4 Tips for Calling in Postpartum Support
(or really support at any point on the reproductive continuum.)
Most of the time we have folks in our life who really do WANT to be helpful, but because of white supremacist colonial culture, many of us have lost the skill of know HOW to show up for people postpartum. These tips are aimed at informing you about the bigger picture of calling in postpartum support, not necessarily getting into the nitty gritty specifics, because that would require a personalized conversation about your specific family dynamics, needs, lifestyle, etc. I do offer prenatal consults where this could be explored based on your specific needs.
Image description: a postpartum mom holding her baby, telling me her birth story with lactation tea, lactation cookies, ginger fried rice and gifts of herbal support in front of her.
Make space to accept support. Because our immediate communities are usually rather un or undereducated about how to appropriately show up for their postpartum kin, we tend to throw the baby out with the bath water and say “no one is allowed to come see us for the first X number of weeks!” While I agree in a “no visitors” policy postpartum, they doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t communicate with your community about your actual needs postpartum and turn would-be just “visitors” into helpers - vital parts of your postpartum recovery team.
Teaching your family how to show up for you postpartum is hard work because it is an act of ancestral healing - hard, but worth doing. Like I mentioned white supremacist colonial culture is one that leaves birthing people out of sight and in isolation, so bravely asking for help might trigger your family members - because “they had to do it alone,” or maybe because they forced their recovery too soon and are still dealing with the bodily repercussions of not taking the proper amount of time to heal and replenish their bodies and spirits. Resentment might surface that is about them, not you. By calling in your community and asking for help, you are normalizing asking for help. You are helping shift the paradigm from a culture that comes and hold the baby, but never holds the birther to one that remembers the personhood of the birther too who has needs that deserve to be met. Your children won’t have to struggle to receive informed, traditional postpartum care when its their turn because of the work YOU are doing right now to shift the culture. This is what I mean when I say this is HARD work, but it is WORTHY work.
2. Be specific about what you need. If you don’t know, you have to find that out first. Your potential support people can’t read your mind, and they want to know what you need.
Image Description: A picture of a postpartum mom eating ginger fried rice and sharing her birth story with me while her baby sleeps in her arms.
Reaching out to a handful of people individually about what you need is a more effective way to actually potentially receive the support you need and deserve vs putting a blanket cry for help out to the public. Speaking publicly about your needs is still a good and valid thing to do, but I find that works more for normalizing asking for help more so than it actually gets you the help you need.
My clients and I work on:
making a list of chores they’re comfortable with their village doing for them, something that can easily be pointed to without mental labor from the birthing person,
we work on communicating to their people what is helpful vs not helpful and setting brave boundaries,
we work on what it might look like to accept help from family members you might otherwise shut out in the tender postpartum period,
and we set realistic expectations for what you can expect support to look like postpartum given the lives of the people that make up your village.
There’s a lot of nuance to family dynamics, so there is no one-size-fits-all way to communicate with your village about your postpartum needs.
Image description: a photo of me at the hospital on my discharge day, the first time I could stand up by myself and felt well enough to change my baby’s diaper.
3. Never ever ever compare the amount of support you feel like you need to the support it seems like someone else does or doesn’t need. 1. You don’t know if they actually don’t need as much help as you or if they actually do but they just aren’t being open about that. And 2. Even if they are getting along great without the support you want or need that’s THEM not YOU.
What you specifically need in this season is just a fact, it is unhelpful (and maybe even harmful) to wish your needs looked like someone else’s needs. (And don’t even get me started on how is wanting to need less support is just a byproduct of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that praises people, especially mothers, who can keep themselves seeming small and needless, out of the way. It’s the same reason why we laud parents who have “easy babies” but that’s another discussion.)
The point is, your capacity tends to look very similar to the capacity of your newborn when you are postpartum. You are brave and smart for asking for help in navigating that and trying to plan for a supported postpartum. What kind of help another parent did or didn’t have/need is utterly irrelavent to YOU and what you need.
4. Lastly, expect a change to your status quo.
Image description: A photo of a newly postpartum mom, helping blow the nose of her older kiddo while nursing her second baby.
It is not a sign of a failure in postpartum support if your home isn’t as clean as it used to be pre-baby. It is not a sign of failed postpartum support if you still feel tired or like you can’t do more than the bare minimum in a day. This disruption to your status quo comfort, this kind of life-leveling is exactly what postpartum is SUPPOSED to do to us, and we’re meant to surrender to that change, not plan our way out of it.
Do we culturally and medically fail postpartum people all the time? ABSOLUTELY. I’m not suggesting we call that kind of negligence anything other than what it is. But if the people in your life are doing what they can for you, given their own life requirements while we all grind under the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and your life is simply no longer looking like what it used to - know that your life is supposed to be deeply, utterly changed by this postpartum parenthood experience.
If you have needs beyond what your village is able to meet for you, it is time to reach out to professional support (whether that be a lactation consultant, a therapist who specializes in postpartum mood disorders, a cleaning person, a postpartum doula, a night nurse, etc.) And if you’re scoffing at that list because unfortunately under capitalism those types of support are privileges instead of standard, then remember that asking for help can also look like bravely asking for financial help to get the resources you need for your well being and healing.
Even with all that was already said, there’s still so much more to say to be fully encompassing of everyone’s circumstances, to be fully trauma informed, and this article barely scratched the surface of how the culture of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy sabotages the postpartum period with “snap back” culture, going back to work too soon, not prioritizing staying home and staying warm postpartum, disconnection of traditional foods, a society that disrespects birthing folks and what they just went through to bring forth the next generation, etc.
These tips are merely intended as a jumping off point for deeper, more specific conversations to happen within your own community for relational healing right now, and a more easeful appropriate postpartum expectations for future generations.