Postpartum care isn't fluffy. It isn't just warm soup in ceramic bowls, or hand crafted herbs harvested under the full moon, or organic ghee, or linen swaddles, or saying no to visitors.
Postpartum care saves lives. Postpartum care prevents suicide, nervous breakdowns and even seperation & divorce.
Postpartum care is gritty.
People overlook the potency of postpartum, because birth is SUCH a trip. But if birth is the cracking, then postpartum contains all the consequences of that rip. Come what may.
And sometimes a consequence of that crack is that a whole lot of darkness comes flooding in, damanding attention. Sometimes like a flood, and sometimes as a slow pressure leak.
Which is why postpartum care is suicide prevention.
Which is why postpartum care is mental health care.
Which is why postpartum care needs to be trauma aware.
Postpartum care is knowing how to respond when someone tells you how they want to die, or how they just had a vision of throwing their baby out the window. You need to know how to respond without judgement or persecution.
Postpartum care is understanding that a mental health care plan and a prescription is wildly inadequate.
Postpartum care means learning to sit in the dark, which often means facing off with your own as a way of building resillience for the heaviness.
Postpartum care must include care beyond the first six weeks. Because after that is when most mothers fall through the cracks.
As a society we have a responsibility to mothers. I do not take this responsibility lightly.
Postpartum care saves lives.
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