Postpartum Support Plan: What Every New Parent Needs Before Baby Arrives
We prepare for birth. We rarely prepare for what comes after. This piece is for every parent who has ever needed help and couldn't find the words to ask for it.
It’s October 2021. Our son was almost one month old.
I vividly remember my husband and me being shells of ourselves, sleep-deprived and closely resembling the walking dead.
We were only one month into our postpartum journey, and our external appearance reflected just how empty we felt inside.
And I’m pretty sure I was sitting on the couch like this… when my mother found me.
I was so depleted mentally, emotionally, and physically.
We naively thought we didn’t need help… There were two of us and one baby. So we didn’t prepare to ask for it, nor were we comfortable asking for help. What would it mean for us if we couldn’t handle it on our own?
We also foolishly thought that help would be abundant and that we didn’t have to ask for it. Our support systems knew we just had a baby. Additionally, I couldn’t have predicted the sudden, bizarre shifts in my relationship dynamics with my in-laws. Which further intensified how isolated we both felt, on top of the added emotional stress.
I was breastfeeding, still healing physically from birth, making sense of my own journey of becoming a mother — all while trying to keep my newborn alive.
And a month later, when it was time for me to return to work… I saw my personal experience reflected in my clients.
Postpartum Reality
In my work as a therapist who specializes in perinatal mental health, I consistently saw the same pattern. Parents who clearly needed support but couldn’t identify what that support should look like, couldn’t bring themselves to ask for it, and couldn’t receive it when it arrived. But it is not a personal failing. It is what happens when a society sends people into one of the most significant transitions of their lives without a map, which is why I created one.
The mountain of information throughout pregnancy has a steep drop-off after birth. We prepare for birth, and even then, primarily through a physical lens. We discuss contractions, dilation, pain management, and feeding logistics. We say very little about what happens to a person’s identity when they become a parent.
About the hormonal reality of the weeks that follow. About the relationships that shift, sometimes dramatically, around a new baby. About the emotions that arrive uninvited and without adequate language. This became the through line that connected my lived experience to those I sit with. Our culture has underprepared parents for the postpartum transition.
The research confirms what experience reveals. A 2017 study found that many birthing individuals receive neither the practical nor the emotional support they want and need during the postpartum period. This lack of support directly increases the possibility of perinatal mental health symptoms. This study confirms the experience of so many parents today. We are too exhausted to know what we need and too conditioned to ask.
As the Mental Fog Rolls in
The shift from pregnancy to postpartum is jarring — you’re going from party of 2 to 3, and the ride there is often a multi-day, whole body event. Birthing, and every birth that follows, forever changes us. They often compare birth to a marathon. But imagine actually running a whole marathon, and at the end of the race, they give you a newborn, with no respite to recover. The holistic weight you feel is real, and once the initial rush of the “feel good” chemicals starts to taper off, we crash. We are already starting off the 4th trimester from a space of depletion.
Decision fatigue in the postpartum period can be exhausting. And a well-intended question, such as “how can I help?” can feel like it tips us over the edge. You know you need support, AND there are so many competing needs that it can feel like you’re drowning in options.
Decision fatigue during the postpartum period is the sense of overwhelm that comes from constantly having to make decisions, both big and small, conscious and unconscious. It is the never-ending stream of decisions that may bring on feelings of irritability or mental paralysis, and can make us want to avoid making choices altogether. Not because we don’t care. But because we only have a finite amount of mental and emotional capacity.
The average adult makes about 35,000 daily decisions. A survey found that parents make 1,750 “tough decisions” in their baby’s first year. But wait, there’s more... because a mother’s brain is said to make over 1,000 micro-decisions every day. Parents’ experiences of raising a family in modern times are marked by immense cognitive overload, especially for the birthing parents, primary caretakers, and “default” parents — who are oftentimes the same person.
Understanding this helps the current generation of parents affirm their experiences while also gaining more insight into why their parents may have repeatedly displayed irritability. (Sorry Mom, for forgetting to take the chicken out of the freezer.)
Why don’t we ask for help even when we’re drowning?
The full piece, and the free Nesting Guide, are on the Happy Nest Collaborative blog.
