Some lessons from birthing during a pandemic.
I asked a while back what the best and worst thing was about birthing during covid. The answers seemed contradictory:
The best thing - limiting visitors
The worst thing - not having loved ones close
I realised they weren’t contradictory at all. Because the answer to what makes a positive postpartum period isn’t ‘No visitors,’ nor is it ‘heaps of helpers’ - the answer is ‘the right visitors’
Building the village is not as simple as asking for and accepting all help. Not all help is created equal. This is clear by the reaction of many mums to covid isolation rules - the sweet relief of not having to deal with well-meaning grandparents who often disrupt the mother-baby bond by holding the newborn for hours at a time, or offer unsolicited advice. And not having to fend off the influx of outer circle friends and colleagues who want to meet the baby and who overstay their welcome.
And on the other end of the scale is isolation, which can seem like the dream to parents who are haunted by memories of the revolving door of germy visitors waiting to kiss their baby’s face. Or parents putting up with judgmental attitudes towards their parenting choices when they were so fresh out of hospital they weren’t even sure if they had made any parenting choices yet... “Is picking up a crying newborn even a choice?” 😱
However, to many women who birthed at the beginning of Australia’s covid lockdown, it was the worst time of their lives. Completely isolated from their support system, and birthing and entering postpartum in an environment focused largely on fear. Fear is absolutely not an emotion conducive to a peaceful and joyful fourth trimester. And to birth without their own mothers, doulas, sometimes even their partners, was devastating and dangerous. So yeah, we weren’t meant to do this alone.
So who are the best people people to have by your side as you make the transition from maiden to mother?
Q: Who are the ‘right’ visitors?
1: People who give you the warm and fuzzies.
These are the people in your life who you love, who love you unconditionally, who sit with you through your struggles and intuitively bring wine/tea/chocolate. The people who you can be authentic around, who love to watch you grow and change. The people who excitedly ask to hear your birth story, before they’ve even asked what you named the baby.
2: Those who know what you need or are quick to ask.
A postpartum doula is trained to anticipate your needs during the fourth trimester. But you may also have people in your life who are always on the phone after a setback or crisis asking, “what can I do?” Those are good people. Just don’t be afraid to answer them honestly - “actually there’s a basket of washing to go out, would you mind?” For the good-hearted people in the world, it feels so good to help. Let them.
Covid taught us many things. There are always pros and cons to every situation. The important thing is to learn from every event - positive or negative. We learned some vital lessons about the postpartum period. You probably heard that QLD health saw a trend of babies gaining weight faster during isolation. They suspect it has a lot to do with the absence of visitors, and more of baby’s time spent in mum's arms, breastfeeding on-demand with no distractions.
As we know, our mental health is so important not just for us, but for our children. We can’t pour from an empty cup. So we pray, cross our fingers, we do whatever it takes so that we don’t end up in lockdown again. Women need their village, especially, vitally during the fourth trimester. Thank you to the mothers who gave me their feedback on Instagram about this topic. For some, it hurt even just to remember that time.
My hope is that it doesn’t take another global pandemic for us to make some individual and systemic changes to the way we treat mothers. We need quality support to be the norm, not this total depletion we hear about so often.
