Can we have our postpartum bubble and eat it too?

Can we have our cake (the postpartum bubble) and eat it too (the soup…brought by the village)?

I had an enriching conversation with my friend yesterday about the modern postpartum dilemma - we ask for the village to come care for our newborn mothers, but we also set rules and boundaries around what that care must look like. Are we asking for a village or a dictatorship?

There are a couple things that are at play here. The first, I believe is simply that there is really one time in a woman’s life when she should get to make the rules, have her cake and eat it too - birth and postpartum. It’s a time when she is performing the most intense of physical tasks; the most magical and the most important. She’s birthing and breastfeeding a human being. It’s massive! So she should get to call the shots. And in a perfect world no one would take offence at her boundaries and, in fact everyone would anticipate her needs so well she wouldn’t have to ask in the first place.

But we don’t live in a perfect world. Actually from a sociological point of view we live in a kind of state of transition or remembering. Let me explain:

Since industrialisation we have been separated from our families, raised to live independently. Our wisdom is not passed down from elder to young, but instead outsourced to professionals. We no longer have the village and we no longer know HOW to ‘village’

Cultures where children grow up watching birth and learning about postpartum care, are cultures in which birth is revered instead of feared.

If we were raised among our extended family in a more communal setting, with the kids watching babies being born and the adults caring for the new mother, then the knowledge about what women need would be innate. We wouldn’t need to make rules or instructions, we’d just know, because we would have seen it from an early age.

This innate knowledge about the world of birth just isn’t here at the moment. Western women fear birth in a way no other culture does and this is due to the medicalisation of birth in the 20th century - outsourcing our births and our health to the ‘professionals’ in white coats. As a collective we have very little understanding of, or trust in women’s bodies. In fact most women I know have little understanding of their own biology and physiology, their cycles or hormones. The knowledge we have of the female body wasn’t passed down to us from our mothers and grandmothers. It was gained on an as-needed basis from GPs, specialists, and Google.

And the same goes for our village, our people. The Westerner’s ideas and customs for greeting a newborn and congratulating new parents are…well they usually aren’t what is actually needed. The wisdom of what our women need during this critical juncture was lost with industrialisation and colonisation. And we’ve suffered for it. Women are depleted, depressed and confused. We need our village but we need them to wise up to effective postpartum care. And most of all we need our village to remember that, while the baby is cute and all, it’s the mother who just performed a miraculous feat of nature and deserves to be honoured.

We’re out of touch. We had this innate knowledge somewhere way back. And we’ll have it again. But for now, those of us studying the ways of birth, postpartum, menarche, matrescence, cycles, menopause, feminine embodiment…we’re all on a mission to educate and instruct, until such time as the knowledge and the wisdom is IN US. Innate.

Then we won’t need signs on our door asking visitors not to stay too long. We won’t need meal train schedules and door drop-off rules. Maybe we won’t even need doulas! In a perfect future it’ll be organic.

For now though…I guess just do whatever the mum asks 😉