A life-changing gift for Newborn Mothers
Looking for the perfect gift for a pregnant friend or family member?
You planned for the birth, then realised those books and classes did nothing to prepare you for the rest of your life as a mother.
Whether you are pregnant for the first time or your babies are growing up too fast, this book is your invitation to join a gentle, internal revolution in your heart and in your home.
This book is a sanctuary for your birth as a mother.
Here is an abridged extract from the bestselling book Newborn Mothers - When a Baby is Born so is a Mother. To read the whole book click here to find the best price plus shipping.
About this book
The challenges we face as women on our journey to motherhood are complex and require solutions at many levels. There are external barriers to our motherhood happiness, like discrimination at work, gender bias in medicine and research, expensive and poor-quality childcare and lack of paid parental leave. These changes need to happen at a more global level.
That’s not what this book is about.
Newborn Mothers is for mothers who want to take action on an individual level in their own lives. As you expand your life in peace and joy, you are inviting other mothers to join you in peace and joy too. Together, we can create a new blueprint for motherhood.
This is a manifesto for an internal revolution.
A revolution in your heart and in your home.
This book is your invitation to join the renaissance of a more joyful, peaceful transformation to motherhood.
The numbers
One in seven women in Australia will experience postnatal depression. That’s 48,400 women — enough to fill 116 jumbo jets — every year.
More than two-thirds of mothers do not meet their own breastfeeding goals. These are not goals set by the government or the World Health Organisation. These are goals set by the kind and generous mothers themselves, who want to feed their baby, and don’t have the support they need.
Marriages suffer during the transition to parenthood. As early as 1957, psychologist Edward LeMasters published a paper claiming that becoming parents caused a marriage crisis. Back then, he was ridiculed. This was supposed to be the happiest time of your life! But decades of research since have shown consistently that conflict increases dramatically in marriages once a baby is introduced.
And the leading cause of maternal death in Australia is suicide.
This is not a problem unique to one part of the world. You can research the numbers in almost any industrialised nation and they will paint a similar picture.
Women are suffering. Babies are suffering. Marriages are suffering. Something has gone terribly wrong, if this suffering is how we are experiencing what should be the most joyful time of our lives.
The start of something
I didn’t know all those numbers when I started out as a postpartum doula at only 24 years old, before I was even a mother myself. I came to postpartum work through my interest in Ayurveda, traditional Indian medicine. When I learned about Ayurvedic postpartum care, I knew this was my calling in life.
Over the next few years I studied five different postpartum doula trainings, and while they were all excellent in their own ways, none of them really got much deeper than practical information about baby care and breastfeeding. None of them really addressed how to support Newborn Mothers through this major life transition, this rite of passage.
None of them acknowledged the deep and profound changes going on inside a Newborn Mother’s brain, let alone how we — as professionals — could support them through it.
Although I started my doula business, providing massage and meals for Newborn Mothers, I knew there was something more. When I had my own first baby, the need to find answers became even more urgent.
I started exploring postpartum from different perspectives including through my own background in social justice and community development. I dove into newer areas of study to me, from anthropology to evolution, traditional medicine to brain science, and eventually pulled together a radically new paradigm for postpartum transformation.
Now, over a decade later, my work has evolved. I’ve written books and created online courses, available worldwide, for Newborn Mothers and the professionals who work with them.
The faces
When I first began working as a postpartum doula, I received many emails. Even though I worked, at that time, only in my local area, these emails came from exhausted and overwhelmed mothers all over the world.
These are the faces behind the numbers: the individual Newborn Mothers who are suffering; the stories that the statistics don’t quite show.
“I have three children under four years old, and have certainly gone through my share of desperation, depression, and feelings of total failure. Motherhood has rocked my world.”
“I am almost in tears. I am a mother of a one-and-a-half- year-old and three-and-a-half-year-old. My transition into parenthood for my first baby was extremely difficult. Birth was healthy, baby was healthy, breastfeeding was normal... but it was still the hardest transition in my entire life.”
“I have felt so saddened that with both of my babies the circumstances of my life and conditioning of my culture prevented me from fully experiencing that sacred window of time in the way that I wanted. I feel so exhausted and stretched thin caring for my five-month-old and my two-year- old. I have found myself feeling resentful when my little ones won’t nap, or my husband wants to be close.”
Hearing so many women’s stories, I began to see patterns. Many mothers found ways to excuse their suffering, almost apologising that they were not enjoying motherhood, as though the problem was unique to them.
It was hard for me because of colic.
Things would have been different if I hadn’t had a traumatic birth.
If only my family lived closer...
I shouldn’t have had my babies so close in age.
There are a million reasons why it might be intense for you — often more intense than giving birth — but none of them is entirely true. The truth is it’s intense for nearly all of us. And surely this points to some broader cultural systemic problem making mothers feel desperate and depleted.
It’s not your individual circumstances.
And it’s not any shortcomings as a mother.
And it’s certainly not your fault.
“But these are the best days of your life”
Any time you complain about any aspect of mothering, you are likely to be told to enjoy it, because “they grow up so fast”.
Retrospectively, it seems like a blink of the eye. But while the years may fly by, the days are long and the nights are longer. Maybe living in the moment works for some mothers, but often when you express your struggle, what you’re really looking for is acknowledgment of your emotions, your experience.
In that moment, it doesn’t feel like it will pass. At 3am, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe you feel like the darkness goes on forever.
“But these are the best days of your life” is society’s narrowly defined script for mothers, and it prevents us from agitating, from making change.
Instead, it feels more like A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
As a parent, the highs are higher than you ever experienced before you had children. But the lows are also lower. The happiness scale got rearranged. There are more extremes of emotion; nothing is steady or familiar.
There is more boredom, loneliness, suffering. But there is also more joy, peace and bliss.
Your baby enjoying his first heart-melting giggle. Watching your partner soothe your baby to sleep. Savouring that rare hot cup of tea, alone.
Those transcendent moments are what keep you going, refuel you until the next pit stop, whenever the hell that will be.
How long is postpartum?
Postpartum is generally recognised as the six weeks after birth. Medicine, science, and traditional cultures around the world acknowledge that this is a unique time in a woman’s life requiring specific care.
But since postpartum literally means after birth, you could consider a woman postpartum for the rest of her life! I believe we need to expand our understanding of postpartum and prefer to see it in stages, unfolding in layers over time and requiring longer term emotional and practical support.
Mothers commonly ask me how long postpartum lasts, usually because they are convinced they should have ‘bounced back’ by now. I’ll let you in on something right from the start... there is no ‘back to normal’ after you have a baby, because becoming a mother alters the very structure of your brain and you will never be the same person you once were.
This can be a great opportunity indeed! You are being invited to reinvent yourself, because when a baby is born, so is a mother.
And let me tell you the truth... the birth of a mother can be more intense than childbirth.
