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Lorraine
EricaYou’ve just given birth and it’s supposed to be all roses and violets, right? The nursery is decked out, the breast pump is ready, and you’re supposed to settle gently into the next phase of your life. But you feel more like all hell just broke loose, and your whole life changed overnight. How are you supposed to know what to expect when your life and body no longer remotely resemble the ways they used to be?
Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. As an OB/GYN physician, author of What’s Up Down There? Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist If She Was Your Best Friend, and a mother, I’ve been there, done that. When my little one was born, I had those moments of panic when you wonder whether there’s any chance you can just push that little sucker back in there and keep your old life. And yes, it’s perfectly normal to feel that way.
What else is normal when you’re a postpartum mother? And what’s not? When I solicited the anonymous questions women would only ask their gynecologist if she was their BFF, the postpartum questions ran the gamut. But most of the time, the answer was “Yes, you’re normal. And no – you’re not going crazy.”
How do you know the difference? Here are some tips!
What’s Normal
1. It’s normal if it takes you months to get back to your pre-baby weight (or if you never quite get there). Remember, it took you nine months to gain the weight. It may take you nine more to lose it. If you’re still significantly heavier than is healthy for you, you’ll need to work harder after the nine-month mark by watching what you eat and exercising. Most importantly, though, you must love yourself just as you are, and appreciate the miracle you’ve helped bring into being.
2. It’s normal if your body is never quite the same. Ignore all the celebrity “Body After Baby” articles. Remember, these people have personal trainers, private chefs, plastic surgeons, and great genes. If you’re anything like me, your body will never go back to exactly how it was before. Varicose veins, saggy boobs, a flabby gut, stretch marks, and other evidence that you are a mother may change how your body looks and feels. And that’s okay.
3. If your doctor gives you the go-ahead to have sex at your six-week postpartum visit, it’s normal if sex hurts for a while. When you’re nursing, your estrogen levels may plummet, leaving your vagina thin and fragile, much like the vagina of a menopausal woman. While this is reversible, it can make sex uncomfortable. But don’t worry, it’s not permanent, and lubricants or vaginal estrogen can help.
4. Feelings of doubt, regret, and inadequacy are completely normal after you’ve given birth. We think we’re supposed to instantly fill with abundant maternal love and transform overnight into SuperMom. But most of us don’t. In time, you will realize that you’re good enough, just the way you are, and the maternal instincts will catch up.
5. It’s normal to feel teary and emotional after giving birth. 40-80% of women experience some “baby blues,” temporary mood changes that include wild swings from elation to mournful sadness, testy irritability, overwhelming anxiety, feelings of doubt and regret, and fits of weeping. These feelings typically peak in the first two weeks after giving birth and tend to improve after that.
6. If you leak urine for the first few weeks after childbirth, don’t worry – you probably won’t need the Depends quite yet. Short-term incontinence is common as nerves and other tissues recover from being stretched during childbirth. Start doing Kegel exercises and keep it up for the rest of your life.
7. It’s normal if you still look pregnant a week after giving birth, so don’t get too upset when people ask you when the baby is due. The uterus takes six weeks to shrink back down to normal, so don’t freak out.
8. It’s normal if your vagina feels a bit loosey-goosey. You may have just pushed a watermelon through a tailpipe, so don’t be surprised if things feel different. You may even notice that air gets trapped in there, causing sounds similar to passing gas (commonly known as “Queefs” or “varts”). It’s totally normal – and okay to giggle!
9. If your sex life completely disappears after you have a baby, you’re perfectly normal. The combination of hormonal shifts, fatigue, life stress, and changing family dynamics makes some women feel as if they wouldn’t care if they never had sex again. Don’t worry and reassure your partner. This situation is usually temporary.
10. It’s normal to feel let down if your baby isn’t the sex you dreamed s/he would be. It even has a name – “gender disappointment.” For women in the United States, gender disappointment occurs most often when a boy is born, which is only natural. Feelings aren’t right or wrong – they just ARE. Let yourself feel your feelings and talk to a therapist if need be.
What’s Not (Translation: When to Seek Help)
1. While sex may hurt for a while, it’s not normal if you still have pain after you stop breast-feeding. You could have scar tissue, a hormonal imbalance, vaginismus (painful contraction of the vaginal muscles) or vulvar vestibulitis (inflammation of the opening to the vagina).
2. It’s not normal to let your regrets, fears, and doubts about motherhood to cause you to neglect or harm your child or yourself. Seek out support from others and make sure you tell your doctor.
3. It’s not normal to feel chronically tearful, hopeless, helpless, worthless, unable to experience pleasure, or depressed. Sleep problems, lack of appetite (or sometimes the opposite), extreme fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and thoughts of hurting yourself, your baby, or anyone else could signal postpartum depression and needs prompt attention. If you feel this way, please, ask for help.
4. If you’re still leaking urine months out, you may have more serious damage to your pelvic floor. It may improve when you stop nursing, and Kegel exercises may also help. But if it persists, see your doctor.
5. It’s not normal if things are falling out of your vagina. Pelvic prolapse, during which the bladder, vaginal walls, uterus, or rectum pooch out of the vagina as a sort of hernia, can follow childbirth. As with incontinence, Kegel exercises can help. But talk to your doctor.
6. If years have gone by and your sex drive never returned, you may want to seek help. While decreased libido often accompanies childbirth, it should come back in time.
7. If your baby is sleeping through the night, but you’re still feeling like you’ve lost your mojo – you wake up tired, your energy drags throughout the day, you’re not sleeping well, your sex drive sucks, your mood swings, and you simply don’t feel vital – get help. Your thyroid, adrenal, or sex hormones may have gotten whacked out of kilter by the pregnancy. Even if you’re not sick, don’t settle for just being well. Strive to be vital. See an integrative medicine doctor (such as the ones at the Owning Pink Center, where I work) who is skilled at handling this kind of complex hormone balancing. You deserve it.
Most of all, give yourself permission to be honest with yourself about where you are right in this moment. Don’t give in to the pressure to pretend that you’re something you’re not. If you’re all aglow about having a new baby and everything is hunky dory in your body, your relationships, your job, and your life, more power to you, girlfriend!
If it’s a time of transition you find sometimes (or often) painful, own it. It’s okay either way, and pretending only makes things worse. Seek out the support of other authentic Mommies who would rather be real than glaze things over, wearing masks and pretending to be something they’re not.
No matter what, being a mother will help you grow, change you, stretch your limits, and bring unprecedented love (and pain) into your life. It’s the full gamut of experience, the whole shebang. And whether or not you signed up for it, it’s now yours.
You can be a Mommy with Mojo, even (or should I say especially) when things aren’t perfect. Be all you all the time, and trust that this is exactly perfect.
Linking with you arm in arm,
Lissa Rankin, MD
Lissa Rankin is a gynecologist, a professional artist, an author, a mother, and founder of Owning Pink, a website and a series of women’s workshops committed to empowering women to reclaim their health, their girlytude, and their mojo.
Suppose you had a wise, warm, funny best friend – who just happened to be a gynecologist. You’re out with the girls, sipping some cocktails, the conversation turns to sex, and then to girly parts. One by one, you start asking her all the questions you’ve secretly wondered about – and discover that you all have a lot in common.
Well, if you were to write those questions down, you’d have Dr. Lissa Rankin’s book What’s Up Down There? Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist If She Was Your Best Friend (St. Martin’s Press). Order now, visit Lissa on her nationwide tour this fall, and visit OwningPink.com to get – and keep – your mojo.
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Read Our Archived Guest Blog Posts
Drs. Grace Lo & John Korn with Oral Hygiene Survival Guide for Baby’s First Year **You still have until Sept 30th to enter to win a pack of Tooth Tissues**
Laura Grady with See You at the Movies
Stacey Curnow with Thanks for the Memories
Sarah Deveau with Turn Children’s Clutter into Cash
Jaime Lewis with I’m Not That Mom
