare provider working with babies, mamas, and young families.
You are a grandparent looking for ways to support the new parents in your life.
You are a neighbor wondering how to support another neighbor who just had a baby.
You are any person who cares about the well-being of mothers and babies.
New Mama Project certainly has a target audience, but our ultimate goal is much broader. If our business is truly successful it will not be because of the money we’re earning, but because of the shift in the way our culture views the postpartum period. We hope that postpartum preparation becomes as routine as a hospital tour or a Group-B strep screen. We hope that our work will start a conversation about postpartum support that shifts a zeitgeist for generations to come. We want all new mothers to feel comfortable sharing their postpartum experience with each other and asking for support when needed. We want to end the need for new moms to ask, “am I normal?” We want pregnant women to enter motherhood prepared for the normal ups and downs of the postpartum period and armed with knowledge about maternal mental health risks. Taylor and I are deeply passionate about this work and wholeheartedly believe there is a need for a fundamental change in how we prepare and support new mothers. We’re hoping that YOU come with us. Whoever you are, whether you’ve had one baby, many, or none. You are New Mama Project. You are why we write this blog. We hope you will keep following, share our work with others you know who will be touched and inspired by it, and share your story with other mamas. Thank you for being part of New Mama Project.