Newborn Mothers Audiobook - First Chapter
Welcome to this extra special episode!
In this episode, I’m going to read you the first chapter of my best selling book Newborn Mothers - When a Baby is Born, So is a Mother.
The chapter introduces postpartum, the way we use language and the statistics of women experiencing postpartum depression. It details stories from Newborn Mothers, the duration of postpartum and the transformation to motherhood.
To get your copy of of the complete audiobook purchase the ebook or the printed book and you'll get instructions on how to download the entire audiobook FREE. Find the best price plus shipping here.
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About Julia
I am the founding director and lead educator at Newborn Mothers. I have worked in postnatal care for over 15 years.
I studied five different postnatal doula trainings before deciding to approach postpartum care from new perspectives. I researched anthropology, biology, evolution, cultural care and more to create a new paradigm in postpartum care. I have a background in community development and social justice, and value respectful and culturally sensitive postpartum care, and combine scientific evidence with traditional practices.
This book combines years of postpartum knowledge and experience into a short and easy read for busy and tired parents. The book reached number three on the Australian Amazon Bestseller, and you get to listen to the first chapter free right here on the podcast.
In this podcast we explore:
What are the key challenges faced by women on their journey to motherhood?
How do external barriers like discrimination at work and lack of paid parental leave affect new mothers?
What is the difference between postpartum and postnatal, and why do you choose to use postpartum?
How does the birth of a mother compare to the birth of a baby in terms of emotional and physical transformation?
Why is postpartum care essential for a mother's physical, mental, and spiritual health?
How can community support impact a mother’s postpartum experience and long-term well-being?
What are some common misconceptions about postpartum depression and mental health?
How does the term "newborn mother" reflect the ongoing transformation that occurs after childbirth?
What practical steps can mothers take to support their own postpartum recovery and transformation?
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Transcript
Julia Jones:
Newborn Mothers, when a Baby Is Born, so is a Mother written and narrated by me, Julia Jones. For more information, go to newborn mothers.com. Acknowledgement of Country. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where I write this book, the Wa nunga people, and pay my respects to their elders. Past, present, and future. I would like to extend this acknowledgement to the First Nations people of the world, wherever you may be reading this book,
Dedication This book is for you, newborn mother, written in appreciation of your efforts to raise healthy, happy children and create a better future in recognition of all the invisible work you do both internally and out in the world every day and every night. I thank you for taking time out of your full life to read this book. I promise to do my best to make good use of your time, and I hope this book will ultimately give you more time, more freedom, more peace, and more joy. I want you to enjoy every page of this book and walk away feeling inspired
About this book. The challenges we face as women on our journey to motherhood are complex and we 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 for motherhood. This is the 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. A note on postpartum, you say postnatal, I say postpartum. What's the difference anyway? Post simply means after partum and natal both mean birth while they're synonyms for the same period just after the baby is born. There is a subtle difference. Part refers to the one giving birth IE the mother and natal refers to the one being birthed, IE the baby. Postnatal is the term more commonly used here in Australia, whereas postpartum is more common in the United States.
This is one of the few times I jumped the fence with my language. I choose to use postpartum as it more accurately reflects my mission to support mothers and to remedy the gap I see in our culture of care. However, if you are more familiar with the term postnatal, it could be used interchangeably with the word postpartum throughout this book without altering the meaning. A note on gender. Unfortunately, the English language lacks gender neutral pronouns at this time. I love the word mother for its powerful feminine archetype and therefore refer to the birthing parent as she. For clarity, I refer to the baby as he. I acknowledge that some readers may not identify with these genders, and I hope you can still find value in this book. They smile just in time. Just when you are on the verge of listing your baby on eBay, free to a good home, a miraculous thing happens. He smiles, oh, joy of joys. The only thing more lovable than a sleeping baby is a smiling baby, but here's the catch for your baby to learn to smile, you need to learn to smile too. 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 but don't have the support they need. Marriages suffered during the transition to parenthood. As early as 1957, psychologist Edward LA Masters 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 consistently shown 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 in our lives, the start of something, I didn't know all those numbers when I started out as a postpartum doula, only 24 years old before I was even a mother myself, I came to postpartum work through my interest in Aveda traditional Indian medicine, and when I learned about Ayurvedic postpartum care, I knew this is 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 for 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 is
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. Brie told me 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. Samantha told me I am almost in tears. I'm a mother of a one and a half year old and a 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. Nara said, 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 2-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've 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 is certainly not your fault,
But these are the best days of your life. Anytime 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 an 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 acknowledgement of your emotions, your experience in that moment. It doesn't feel like it will pass at 3:00 AM There is no light at the end of the tunnel, and maybe you feel like that 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 and 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, requiring longer term emotional and practical support. Mothers commonly ask me how long postpartum lasts usually because they're 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. Postpartum does not equal depression.
Contrary to pop culture, use postpartum does not mean depression. Postpartum is the time after birth and postpartum depression is when depression is experienced during this time. Sadly, depression is the experience of so many women at this stage in their lives that the word postpartum has become synonymous with depression and perhaps with the stigma around mental health. Some people feel more comfortable avoiding the use of words like depression and anxiety and find it easier to say, I had postpartum or I've got postnatal. I'd like to see the word postpartum reclaimed to reflect its true meaning and opportunity for profound personal transformation. This transformation can be positive or negative, largely depending on the way your community supports or neglects newborn mothers, and once we have an understanding of the impact that this time can have on women and babies and families and the whole community, it becomes critical that we give mothers the support they need. During what my teacher Isha Oaks called a sacred window of time after birth, there is a sacred window of time, a time for complete rejuvenation of a woman's physical, mental, and spiritual health. A time for deep extended bonding with her newborn the first 42 days after birth, set the stage for her next 42 years, Isha Oaks.
What is a newborn mother? The process of becoming a mother is gradual, not abrupt, and I use the term newborn mother to reflect this state of profound transformation. No matter how long ago your baby was born or how many babies you have, you can feel like a newborn mother. Whether or not your baby is biologically related to you and whether or not you are actively mothering your child. If you can relate to this transformation, this idea of being born as a mother, then you are a newborn mother. Being a newborn mother lasts as long as you need to feel confident and strong. In general, I find that the more loving support a newborn mother receives, the more quickly she can become confident and strong.
A newborn mother is a recently born mother whose strength is asking for help. She acknowledges that the birth of a mother is more intense than childbirth and that she is as sensitive and vulnerable as her baby. Her heart is wide open and her needs are high. As she nourishes herself, she nourishes her children. If you are a newborn mother, then this book is for you. Transformation. Transformation is a buzzword these days, but there truly is no greater transformation than motherhood. Painful and powerful. It stretches you to your limits and beyond. Transformation involves rebirth, which also involves loss. There are deep internal shifts in ways of knowing and understanding the world around you. Maybe you are grieving as your old self is gone superseded. Maybe you feel as though you almost don't exist. Motherhood truly changes you from the inside out, and I mean this quite literally. Often when a pregnant woman thinks about having a baby, she thinks of herself plus a new baby. Rarely do we realise that there will be a new self too. A newborn baby and a newborn mother artist Sarah Walker described becoming a mother as discovering the existence of a strange new room in the house where you already live. It sounds poetic and it's true even on a very basic biological level among many other changes, the structure and even size of your brain alters when you have a baby.
