Reply to Is there any expectation on a family member who stays “postpartum”?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It is absolutely rude and I would also be pissed. If you visit a new mom within the first month (minimum) after birth, you should be helping in some way and you should treat the new mom with some deference as she's recovering from pregnancy and childbirth. Just from a practical standpoint, the new mom is dealing with massive hormonal swings that can make her emotionally tender and you should be thoughtful of that. But especially if it's a first child, she's also undergoing an identity change and deserves some extra TLC. So does the new dad. If you don't want to sign up for that and want it just to be about YOU meeting the baby... you can do that from a hotel via short visits. If you can't afford that, you can wait until the baby is older. Sorry.

I traveled TO my ILs home when my DC was 3 weeks old after much pressure was placed on me to do so because my FIL was ill and could not travel. I didn't feel ready to travel and was still bleeding. It was a 7 hour car ride both ways. I was not even offered hospitality while we were visiting -- they planned a party for a bunch of people to come over against my express wishes that it just be ILs and my husband's siblings and that I was not ready to see other people and didn't want to be passing my newborn around to a bunch of people I barely knew. No one except my DH made any effort to take care of my physically (like even just checking to see if I needed a drink while breastfeeding) and my MIL complained repeatedly that I was "hogging" the baby.

I repaired my relationship with them but never truly forgot this. I still think of them as fundamentally selfish people.[/quote]

Omg I blacked out that my MIL pressured us into driving 4 hours to stay with them for the weekend when I was about 4 weeks post partum , for a cousins baby shower. I don’t know why we agreed to go!!!! Probably just totally clueless , as new parents, and not yet used to putting our foot down for our new nuclear family. (Because before the baby of course we’d have gone up for the shower- it didn’t cross my mind that after the baby I’m totally free to say no, I’m post partum and no). It was awful. I was so sleep deprived and the drive was still hard on my C section scar. I felt like I had to get dressed and be awake on time and be pleasant with relatives when I was hormonal and miserable and exhausted. Plus we were sleeping on a sofa bed which is what we always slept on when we visited and it hadn’t  even occurred to me that this was horrid to do to new parents and their newborn.

I remember my MIL being like “I’m sure it was so hard for you to come but I really appreciate it” and that’s when I realized, I may be clueless about adjusting to being a new mom but she isn’t clueless at ALL and knew exactly what she was asking of me. This is the same MIL who came to stay with us and sat around holding the baby while I cooked and cleaned, announcing “I just want to hold the baby and not cook or clean”. Man I shouldn’t have read your post because the anger is coming flooding back at remembering this!!![/quote]

Reading these stories feels radicalizing.

One of the things that really hits me is how vulnerable new mothers are. It's like being an injured animal, in fact it makes me think of how animals give birth and how pregnant mammals will seek out a "safe place" to hole up specifically because they know that if a predator were to find them during this time, they and their infants would be defenseless. So that's why cats are always giving birth under porches where it's really hard to get them out -- that's the whole freaking point.

But people act like a woman giving birth (and human childbirth is much more harrowing than it is for a lot of other animals because of the size of the human head and the fact that humans walk upright) is like nothing, not even worth acknowledging, and we should all be popping out of the hospital like Princess Kate in new outfits with smiles on our face, ready to deliver our brand new babies to our MIL and pose for photos within hours.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that. Burn it all down.[/quote]

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