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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ugh I just lost a whole post!!!! Ugh. [b]Well I basically realized that my MIL was not focused on my as a person at all. She was purely focused on her experience of becoming a grandmother and had a lot she really specifically wanted from that. So I became the person who might interfere with her wishes, rather than a woman who was really, really struggling.[/b] I am also feeling super triggered by this thread because I have tried to push it all down but it’s important to make sure I never do this to my kids or my spouses. I WANT to remember how much it sucked so I can do better.

And yes husband’s need to stand up for their wives. But MILs and mothers need to treat a woman who has just given birth with decency.[/quote]

I think the bolded is the common thread through a lot of these experiences.

I remember a friend phrasing it as "they just see you as a vessel." And that nails it. It's very dehumanizing in the postpartum period, when your body is quite literally still knitting itself back together.

I wound up getting full blown PPD when my "baby blues" didn't go away. I sometimes think it wouldn't have happened if I'd just felt a bit more supported and nurtured during that time. When I read about people whose family or culture really dotes on the new mother and supports her until she's truly recovered from childbirth (not after a few days but after like 6 weeks), I just think "that is how to do it." And it's also how you build close family bonds between the baby and the extended family, because instead of viewing the baby as a resources to be fought over and to demand access to, seeing the baby as what they are: a child who needs his or her mother, who needs the family to rally around and create a welcoming environment to grow up within.[/quote]

Yeah I agree. I really need to get off this thread but for OP: this experience was really shocking to me because it wasn’t any specific disagreement. It was just a change in relationship- I went from relatively easy going DIL to person who might interfere with me basically over night, and if I did something to trigger that I don’t to this day know what it was. It hurt a lot but now more than a decade later we have a new normal. She’s possibly still mad and seeing me as her opponent but I don’t really think so. I know now she really loved and idealized that newborn period and basically wanted to have it again. She doesn’t seem to miss dealing with tween shenanigans the same way and seems over all to think my kids are great so I can’t really be that bad. Anyway it might get better again, especially if you and DH are a united front. Good luck![/quote]

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