‘Bounce back’ expectations are bollocks.
Am I the only person who really hates it when people ask me if I am ‘back to normal’, since having my baby? Of all the things I hear that are complete bullshit, that takes the biscuit.
What I want to say is, “If you are referring to the normal I had before growing, birthing, feeding and raising two brand new human people, then no - you absolute muppet - because time travel is impossible! Bell-end.”
But I take my Britishness very seriously. it”.
So, what I actually do is chuckle politely, tip my head to one side and say with a smile, “No, not quite. Life is all just a bit mad, isn’t it.
Though, the more I hear it, the more I realise that this is not a question they’re asking; it’s a social filler. Just a little thing they say to open conversation about me going back to work, about me balancing motherhood and working, whilst also being a wife and friend and dog-mum. It’s a polite, semi-specific way of getting me to talk about my life without having to confront the hellishness of new parenthood. If they really cared, what they should ask is ‘how are things now that the immediate hellscape of postpartum is settling down?’.
So why don’t they ask that instead?
Easy. They don’t want to know - unless you’re a parent in the same stage of hellscape, in which case we revel in that kind of chat. Nope, they don’t want to know because our culture isn’t really interested in the hellscape of parenthood. It likes cool prams and Montessori living, but not the hellish bits thank you very much; it interrupts the nice narrative of the normal.
The fact is that our culture glorifies quite a few things: youth, energy, creativity, invention, beauty. Pregnancy falls into a few of those categories and so that explains why pregnant people are treated so well (most of the time) by the media and by people in general. Birth too is seen as a powerful thing and so that too is treated (mostly) positively - albeit a bit more feared. And then there’s the little cute baby - well who doesn’t love that!
The ‘new parent’ is a thing, but mostly an object of pity and secrecy.
But an ‘established’ parent?
No… they need to be the same person that they were before, just with said baby/toddler/child in tow.
Yes, they’re more tired and grouchy and they can’t go out as much, but they’re still the same person underneath it all (remember that phrase, it’s important). So, once their colon realigns, the bleeding and the leaking stops, the baby starts sleeping and eating and whatnot then they’ll just return to normal, won’t they. They’ll put on those pre-pregnancy jeans, head back to their favourite pub with their favourite group of friends and live the same life, with a kid in tow.
That.
Does.
Not.
Happen.
Sleep deprivation and actual responsibilities aside, they are actually not the same person beneath it all. And that’s actual science, not just my humble opinion.
In the 1970s, anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term ‘matrescence’ as the process of becoming a mother. Her stance was critical - she highlighted that the birth of a child placed the focus on that small human but that in doing so, the focus was removed from the person who had just birthed that human. Acknowledging that: ‘giving birth does not automatically make a mother’, Raphael spawned an interest in this process of humans becoming parents on all sorts of levels, including a neurological level as well as a social and cultural one.
What’s cool is that this process is so complex but so evolutionarily gorgeous! The way our bodies are able to create life and then use our hormones to create our ability to keep that new life alive is mind-blowing … It’s like proper actual art!
And not least because, like most pieces of great art, it’s never really appreciated at the time.
Don’t believe me? Let’s dissect it.
Pregnant? You will almost certainly have an app that measures your baby according to fruits, vegetables or retro toys. But do you have an app that explains tha your brain feels fuzzy because your grey matter is reducing to allow you to become more empathetic and socially aware. This will allow you to bond with your tiny human when they emerge from you.
On the edge of giving birth? You’ve got a million people telling you to rest and put your feet up because once the baby is here blah, blah, blah. But is anyone sitting you down to explain that one of the reasons your emotions flip-flop between joy and anxiety is because you’re laden with oxytocin and cortisol to ensure you hold that baby close and stay alert to danger? This will allow you to keep them safe at all costs.
Or perhaps you’re in the blur of the postpartum haze. How many people have sent you a message telling you to sleep when the baby sleeps (another bullshit thing to add to the list) or to ask for help if you need it while they stay in their own homes? Where is the message that helps you to unpick your crazy mind by explaining that your brain is literally morphing in to become more emotionally intelligent, motivated, resilient, efficient and perceptive? (Katherine Ellison, ‘The Mommy Brain’, 2006). All of these things will prime you for keeping your kid safe and raising them to be a good person.
And it’s not just mums, either. Patrescence is a thing - while their hormones aren’t as crazed during their partner’s pregnancy, the oxytocin released during skin-to-skin after birth and through postpartum can trigger a huge spike in testosterone (aka the Hunter Warrior hormone).
Importantly, not one single element of these great big shifts or changes go away once the baby starts sleeping and eating and walking and whatnot. They don’t disappear even if you manage to get back into those pre-pregnancy jeans. They might lessen or change, but they will never go away; the changes these hormones created are permanent and rightly so because they are nature’s way of ensuring that human parents, a breed of parent defined by their social tendancies and committed family groupings, continue to look out for and protect their babies even once they stop being babies and retain their childrearing, childprotecting knowledge long enough to pass it onto the next batch of baby-making people (i.e. when they become grandparents).
In short, these hormonal shifts are absolutely vital to birth: they mark the birth of a parent, just as much as a birth of a baby. And once something is born, it can’t ever be unborn.
This information, this science, is out there and it’s really bloody useful to know!
So why does it take the majority of parents to get into the hellscape of sleep deprivation and mental confusion and anxiety before they ever hear about it?
Simple: we don’t discuss it.
During pregnancy, this concept of ‘the horror story’ of birth and postpartum is feared. No one wants to enter the world of parenthood terrified, and quite rightly so! Positive mindset is everything and we need to promote that. Pregnancy people shy away from the reality to protect themselves (‘Don’t ruin my baby bubble!’) and the people around them ‘keep the secret’ to protect them, but if we keep everything slightly negative back are we not doing new parents a disservice too? When we create a culture which only talks about blissful postpartum and an easy return to the normal for everyone, after time this is the only one that is seen… the only one that is expected…
And so we have the question of where this lack of knowledge about the reality that faces them leaves new parents?
I shall tell you. In a right bloody (avoidable) mess, that’s where.
It’s a simple equation to unpick really. Culture tells people they will feel a bit crap after birth but then, with a bit of self-care, they’ll ‘bounce back’. So people expect to feel a bit crap after birth and accept that, and then go on a spa day and join a gym. They might even fit into those jeans again and go to the pub. But they still feel a bit crap.
Maybe they realise that they don’t like going out at night much any more, or that they find certain music or crowded situations too stressful and unpredictable. Maybe they don’t like the smell of sour beer that lives within the disease-ridden pub carpet. Or maybe the inconvenience of air travel now seems too big to navigate. Whatever the change, they feel crap about it because this would never have bothered ‘old’ them before.
So they face a choice: do they do these old things in the spirit of reclaiming the glory of the past, and feel crap because these situations feel scary or threatening or uncomfortable to them. Or do they not do them and stay within their new comfort zone, the boring zone. And be boring… aka social death.
Not a great selection of choices really, is it? Either way they’ll feel crap… but what they can find solace in is that great social media refuge of the ‘I’ve lost myself in parenthood’ brigade. Now before you all start messaging me and calling me harsh, hold up! I am not mocking them nor am I saying it’s all ridiculous - it isn’t.
So many parents DO feel lost in parenthood and it’s not wrong to long for a glorious past, but my point is that this is a social construct not evolutionary reality.
And it’s a damaging social construct at that.
Let me put it another way. In cavemen times, adults raised the kids as a village or tribe. If you were near a kid, you helped with the kid, irrelevant as to whether it was yours or not. Children were a central part of the matricentric social structures of Early Man, where women and their offspring were vital to the continuation of the tribe. Therefore, it’s likely that becoming a legitimate parent through the act of creating your own baby was a right of passage into a new layer of the social structure.
That’s not how we do it. Our society doesn’t really like kids much - we have separate spaces for their entertainment, separate menus for their food and separate spaces for them to sleep in. The small people have to stay separate from the big people until they are big enough to be like the big people and do the same things that the big people like to do. And so when big people have little people, they have to stay with the little people. Separate. And so they lose themselves as they don’t ‘belong’ anymore.
But there is a whole sea of people who don’t belong: it’s the ‘I’ve lost myself’ tribe.
And here’s the crux: when a new parent say they feel lost, what they’re saying is their identity has gone because they are trying to define themselves by the values associated with their old selves. But biologically, they’re not that same person anymore. Their brains are wired differently and so, while they may retain their appearance and some key traits, there will be elements of their perception of the world that will never be the same again.
But we don’t tell them that, do we. Because we want to protect and because people don’t want to hear it. But this is not balanced - it’s an unnatural obsession with an illusion of perfection and permanence that is not real and not human. It’s not even scientific.
So, this lack of understanding of their own transformation may well cause the conflict of before and after: what they liked before, they don’t like after, but they feel they should, so they’ve failed and no longer have an identity other than being ‘a parent’. And this becomes a bad thing.
But imagine what would happen if we got the information balance right. That they’d known this was going to happen and did not feel scared by it. Or, failing that, if they’d been educated about it as it was happening to them.
Would they feel as guilty? Would they feel as lost? Would we celebrate our birth as parents as enthusiastically as our baby’s birth into life?
Imagine a world where it was totally standard to do the following things when someone announced a pregnancy or had a baby…
Share experiences of change openly and without fear, rather than just talking about the amount of wine we drink now.
Ask a new parent how they’d like to socialise, rather than just not inviting them to events.
Encourage new parents to find ways to embrace comfortable change, rather than find ways to squeeze their old lives back.
Tell new parents what we love about what they’ve become, rather than commenting on how they’ve changed.
Dr Rachel Reed emphatically states that "Childbirth unravels you… so that you put yourself back together in the end as something different"; this is not new thinking. Its engrained in the wisdom of centuries of birthers, but one which our ‘modern’ world refuses to acknowledge. I believe this is the mentality we need to rediscover. In fact it's one that many of us are waking up to already. During a particularly heartfelt mentoring session, one mum once resolved her own issues with this ‘before and after’ complex with the phrase, ‘Do you know what, I cannot wait to see who I become next.’.
And what a badass resolution that was.
