Reply to $100 race: Motherhood Edition

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We know that certain external supports will help women adjust to motherhood better: being close to family, having support from a spouse, having time off from work. Women can do their best to line these things up, but sometimes the timing of pregnancy or birth can make a person’s best laid plans fail. Maybe you have family close by, but they have to leave to care for an older relative right as your baby is born. Or somebody gets sick. Or a sibling needs their help more. Or maybe your spouse, otherwise supportive, ends up on some kind of project at work that is all-consuming, or ends up sick, or has an accident right as baby is born, etc…

I do think that some people who have all these supports in place and all goes like a well-oiled machine…don’t realize that they have had extraordinary luck and can be a little….self congratulatory? Like “yes, I chose to live near my parents so they could help me out…I did that.” Well, you had some good luck, too, because about a million things could’ve gone sideways.

Then there are the “just bad luck” things: having a highly sensitive/high needs baby, family income (I’m putting this in this category because there are too many factors that can contribute to this and there IS a good dose of luck involved with whether you have money or not), health of baby and mother.

PPD/PPA and other postpartum health and mood disorders are like compounding interest (in a negative way) for new moms. PPD/A in addition to lacking any (or more than one!) of the aforementioned supports is like falling into a 50 ft deep trench with your baby and trying to climb out. These disorders can make the early years of parenthood absolute hell—and aside from the aforementioned supports  (which are subject to disruption) there’s not much someone can do to try to predict and head off PPD/PPA before it happens. It’s a “I hope that doesn’t happen to me” situation. It comes for women when they have otherwise not had a history of mood disorders. And it is a particular salt in the wound that, culturally, women are expected to enjoy their babies and that treatments for PPD (therapy, exercise, sleep) can be limited by the baby’s very existence.

But this is life and life is not fair. Some people get cancer and some people don’t. Some people are good looking and some people are not. Some people are born into poor families and some are born into wealthy families. We don’t need to resent mothers who have had good luck because luck is random. But… motherhood is a formative experience for many. And if you’ve had a difficult time, it can feel very lonely. There are things we can do as a culture—and as a country—to help all women with this transition (but especially women who get the short end of the stick). But it’s simply not a priority in America. We have chosen not to support women in this time in their lives, and when you have a difficult experience like it sounds like maybe OP did, that feeling of being ignored is emphasized. [/quote]

This is one of the best posts I’ve read on DCUM. I hope a lot of people read it and take it to heart. [/quote]

+1
Thank you, first PP, for taking the time to write this out. [/quote]

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