From patchwork career to postpartum care professional

This reflection is by Antonia Anderson, as part of the series: How the Newborn Mothers team became postpartum professionals.

Read more: The journey to becoming a postpartum professional by Julia Jones and Expanding beyond birth work into postpartum care by Dusk Liney

When people think of postpartum care, two things come to mind: “mothers” and “babies.” Maybe you have a mental image of rocking a grizzling newborn to sleep or preparing a hot meal for a tired-eyed new mum.

But there are so many other important aspects to providing high-quality postpartum care.

As someone with a patchwork career who flitted from job to job for over a decade before getting pregnant, it’s fascinating to reflect on how many of my skills carried over from previous jobs into postpartum care work.

In this blog post, I share how my diverse skillset was precisely what I needed to run a postpartum support business. 

My first day as a mother

“Do we leave the frilly bits out or tuck them in?” my partner wondered aloud.

I was a few hours postpartum, still high from birthing hormones. He was tackling nappy change #1 (out of approximately eleventy billion to follow).

“Hmm, there don’t seem to be instructions on the packet…”

I had never done this before, either. “Let’s google it!” It turned out that the frilly bit goes on the outside.

This should give you a picture of how clueless we were as parents. I had held babies before but never cooed over them or felt mushy. Before I gave birth, parenting was like a foreign land to me.

Here are a few more examples:

• I assumed that my body would recover from birth within a few hours instead of weeks.

• I genuinely thought breastmilk spurted out of a large single opening in the nipple like a fire hose instead of through many small ducts.

• And I had NO IDEA that there would be so much to learn.

My life before motherhood

I’ve never followed a traditional career path with an upward trajectory.

After graduating from university I flitted between jobs. I worked as a graphic designer and web developer for a few years. Then I went back to school for my master’s degree, worked as a university professor for a while, and somehow ended up in Nepal teaching English and doing freelance copywriting and editing. I also had a couple of marketing and sales jobs along the way, as well as providing disability support and elder care.

You’ll notice that none of these jobs have anything to do with looking after babies. I had no interest in babies and was never drawn to work in childcare or kindergarten. In fact, I can’t even remember why I wanted to have my own babies! It probably seemed like a good idea at the time…

My husband and I met in Kathmandu. We travelled around for the first couple of years of our partnership, moving between the USA, Australia, India and Nepal. I continued doing freelance writing as my primary income source, and my husband provided technical support at a local Buddhist university. 

Eventually, we ended up back in Australia with a much-wanted baby on the way and no plan whatsoever for what our life might look like once we were a family of 3!

Mastering mothering skills

Six months after having my first baby, my baby care skills had improved exponentially, and I could laugh at how clueless I’d been. I could open a stroller with a flick of a single wrist. I could change a nappy in the dark while breastfeeding. I could even rock the car back and forth at a red light to prevent my snoozing baby from waking up and crying!

While these new mum skills made my life easier, they didn’t bring me the sense of achievement and purpose my previous roles had. I was very eager to get back to work and assumed that at some point, I’d effortlessly pick up a freelance writing job and step back into my former identity.

Trying (and failing) to step back into a previous work role

Finally, the baby was asleep! 

I opened my laptop and sat down to write an article, just like I’d done so many times before.

But my brain had melted.

I had nothing left in the tank. I had zero focus.

And I was so crippled by sleep deprivation that I could not work out a plan for getting my writing mojo back.

That was my life for the next couple of years. I was drowning in a chaotic brain soup of mum life, unable to transfer my focus to any of my previous freelance roles or dredge up the energy to pursue a different career.

It had never occurred to me that the work of parenting would drain my capacity to do other work. Maybe that’s because before becoming a mother, I never thought of parenting as work…

Exploring motherhood as work

At first, I blamed myself for struggling with motherhood. I thought I was the only one who was finding it hard.

I had only just moved to Australia a couple of months before giving birth—I had no friends, no support network, and I was completely unfamiliar with the health care system, not to mention any resources for new parents. I was socially isolated, had a history of mental health problems, and was chronically sleep-deprived to the point that I was experiencing auditory hallucinations.

I desperately needed a postpartum care professional to help me make sense of it all and find a pathway out of the jungle, but I didn’t even know such people existed.

Later, as I started to meet other new mothers and make friends, I discovered that many of them, too, felt isolated and unsupported. Even mums with strong social networks described the utter exhaustion they felt, crippling physical depletion and an unshakeable dullness of spirit. Their love for their children did not bring back the shine to life; it only made them feel like bad parents for not “enjoying every moment.”

I identified with their struggles, especially when my second baby arrived, and I realised that I was embarking on the same downward spiral as before despite being an experienced parent by this time.

It must have been a gradual dawning rather than a lightbulb moment. But at some point, I stopped blaming myself for not being “good enough.” The truth was, and always had been, that mothering was hard work and required support.

No wonder mothers all around me were so depleted. They hadn’t failed. Their community had failed them.

Starting a postpartum support business

This realisation lit a fire under me. I wished there was some kind of service to support new mothers. I started talking to people about it. “This should be a thing! Why isn’t this a thing?”

Eventually, my friends and husband got tired of hearing me talk about it and encouraged me to do it myself.

When my children were aged two and four, I felt compelled to put my ideas into action. I wanted to help people avoid the difficulties I had experienced, and I desperately wanted to feel I was doing something purposeful. Even though I had mastered the mechanics of parenting, I didn’t find it personally fulfilling. I adored my children, but my daily grind was both boring and exhausting.

I naively thought I was the first person to come up with this idea, and I was delighted to find that I wasn’t. I learned about postpartum doulas for the first time. I read about postpartum traditions from other cultures. I came across people who felt the same passion and determination as I did to help new mothers.

The most memorable one of these people is Julia! In my research, I came across her cookbook, Nourishing Newborn Mothers. It caught my imagination immediately, and I felt drawn to Newborn Mothers in a way I can’t explain. I immediately enrolled in what was then known as the Newborn Mothers Collective and later Julia’s business mastermind. It was amazing to be surrounded by people who believed in postpartum care.

The first couple years of my business are honestly a blur. I was still coping with the long-term effects of chronic sleep deprivation and struggling with my mental health. However, I felt inspired to continue, as supporting new mothers gave me a feeling of purpose and contentment that mothering my children did not.

At that time, I was one of a tiny handful of people providing postpartum support in Canberra. I’m happy to say that this situation has changed. There are now quite a few postpartum care providers, and this is improving every year.

Because I was one of the first postpartum doulas in my local area, I did a lot of groundwork, educating parents and explaining the need for postpartum care. I ran monthly workshops for expectant parents and professional development workshops for healthcare organisations and not-for-profits. I connected with birth doulas, massage therapists, yoga teachers, childbirth educators and anyone working in similar fields.

It was an exciting time, and I loved getting enquiries from potential clients who had seen me at a workshop or heard about me from another professional. I loved receiving heartfelt messages from my clients, letting me know how much my support had helped them.

I especially enjoyed working with second-time mums who had struggled the first time around and giving them the postpartum experience they’d missed out on and deserved.

How my life before motherhood prepared me to run a postpartum care business

It’s strange that someone like me, who had zero interest in mothers and babies, somehow ended up here. If you’d asked me fifteen years ago if I had the necessary knowledge and skills to provide postpartum care, I would have cackled in disbelief.

But on reflection, every one of my previous jobs provided me with skills I’ve used in my postpartum support business.

• Website development - I created, maintained, and upgraded my website at a fraction of the cost of paying someone else.

• Graphic design - I designed all my marketing materials. As a bonus, when COVID stopped me from doing face-to-face client work, I designed and created postpartum business resources, which I sold on my website to professionals worldwide.

• Writing - I wrote articles for publication in parenting and baby magazines. Potential clients would read the articles and reach out to me. I could also write blog posts for my website very quickly as I was used to working efficiently.

• Sales and marketing - these skills get used more than you might think in support work! I noticed that my previous sales experience helped me avoid taking it personally if people didn’t want to hire me. I also knew how to track my results and see where to improve my marketing efforts.

• Public speaking - I already had lots of experience speaking in front of groups (as a classroom professor and as a writer performing my own work). That didn’t mean I didn’t ever feel nervous about doing it, but it gave me confidence that I could do it anyway.

• Teaching - My many years of experience in adult education gave me all the skills I needed to guide anxious new parents through the early postpartum months or prepare them beforehand with workshops and classes. My knack for distilling swathes of dense information down to the essential parts was very handy.

I’m sure there are more skills I drew on that I can’t even identify because they come so naturally to me. On top of this, motherhood gave me much of the training I needed. Finally, doing the Newborn Mothers course gave me the explicit knowledge and skills to become a postpartum professional and run a small business.

I’m not saying you need these exact skills or that they’re necessary for postpartum work. They just happened to be the ones I had in my toolbox. There is no single cookie-cutter skillset needed for a postpartum care professional. Yes, a passion for supporting parents and changing our culture’s postpartum paradigm is a must, but there are no criteria beyond that!

I bet you also have plenty of experience that converts surprisingly well to running a postpartum care business.

And the thing is, most postpartum professionals start their own business, so you can use the skills you have to create a business that is easy for you to run. Do you have experience writing? Start a blog! Do you love running events? Offer mothers circles or retreats! Do you have a background in education? Create educational classes or resources! You can work in homes, online, in groups, or one-on-one. When you are the boss, you can contribute to the postpartum renaissance in a way that suits your skills and strengths.

Postpartum care sounds like a narrow niche—and it is! Postpartum is a unique chapter along a person’s lifespan with no counterpart. The job of caring for people who are experiencing this enormous transition is equally distinctive.

So, it may feel daunting to imagine building an entirely new skillset for this role, but I’d be willing to hazard a guess that you already have 90% of the skills you need for successful postpartum work.

Are you ready to re-imagine yourself as a postpartum professional?

To become a postpartum professional, check out our online, worldwide training. Postpartum Education and Care Professional training is the most comprehensive course for professionals in postpartum care in the world. The training provides world-leading and evidence-based postnatal education teaching professionals how to provide practical, emotional, and informational support to new families.

Newborn Mothers founder Julia Jones has 15 years of experience in the industry and has trained nearly 2000 postpartum professionals in 60+ countries. The training is developed in collaboration with three other educators each with decades of experience in their focus area of postpartum support.