The puerperium Puzzle : How to deal with it?

Alicia has not slept for days, the baby doesn’t know if he is eating well and he cries a lot. She is one of my moms and the feeling of not knowing if she is doing well is very normal. She asks me one of the times we see each other to talk about the puerperium. Moms don’t know what this is, you have to explain, she says. And I who know her, I know that she has not had a good time, that she has seen her world change, she has even seen her people change. This stage is a great unknown, and you have to face it without an instruction book, without anyone who can help you, because there are as many situations as there are women and there are as many ways to take it as children are born. Imagine that you have spent 9 months or even more waiting for a moment, you have wanted it, dreamed for a long time. To be a mother. You see other mothers, they love their children more than anything in the world, they protect them, they would kill for them. It must be ideal. The 9 months go by, your belly grows, people ask you, they care about you. Don’t feel there that chair is very hard, wait for me to put the cushion on you well, don’t eat this, don’t run too much, I’ll help you with the shopping, don’t climb the stairs so fast. Of course, and is that you’re pregnant, and the feeling of sensitivity that grows around you is human, it’s natural, it’s beautiful. And it must be so. When labor approaches you see that time slows down, days do not pass and a week is a world. You want to arrive one day at 5 in the morning and wake up with contractions. And that day comes, either one way or another, it comes. You have your child. A lot can happen. The idyllic, what sells is that suddenly you feel a huge love for that person who has just been born, happiness invades you, you put your child to the chest and takes it, is accustomed to feed the breast and then falls asleep until the next shot. I’ll see you the next morning. And while it is true that there are times that it can be so, normal is not. The normal thing is that I get to the room and from bed lying down and without strength to get up tell me that you have not rested much, the child is not caught, cries, hurts you or you feel as if you had been beaten after so many contractions or after the cesarean . Of course you are happy, everything went well. You have a healthy child. You should feel like the happiest woman in the world. But the but is very big. No one explains to you what a real puerperium is, because there are soft puerperiums, but there are very hard ones. But according to gynecologists,The puerperium is a hormonal revolution and as such it is a change. And that change is in our body, not in that of your husband, your mother or your mother-in-law. You know who you are, where you are and what’s happening to you. It’s okay if suddenly you don’t feel that enormous love for your child because it will come, and it will be so great that you will be able to kill or die for it (without exaggerating). It’s okay if you think you won’t be able to raise him, educate him, because you know, your example will be the way. It doesn’t matter if you don’t give your milk or give up breastfeeding, you’re not taking away your child’s intellectual qualities or losing the maternal bond with him. Nothing happens if he cries and if you despair, if you wonder if the best thing would have been not to have him, we are human. It’s okay if you don’t stop arguing with your partner now (get up, it’s not your turn, I’ve been up all night, it’s your fault that you want to continue breastfeeding…). Nothing happens. They ask you, or we ask ourselves to be super mothers. You see that a little person, your son, has just come into this world, and depends on you, for everything, to dress, to clean, to eat, for everything. On you. And you have to measure up. To be a super mother and to control everything. But your head and your orchestral hormones don’t allow it. And I repeat, there are moms who can, and all this stuff I’m talking about looks very different from a second pregnancy. But the normal thing is that feeling of out of control, of impotence. Of a lack of control and an impotence that you think you can’t afford, but of course you can afford it! The images sold to us of a smiling mother just having given birth in her bed with her son, surrounded by white sheets, make you think that something is not working as it should. They don’t help. But it’s the way, it’s your way. Now you don’t realize it but you are a super mother, whatever the situation you are in. Whoever surrounds you and whatever they tell you. You are the best mother in the world, and you will realize, just give yourself time.