This one is written for you.
Not for the mother, she has the rest of the book. This is for her husband, her mother, her mother-in-law, her sister, the friend who keeps asking if she is alright and keeps getting “I’m fine.”
You are probably here because something is off and nobody will say what.
What has actually happened to her
She has just been through the steepest hormonal drop a human body goes through. Not a figure of speech, progesterone and oestrogen fall from pregnancy levels to almost nothing within a couple of days of the placenta coming out. Nothing in puberty or menopause is this abrupt.
At the same time her brain is physically reorganising, so that she wakes at a sound nobody else in the house hears. That is not anxiety. That is the rewiring doing exactly what it is supposed to do, and it comes at the cost of a brain that cannot switch off.
And she is doing all of it on a fraction of the sleep she needs, while healing from either major abdominal surgery or a delivery, often while feeding every two hours.
If you did any one of those three things, you would not be yourself either. She is doing all three at once, and being asked to look happy about it.
What does not help
- “Everything is fine, why are you crying?” She usually does not know why, and making her justify a feeling before she is allowed to have it just means she stops mentioning feelings.
- “We did all this without so much fuss.” It may be true, or it may be that nobody spoke about it. Either way it does not tell her what to do tonight.
- “Just be positive.” Excellent advice if it worked. If it worked, she would have done it already.
- “You should be grateful, the baby is healthy.” She is grateful. Grateful and struggling are not opposites, and putting them in competition teaches her to hide one from you.
What does
- Ask how she is doing, not how the baby is doing, and then wait through the pause before she answers.
- Take a whole task, start to finish, without being asked and without narrating it.
- Protect one stretch of sleep. Uninterrupted, and defended from the doorbell and the visitors.
- Let her say something ugly out loud without correcting it, fixing it, or repeating it to anyone.
- Notice out loud that she is doing something hard. Not that she is doing it well, that she is doing it at all.
Keep the note
The full version of this, as one page you can come back to, and the occasional email about how to be useful to her rather than around her.
If you are worried about her tonight
You do not need her permission to get advice, and you do not need to be certain first. If she is not sleeping at all, saying things that do not follow, or if you are frightened, treat it as urgent.