THE PROFESSIONAL MOMMY

Dropping in 

I am not sure what to title this article, but I worked with hundreds of mother baby dyads over the past decade. To my knowledge, no one has talked about this phenomenon that I informally call “dropping in”. Dropping in can best be described as the transition a woman may go through from doing things in her everyday life to “dropping into” the space of having a newborn and just being with that baby.  

Women are amazing. They work, they connect, they buy gifts, they hold families together, they create homes and beautiful spaces. Most women I know are DO-ers. They don’t stop and they make things happen, all day, every day. I have friends and clients who are CEO’s, pilots, Olympic athletes, business owners, stock market traders, politicians, philanthropists, scientists, doctors, attorneys, single moms, and on and on. Believe me, these women can get things DONE. They manage multiple kids schedules at multiple schools and never miss an event. I know who to call on if I have a leak in my house, or need to purchase furniture, or help making travel plans, or need a quick remedy for a child’s cold. Women are invaluable resources for all of life’s need, and if they don’t know the answer, they will figure it out! 

But something happens when you have a baby. There is a lot of fuss in our culture about childbirth, and rightfully so. We have baby showers, gender reveals, boutique home nurseries, baby registries, doctor’s appointments, hospital stays, and birth stories. We have a ritual of visitors and meal deliveries and gift for the new baby. This is beautiful. However, among the fanfare of the new baby, the mother is sometimes overlooked. She has just gone through arguably the biggest transition of her lifetime and is now a different person. She is new. She has birthed a new version of herself and is irreversibly changed. The mother is now part of a dyad that can never be severed, even if she is physically separated from her baby by adoption or death. These tethers NEVER break.  

Now mom is home with the baby, and the fanfare has died down. This woman who has been DOING her whole life is suddenly on someone else’s timeline and that little someone is just BEING. Yes, the baby needs to be fed and diapered, but really not much else in those first few weeks. Mostly they need to be held and loved. They call the first 3 months of a baby’s life the fourth trimester, because human babies are born grossly underdeveloped and completely helpless. They need the additional 3 months outside of the womb to complete their brain and nervous system development. This is best accomplished by breastfeeding directly from mom’s breasts, by skin to skin contact with mom, and by sleeping most of the time.  

I have seen new mother’s struggle tremendously during this time, not because the babies are particularly difficult, but because the transition from DOING things all day long with hard, tangible results, to BEING with a needy newborn is such a difficult transition for women. There are no metrics, no boxes to tick, no pay raises, no quarterly reviews. Most often in our culture new moms are kind of forgotten and invisible during this time. They have an especially difficult time “dropping in” to this space of being.  

Here's an example. I had a client who was an art teacher at a rural elementary school. Every kid in the school rotated through her classroom each day. She said, “I have 350 kids at school every day, that is far easier than taking care of this one baby.” That comment stuck with me. 350 kids sounds like a lot, but those kids went home at 3:00. That teacher got paid for her work. She had weekends off. The relentlessness of motherhood is an unpaid endurance event.  

The sad part is that many women can’t wait to get back to work because that is a space they will feel useful and seen. They might be a valuable part of a team, or furthering the mission of a company, or working toward a graduate degree. At the very least they are bringing home a paycheck, which is a transactional way of saying “You are valued this dollar amount”. 

In the fourth trimester, there is little reward for our efforts as mothers. We are severely sleep deprived, our bodies are changed beyond recognition, we are a food source, and at the whim of a tiny, demanding dictator who won’t even reward you with so much as a smile in the first 40 days. There is no pay and little help. It’s no wonder that we are not taught to stop and “drop into” the space that the baby needs, and it’s no wonder that postpartum depression is an epidemic. 

Postpartum care should look like care for the mother. I once heard a seasoned midwife say the following: The first week s of a baby’s life, you stay IN bed. The second week, you stay ON the bed, and the third week you are AROUND the bed. IN bed means you are under the covers sleeping when your baby sleeps (around the clock) and feeding on demand. This is a deep healing time for the mother as she recovers from pregnancy and childbirth. The second week you on ON the bed, meaning you are sitting up, holding your baby skin to skin and maybe interacting with the world a bit more, but still mostly sleeping and feeding the baby. The 3rd week you can get out of your nest to shower and start moving around a bit, but mostly very close to the bed and baby.  

Again, I want to emphasize the deep healing work this rest and recovery affords the mother, especially if she had a C-section. For a woman to truly STOP doing during this time, she would need someone caring for her, cooking meals, caring for other children, running the household, feeding her, and taking over any duties or mental load she may carry. Unfortunately, our culture is not set up like this, but imagine a world where women can take this time, guilt free, and help her new baby adjust to life outside the womb and continue to develop. Some cultures around the world say a mother’s feet should not touch the ground for the first 40 days of a baby’s life. Most American women laugh at me when I tell them that! 

Dropping in is not just a physical space, but largely a mental one where we can let go of the load that we carry as women in order to focus on our healing and our new baby. So much is happening during these first few weeks, but from the outside it looks like we are “doing” nothing. In my experience it is the driven, success-oriented women who struggle with this the most. Doing “nothing” is not in their vocabulary because they have spent their entire lives achieving outside accolades and measurable “success”.  

The best thing we can do is make a postpartum plan for women and prepare them mentally ahead of time. Do not wait for the baby to be born, but start this conversation in early pregnancy so they have time to make the mental shift. They have time to plan for meals, childcare, postpartum doulas, housekeepers, visitors, and returning to work at the end of maternity leave. Releasing women from the mental load of schedules, jobs and finances, even for a few weeks will give her time to meet the needs of the new baby in the gentlest, most healing way possible. Remind them of how much they are actually doing while that baby’s brain is developing the neural pathways for love, safety, trust, attachment, bonding, and their digestive systems and immune systems are setting up for a lifetime of optimal function. All of this happens in the fourth trimester.  

Let us as a society deeply care for postpartum mothers and value the work they are doing, for the health of the mother, the family, and the society.