When the Postpartum Fog Clears

Postpartum. The fourth trimester. It begins with the sweet relief of holding a slippery newborn in your arms. You study her tiny features and her tiny fingers wrap around yours. You smell her fragile vernix covered head and stare into her eyes and it is so intoxicating. Maybe you are in shock. You have been waiting for this moment for months, maybe years. You feel so grateful it hurts, and sometimes it hurts physically. You hold her warm body on your chest so close. She starts to root around so you latch her onto your body to feed and you can feel the hormones release through the course of your entire body. You’ve never seen anything so beautiful and perfect in your entire life and your world just stops. You could stare at her face for hours, and you do, and the hours turn to days. You’re in a fog of half consciousness due to lack of sleep and the reality of this immense new responsibility. You may be stuck on a hamster wheel of feeding, burping, cuddling, changing, and while everyone seems to keep moving forward, it takes time for you to put your heart, soul, body, and mind back together into one piece to be whole again.

It doesn’t matter how your birth went, if your birth plan was followed to the “T” or if your birth plan went out the window; postpartum can sometimes feel as though you are living in a different dimension. This is a transition and it likely will not last forever. You languish in the sweet, heartbreakingly beautiful, and equally harsh and painful moments that can be postpartum. Sometimes it just takes time to put all your pieces back together. Sometimes you may benefit from speaking to your doctor or midwife to see if additional treatment is needed. Every baby and every postpartum period is different. If you don’t feel quite like yourself, or you are in a perpetual fog that won’t lift, please reach out and get support because you absolutely deserve that!

We spend so much time planning for baby, buying the sweet little outfits and all the things for our little ones, and in the process we can easily neglect ourselves. We are expected to pick up where we left off but we need time. The time that we need is so often grossly downplayed. We need to bond, rest, nourish our bodies, and heal. We will be ourselves again. Our bodies need to shift back to how they were before our miraculous transformation, where we transformed from our former selves- to dewy, voluptuous pregnant mystical unicorn-to an emotionally raw, possibly bruised, puddle of tears, milk, sweat, and blood, and before hearts exited our bodies. Reach out and be gentle with yourself.

-Stephanie