Any standard article on the web about the postpartum period will include these two gems in its bullet point list: Don’t Skimp On Self-Care + Go On a Date with Your Husband/Spouse/Partner. 7 months in, I can attest that as simple as these well-intentioned suggestions may be, the likelihood of them happening in any robust way is pretty slim, unless a not-insignificant web of factors aligns.
You have to have the means to be able to pull either of these great ideas off. The means includes not just money, but family or friend network resources that give you access to care-givers you’d trust with your baby. And, once those are covered, you have to have a baby who is mostly willing to go along with the plan, and doesn’t protest with tears and visceral discomfort when someone other than the parents holds her.
I’ve mostly struck out on getting these multiple factors to align at the same time. I’d be ready to spend the money, but have no fitting candidates to care for the baby. Or I’d figure out the caregiver part, but then my daughter entered an early onset of stranger aversion. So I’ve regarded the date night advice as a fantasy for most of us. When I hear the phrase all I can do is chuckle inside with the recognition of how far we are from it and how very lucky those couples are who get to do it because they’ve figured out how to get the baby stars to align.
You’d think the self-care encouragement would be easier to follow, since in theory there is another parent around or perhaps in the vicinity who the baby trusts. And yet I’ve mostly come up short here too. I’m a former yoga teacher and have attended my fair share of wellness retreats—the self-care mantra of the post-partum world should have been the thing I aced. And yet after 7 months I can report that the only times I’ve been away from my daughter for more than an hour were occasions when I had to undergo some kind of urgent medical procedure. No massages for me, no women’s retreat, no luxurious bath with champagne and oysters dripping off my face.
Instead, my “me time” has been: an emergency clinic visit to get an enema at week 4, a breast biopsy on my lactating right boob in month 4, and a colonoscopy to rule out scary things for my birth-altered colon in month 7. In fact, the colonoscopy actually fell on her 7-month birthday. She was eating baby cake in the form of puréed turkey and quinoa cereal. I was on my second day of fasting and gagging down my last doses of Golytel solution. It would be sad, if the juxtaposition wasn’t so hilariously mundane and animal. Well, actually, it is kind of sad. If my daughter weren’t so crazy adorable and surprising I might slip into dwelling on it. But, like that insanely repeated old chestnut of parental wisdom claims, “This too shall pass.”
But, down deep, it really won’t. Whatever surface appearances might resume their place in my motherhood life, the strata beneath have seismically changed. It’s not simply that self-care for me right now means a cup of decaf tea and a chocolate cookie rather than a juicy yoga class with a good rubdown afterward. It’s that the “self” in need of care is wholly altered—whatever used to work, whatever used to be possible, is probably not returning. I’ve been transmuted in significant ways, so how to care for me is new territory. (Though of course some things abide: champagne and oysters dripping off my face is something I’d want pre-baby too, but certainly post-baby I would relish that experience with 1000x more gratefulness.)
Of course I’m also grateful for the health insurance that let me get those 3 needed procedures without a lot of hassle. And I’m grateful that they all turned out ok. (The gasteroentology doc actually wrote “A+” on my exit paperwork for the colonoscopy result. I’ve included photographic evidence of that odd form of delivering good news. Does it mean I’m a student of the large intestine?)
And, I’m over the moon about being a mama. There’s no complaining here. It’s just a reality check for those too-generic bullet point lists that purport to offer guidance in the post-partum wilderness. Unless they’re delivering me those oysters and champagne, I’m not really buying it. The self on the other side of birth is both too delicate and too strong for canned lists. The more our society could see that, the closer we might get to offering women support in the post-partum savanna that begins to equal the attention and care given to their babes.