Maybe it was the underwear. Mesh boy shorts with a bright green stripe. Or maybe it was the pink plastic pitcher on the bedside table, which was making Abby shudder every time she looked at it. Why was a pink plastic pitcher of water making her shudder?
The thing was that the baby was absolutely fine, and so was she. There hadn’t been any true emergencies, the close calls she’d heard about in her childbirth-preparation class. Thinking about that class now, it seemed hard to believe she’d ever gone to such a thing, ever sat on a floor pillow rubbing her stomach in a circle of other pregnant women also rubbing their stomachs, all listening attentively to a kind woman with a grey ponytail explain the difference between dilation and effacement. How had that even been her? First of all, Abby couldn’t really sit anymore, and she sure couldn’t sit on the floor. And the last thing she wanted to do was rub her belly, which, mysteriously, seemed to now be larger than it had been when she was actually pregnant.
Everyone was gone. “We want you to get some rest!” That’s what everyone—the nurses, her husband, her visiting friends—had said. And they seemed so pleased that they’d made this rest possible. The baby was in the nursery; her husband had gone home to take a shower and walk the dog. “Now you can rest!” he’d said triumphantly before kissing her goodbye. “Okay, time for some rest!” the nurse had said, wheeling the baby out the room. And then that heavy, windowless door closed, and Abby was alone.
Get some rest? What did they mean? How, exactly, would Abby do that? Watch some television? Read a magazine? Just close her eyes and fall asleep? Every time Abby closed her eyes she saw the baby, felt that prickly sensation in her breasts, and then she really needed the baby.
She decided to give it a try. I’ll rest, she thought. That’s what the childbirth teacher had always said: “Sleep when your baby sleeps.” It had seemed so logical then. Now it seemed like one of the stupidest things she’d every heard. But she was going to try.
She’d given birth right there, right there in that bed, in that room. It was something the hospital was proud of, that women didn’t have to transfer to delivery rooms. But she wouldn’t have minded a transfer. There was something about being in this very room, the room where nothing had gone wrong, not exactly, but also nothing had been exactly what she’d thought it would be. She’d expected pain, sure, but now she thought there should be a different word for what she’d felt. Pain was what happened when you broke your arm. This had been something else. This pain had an engine, a personality, it’s own heartbeat.
Before the birth, Abby had thought she’d try all sorts of positions, the essential oil diffuser her sister sent her, and the playlist her husband had made. She’d hated all of it. She’d wanted total silence. She’d hated all the smells and hadn’t wanted to be touched. She still felt terrible about that. All she’d wanted was to be totally still and focus entirely on the pink water pitcher. And then there’d been that moment of terrible fear, that one moment when everyone was telling her nothing was wrong—everything was fine—but they just needed a few minutes with the baby, just needed to check a few things before she could hold him.
And even though everything was fine, even though the baby wasn’t gone for long, those were terrible, terrible minutes, and she didn’t like thinking about them. She didn’t like thinking about her beautiful baby being alone, without her.
Abby loved the baby. He was beautiful. He was like sunshine. That’s what she would tell people when they asked what he looked like. He looks like sunshine. When he’d been taken out of the room—“Just for a moment! Everything’s fine!”—the room was suddenly dark. The thought of that darkness gave her a stomachache.
Where was the baby right now, anyway? Was her resting time over? She was ready to be done resting. Should she push the call button? Maybe, but what would she say? She was embarrassed to say she didn’t want to rest. Sleep when the baby sleeps!
Just then the windowless door swung open, and a nurse was there, holding a shrieking bundle of baby in her arms. “Well, someone’s ready to eat,” she said.
Relief! There was the baby. There was the sun. And also, that strange new prickly feeling in her breasts. The nurse handed Abby the baby. “Is Mom ready to feed?” she asked.
For an instant Abby was confused. She didn’t know how to answer. Who was Mom? “Oh,” she said suddenly realizing the nurse was referring to her, “you mean me!”
“Of course I do,” the nurse said with a laugh. “Who else?”
“No one else,” Abby said, trying to laugh a little too, even though it didn’t seem that funny to her. No one else! No one else but her.
I assure you
There are many ways to have a child…
There are many ways to be born.
They all come forth
in their own grace.
—Muriel Rukeyser
You did it: you gave birth.
In a few short (although they may have felt very, very long!) hours of labor and delivery, your body has transformed, your identity has shifted, your hormones have gone into free fall, and people you don’t even know are calling you Mom. It can feel like waiting for the navigation system to re-center, but it hasn’t yet.
Now the baby you’d been waiting for is in your arms. You may be surprised at how madly in love you already are with her, and how protective you feel. Or you might not be feeling as in love as you thought you would. Or you might be in a strange in-between: crazy in love with a baby you don’t know or understand at all. These early days with a new baby are all about that in-between.
When Alison was getting ready to go home with her first son, the nurses helped her dress and swaddle him, then Alison waddled over to dress herself, but between the huge episiotomy and the residual spinal block, she couldn’t get her clothes on. So the nurse helped her get dressed too. The nurse then put Alison and her baby in a wheelchair and wheeled them out of the hospital to a car driven by her husband, who also had no clue how to take care of a baby. As they drove away, Alison looked back longingly at the hospital with all its help and support. She looked at her husband and then at the baby in that huge car seat, and she thought there had been some mistake.
But there was no mistake; there was just the in-between, that unsettling, entirely unknown territory between the hours of birth and the weeks (and months) of becoming a mother. The nurse, the pediatrician, the woman at the grocery store check out—they might all call you Mom, but that doesn’t mean you feel like one. And it doesn’t mean you should. You can still call yourself by your name.
Chances are your birth experience is a powerful memory, a visceral feeling. But it might not be a story quite yet. Or, at least, it’s not the story it will become, as you recollect all the moments of amazement, confusion, fear, laughter, and pride, and blend them with the recollections of the people who were there with you. We encourage you to talk about your birth as much as you want, as much as you are able. Don’t worry about repeating yourself! Tell your partner, your family, your friends, and, by all means, tell you baby. The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe isn’t made of atoms; it’s made of stories. We think this is true of babies and mothers too. We are made of stories. And in a world that doesn’t always listen so closely to the stories of women’s lives, it’s important to know that your birth story matters.
It’s also important to know that it’s an extraordinary, heroic story even if it’s not the story you were expecting to tell, even if your birth didn’t go the way you imagined it would. In truth, no birth goes the way a pregnant woman imagines it will, because birth is, by its very nature, unpredictable. We live in a world in which our watch can tell us how many hours we spent in REM sleep, but still no one—not a doctor, fortune teller, mystic, midwife, or robot—can tell us exactly what a birth is going to be like.
Giving birth in the United States at this particular moment in time means that many of the details and logistics of your birth will be as expected, but each birth is still as original as the baby it brings into the world. Having a baby means taking part in one of our world’s last true mysteries, our last unknowns. You entered it, you experienced it, and now you are on the other side. You did it.
Even when we acknowledge the mystery and the unknown of it all, we can be caught off guard when the expectation and the reality of birth are so far apart. And sometimes that disconnect can make us do strange things. When Erin was in labor with her first baby, she didn’t go to the hospital until she was nine centimeters dilated, because all during her pregnancy she’d been thinking about how much pain there would be during labor, and when the actual labor pain was really intense (so intense!) she still thought, Well, this is bad, but I know it’s going to get a lot worse. Turns out that she actually didn’t know that. She didn’t know anything. All she had were her expectations. And because her expectations and her reality were entirely out of alignment, she almost gave birth in a parking lot.
Abby, too, was caught off guard when her expectation and her reality didn’t match up. And this disconnect left her shuddering at the sight of a pink hospital pitcher. You might also be having a visceral response of some kind when you think about your birth. Maybe, like Abby, you experienced an unexpected separation from your baby after the birth. Perhaps you were expecting to give birth without an epidural, and you ended up asking for one. Or you were hoping for an epidural, and there wasn’t time. Our contemporary culture places significant emphasis on planning for birth, and because of this, during pregnancy, we are as ripe with expectations as we are with baby. All this can leave us feeling let down by our birth experience, or—perhaps worse—that we’ve let someone down.
You haven’t let anyone down.
You gave birth. You brought a baby into the world. You entered into a physical and emotional unknown that no one could entirely prepare you for or thoroughly explain. You met the uncertainty; you faced the pain. You may have been scared, but you did it all anyway.
You did it.
This is an important thing to remember. So important, in fact, that it’s our book’s first mantra. I did it.
We love mantras. We find that they help us focus, help us calm down, help us “fake it until we make it.” Although “fake it” isn’t really what we want to say. You’re not faking it. You are doing it. So maybe a better way of saying this is that mantras help us “speak it until we mean it.”
A mantra can help your mind catch up with a new reality, and in the case of the first postpartum weeks, there is a lot of catching up to do. It can take a while, much longer that the six weeks until your postnatal checkup, much longer than the twelve weeks until the end of the “fourth trimester,” that relatively new term for the three months following birth when the baby is getting accustomed to the world outside the womb and the mother is getting accustomed to, well, everything.
One of the hardest, most absurd things to get used to is your new relationship with time. Or perhaps it’s not a relationship so much as it is a breakup. You can no longer rely on two in the morning to be what it once was: a time you saw on the clock when you were closing down the bar with friends or suffering from a bout of insomnia. Whatever the reason you were up then, and however frustrating it might have been to be awake in the night, chances are no one needed anything from you in those midnight hours. You could lie in bed quietly or read or watch infomercials. But now, when you’re awake in the night, someone most definitely needs you. Two in the morning might as well be two in the afternoon as far as your new baby is concerned. At two in the morning, you might be feeding, changing diapers, dancing around the house with a screaming baby, or eating pretzels and reading the news on your phone while your baby happily kicks and gurgles on the changing table. It’s a terribly disorienting shift in time. And it can be unsettling, even frightening.
When Erin’s first child was a newborn, Erin lived in fear of the evening hours. Every afternoon at five she began to feel a terrible panic set in, the feeling that she wouldn’t make it through the night. Some of this panic, this anxiety, was because she was exhausted and didn’t know what the night had in store for her. But some of this anxiety—a great deal of it, actually—was biological. Although Erin didn’t understand this at the time, her brain had actually changed during pregnancy, adapting to make her more sensitive to threats to her baby’s safety, threats like the onset of darkness, the beginning of evening. Because even though we humans are long past the time, evolutionarily speaking, when we needed to protect our babies from nocturnal predators, our brains haven’t quite caught up to our modern existence. A new mother’s brain is still wired for worry and for vigilance. We’ll explain those brain changes in more detail in chapters to come, but for now we’ll focus on where that worry and vigilance plays out: your nervous system.
Your nervous system is made up of two parts, sympathetic and parasympathetic, and they each do different things in the body. The sympathetic nervous system is the first line of response to perceived threat or stress, specializing in fight-or-flight reactions. It makes your heart beat faster and stronger, opens your airways so you can breathe more easily, and inhibits digestion (in order to shift all available blood flow to more important bodily functions). These are all helpful if you are in danger or if your baby is in danger. It helps you to react quickly and efficiently.
The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, is responsible for bodily functions when we are relaxed or at rest: it stimulates digestion and helps us to relax. It is sometimes called the rest-and-connect response.
In early postpartum, it can be difficult to shift gears from the high alert of the sympathetic response to rest-and-connect of the parasympathetic response. And that’s where yoga comes in.
Yoga is sweet relief and rest. Mindful yoga, with its emphasis on movement and slow, deep breathing, has been shown to effectively shift the nervous system into the safe mode. It is the perfect antidote for new mothers. Yoga has been shown to decrease stress hormones and inflammation and to increase the body’s neurotransmitters that are associated with relaxation. As your nervous system is soothed and calmed, you can be more present and less reactive. You can feel a bit of space open up, giving you the freedom to pause and choose a response, rather than react automatically in a rigid, anxious way.
Your baby gives you feedback about what he needs and likes. In the same way, your body will give you feedback about what you need and want. But it’s hard to hear your body’s messages when your nervous system is stressed. Stress leaves your nervous system with pretty limited options for response: fight, flight, or freeze.
In order to free our bodies and minds to respond in more open and varied ways, we have to relax and nourish the nervous system. And while this can sound complicated (or even impossible), it’s not. We relax the nervous system by pausing. By pausing and by bringing our attention to our breath and to our body. Yoga is a reunion, a time to reunite your body, heart, and mind—all three evolving—through breath and movement. It is a way for you to create breathing space.
But before we begin yoga, we pause. We pause to stop what we are doing for just a few seconds and come home to our body and our breath. In this pause we learn to pay attention with kindness.
Knowing all that you have just gone through, we want to give you ways to rest briefly—and often. A way to switch your nervous system to safe and relaxed. In this practice, you engage your mind just enough to relax your nervous system. You can do it for just a minute, anytime you need it. The more you do it, the better it feels.
Find any position that is comfortable. At first you will probably want to be lying down, with pillows as needed. Later, if you want, you can try child’s pose or practice while feeding your baby. This time and space will become your refuge, a small retreat that you can count on each day. You can play soothing music or pause in silence.
How about trying it right now? First just notice how your body feels on the bed. Observe how you can let go and be held by the safety of the surface. Place one hand or a pillow on your belly, the other hand on your heart. Simply follow your breath with your attention.
Now, lengthen and deepen both the inhale and exhale to the count of four. Feel belly, ribcage, then chest expand on the inhale. It’s important to relax your belly as you inhale. Notice your chest, ribcage, and then belly contract on the exhale. This is called three-part breathing (dirga pranayama). If your mind wanders, don’t worry—that’s what minds do. Just bring your attention back to your breath. If you need a stronger breathing pattern, you can try what is aptly called “victorious breath” (ujjayi pranayama) or “ocean-sounding breath.” Breathing through your nose, press the back of your tongue gently up to the roof of your mouth so that your breath sounds like the waves of an ocean for a count of four. Victorious breath requires a little more effort, which can be more energizing and can engage your attention more. Try three rounds of breath—either three-part breathing or victorious breath.
For this first month, there is no special posture or movement; we are simply learning the art of paying attention to and relaxing our physical body. Bring your attention to the top of your head and relax any tension you feel there, and then shift your attention slowly down your body, relaxing and releasing tension from each part, one by one: your forehead, your jaw, your shoulders, arms, chest, belly, pelvic area, legs, and feet. Finish by taking three more slow breaths and add your mantra to each breath: think I on the inhale and did it on the exhale.
For the next few weeks you will be feeding, changing diapers, making it through another night of less sleep. You can breathe deeply and acknowledge all of these accomplishments with this one-minute yoga.