The ways we need each other

It’s May 2025 and I find myself looking both ahead to another birthday and behind on six months of a significant change in my career, one which has altered the structure of my days and my orientation to time. Sleepless nights with newborns and unstructured afternoons have required me to change the ways I keep myself on track with a new business to run and never ending work to do. This would be challenging enough in the best of circumstances but of course, our circumstances are not the best. The few safety nets we do have are collapsing under an authoritarian regime, our leaders are doubling down on our support of war and occupation, my friends and community members are being fired, furloughed, or at the very least, undermined at work, a new public health emergency is cresting the horizon and climate catastrophe looms ever closer. Despite it all, I feel compelled to keep showing up to work, get the dog to the vet, go on a date, text people back, feed myself, water the plants, read enough, get to the gym.... the mundane stuff required to maintain a good life with most of your health intact is constant and unrelenting. And you’ll note in that list I’m not responsible for the care and keeping of my child because I’m not yet a parent like my clients and friends are. They are holding everything for themselves along with the physical and emotional weight of both a new baby and a healing body. It tips easily into overwhelming and even paralyzing.

Isolation would be a normal and natural response to facing so much challenge; we have to protect ourselves first before we can provide for others. I’ve been trying to recast the isolation that I seek in these times as solitude, as a necessary tool for my self-preservation. Being with ourselves, even if just for a breath, provides the essential processing time we need to pause and digest all the good and bad we take in through the course of our days. Again, this is even harder for parents - especially those responsible for feeding a newborn - who may not have the luxury of even a few minutes alone. Working in a care profession, this is a lesson that I am learning in new and different ways all the time - in order to show up as my best and most empathetic self, I have to build in time to be alone and turn the external noise down with a good meal or a hot shower before I slip into anger or resentment. This is exactly the type of thing I suggest my postpartum clients do when I’m around - prepare yourself with a toolbox of things, of varying time commitments, that you know will charge your battery and return to them when you are feeling drained. You cannot pour into your new baby from an empty cup.

So say you’ve taken some measures to feel like yourself but your battery is too low to be charged by solitude. This is a place where I find postpartum parents hit a big and unexpected challenge a few weeks in. They’re full up on the cozy seclusion that they may have craved when they were working and running around pre-baby and they’re slowly adjusting to the lack of sleep but their battery is still too low to engage outside of their four walls. It’s Groundhog’s Day. You feed the baby, burp and change, get them back to sleep and suddenly it’s been 12 hours and the sun is down again. Many traditions around the world mandate a 30-day or more period of seclusion to rest and recover. Take a look at any pregnant or postpartum person’s social media algorithm and it won’t take long to find a post describing this. What I think is missing from the conceptualization of postpartum confinement in modern American discourse is the fact that extended family or community members would always be around to support the new parents. Often, our modern customs don’t allow for live-in, multi-generational family who cooks and cleans and cares for the new family. I’m not suggesting a revolving door for anyone willing to help; new babies are fragile and we have to be protective of their environment. But we were never meant to raise children in isolation. Instagram would have you believe that if you can’t figure it all out on your own, you’re failing your new baby and shirking your responsibility to your family. Restart the shame spiral again.

Hear me when I say: it is not failure to ask for help. Identify your helpers before baby comes and talk about what it could look like for them to plug in. Like everything that is worth it in this world, asking for help is isn’t always easy to do. Being in community with other imperfect people can be annoying and messy! But being in community and maintaining relationships with friends and family alike is a muscle that requires constant tending to be strong and resilient. The safety net of your family, friends, and neighbors must be strengthened through the exchange of asking for and providing help so that it can withstand the expansions and contractions of life. Childbirth and postpartum are one of the most challenging of those expansions and contractions; your ability to show up for friends might be diminished as you try to care for yourself and your friends might not know where to begin to support you through it. The good news is that no one in this situation is alone in these feelings. I encourage everyone to use the vulnerabilities present on either side of the relationship equation (new parent or helper) to strengthen the bonds that already exist between you. Plan to share a meal with your family, take a walk in the sun with your friend, exercise in a group, and have a laugh or a cry with someone you trust. It’s the best medicine that money can’t buy.