Care Pack #020
After the Baby
For when the months after a birth are nothing like you were told they would be. This is common, it is treatable, and it is not a verdict on you as a parent.
Before you begin, where are you right now?
One tap. It gives you something to measure against at the end.
Everyone told you it would be hard and wonderful. Nobody quite told you it might be this: flattened, or frightened, or furious, or oddly absent from your own life, while a great many people ask how you are and expect a short pleasant answer.
So you say you are tired, because tired is allowed. And the gap between what you say and what is happening gets wider, and the wider it gets the harder it is to say anything at all.
You do not have to feel joyful to be doing this well, and you do not have to be at your worst before you are allowed help.
First, the rare thing that cannot wait
Almost everything on this page is common, gradual, and safe to work through over weeks. There is one exception that is none of those, and it is worth knowing the shape of it.
If you or somebody you are with is confused or disoriented, not sleeping at all rather than sleeping badly, believing things that other people can see are not true, hearing or seeing things others cannot, or behaving in a way that is markedly out of character, that is a medical emergency and it needs same-day help. It usually comes on fast, often in the first two weeks.
Go to an emergency department, call your maternity team or emergency number, or call or text 988. It is rare, it is treatable, and it is treated as urgent for good reason. Do not wait until morning to see how it looks.
- 1.If you need to, put the baby somewhere safe and step out of the room for five minutes. That is a correct thing to do, not a failure
- 2.Breathe out longer than you breathe in, three times, with your feet flat on the floor
- 3.Say the plain sentence: this is hard, I am not a bad parent, and this is not how it stays
- 4.Ask the nearest person for one specific thing. Hold her for twenty minutes. Bring me water
- 5.You do not have to feel joyful to be doing this well
Baby blues, or something more
A short stretch of tearfulness, sensitivity, and mood swings in the first days is extremely common and generally settles on its own within a couple of weeks. That part is expected.
What is worth acting on is anything that persists past those first weeks, or gets heavier rather than lighter, or starts later. It can begin during pregnancy and it can arrive many months after the birth, both of which surprise people.
The practical test is not severity but interference: is this getting in the way of sleeping, eating, being with your baby, or being with anybody else? If it is, that is enough. You do not need to work out which category you fall into before you are allowed to mention it.
The things nobody warns you about
Anxiety rather than sadness
Checking the baby is breathing over and over. Unable to hand them to anybody. Racing thoughts about everything that could go wrong, a heart that will not settle, no appetite.
People expect postnatal difficulty to look like sadness, so anxiety often goes unnamed for months. It is at least as common and it responds to help just as well.
Rage
Sudden, enormous anger, often at the people closest to you, often out of proportion and followed by a wave of shame about it.
Rarely mentioned in any leaflet, which leaves people convinced they have become a monster. It is a recognised presentation, and it is usually exhaustion and overwhelm coming out sideways.
Feeling nothing
No rush of love, no bond yet, going through the motions competently while feeling like you are minding somebody else's baby.
Bonding is not always immediate and it is not a measure of how good a parent you are. For many people it builds over months, and saying so out loud is a relief rather than a confession.
Not only the birth parent
Partners and non-birthing parents get postnatal depression and anxiety too, and are even less likely to mention it because it feels like it is not theirs to claim.
It is theirs to claim. The same help applies, and asking for it does not take anything away from the person who gave birth.
The thoughts you have not told anyone
Many new parents get sudden, vivid, unwanted thoughts or images of something terrible happening to the baby, or of being the cause of it. They are horrifying, they arrive uninvited, and they are far more common than anybody says.
The distress you feel about them is the important part. There is a whole pack on this, because it deserves more room than a paragraph, and because getting this exactly right matters more than almost anything else here.
Saying it out loud
The most common reason people stay silent is fear of what happens next, and that fear deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. It is also the reason things go untreated for months that could have been treated in weeks.
Perinatal difficulty is expected, screened for routinely, and very well recognised by midwives, health visitors, GPs, and obstetric teams. Asking for help is the ordinary path here rather than an alarm being raised.
If you are worried you will minimise it in the room, and most people do, take somebody with you, or write your sentence down beforehand and read it out. "I am not coping, and I have not been for a while" is a complete opening.
Where to go next
You are not failing at something everybody else finds easy. Nobody finds this easy, and most of them are not saying so either.
You reached the end. Where are you now?
One tap, however it landed.
Take this one with you
You will not remember which page this was on at three in the morning. Put your email in and this pack comes to you, then one steady letter a month. Never a gate, and it stops the moment you say so.
There is more on the shelf
66 other packs sit alongside this one, written for the stretch you are in. All of them free, all of them yours.
See the other packsThis digital shelf is free for everyone, and it stays that way because people hold it open. You can be one of them, from $12 a month. Nobody is ever charged to read a pack.