It’s a rollercoaster time, the newborn phase. It’s a watershed of all of the anticipation of the past nearly-year, finally holding your baby in your arms (and even more if you’ve been trying for a while). You will probably feel exhilarated and ecstatic. But you also might feel pummelled by your experience, a bit shocked and really, really tired. Be honest with those close to you, and try to be gentle with yourself. Be careful about allowing hundreds of visitors in to see the baby if you really don’t feel up to it. It is an immensely joyful and lovely time taking your baby home, but it is also unprecedentedly stressful, and if you’re trying to establish breastfeeding it can have a detrimental effect to have visitors vying for your baby’s cuddles.
Give yourself a break if you don’t feel 100 per cent happy every moment. Emotions run high and ‘baby blues’ are to be expected a few days after birth, usually coinciding with your milk fully coming in (whether you breastfeed or not) and the exhaustion of 24-hour days taking its toll. If you are feeling very on edge, anxious, or detached and depressed by the time your six-week check comes around, please reach out to your health visitor or GP and ask what support there is available. There should be no stigma to mental health issues postnatally, so please don’t succumb to ‘I’m fine’ syndrome if you’re anything but.
Keep a close eye on your mental health for the first year of your baby’s life – and beyond. Each phase of motherhood brings different challenges; things get easier but something else always gets harder. Your sleep deprivation might accumulate and have an effect on your resilience. So be kind to yourself. Always come back to your breathing tools, and your awareness of the physical symptoms of stress and anxiety.
Now is NOT the time to be thinking about ‘getting your body back’. You have your body now and it’s incredible. Look what it created!
Clients often say to me that in the postnatal period they feel like their body isn’t their own. You might have loved your baby bump, and now your belly wobbles like a deflating water balloon. It’s hard to come to terms with, and you must be patient with yourself. Internally it feels like everything’s been swapped around, as if all the furniture in your house has been surreptitiously rearranged, and maybe a supporting wall has been knocked down. I will not hear of you wanting to get a at tummy or be back in your skinny jeans. This is about connecting to your body, re- establishing your breathing, your pelvic floor, your awesome abdominals that have housed your baby for the past nearly-year.
You might feel low or even despairing about your postnatal body. But please, this time of recovery is so crucial that you will reap the most rewards if you don’t rush it. Try to go against the societal grain and cultivate some compassion for your body, which has done so much miraculous work over the past year. IT TAKES TIME to recover your strength. And, like it or not, HIIT, ‘body shreds’ and Power Pramming are not the way forward initially, which can be a bitter pill to swallow if you were a gym bunny pre-children.
Be patient with yourself. Be the tortoise not the hare. It is really important to take the time to recover well and fully from childbirth, to help prevent problems with future pregnancies and in your pelvic floor for life.
My new book Pilates for Pregnancy is out in August – preorder it here!