This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
The Postpartum Experience
The fifth trimester is… it’s actually a term that I came up with after experiencing my own. So you guys know what the first through third trimesters are. That’s pregnancy. The fourth trimester is something I experienced when I had a newborn baby. I didn’t know about it until then, but it’s this idea that newborn babies do better when they feel like you’re recreating the womb for them because humans are actually born a whole trimester too early, so you shush them and you swaddle them tightly and you make them feel cozy as if they’re still inside you.
And I remember hearing about that and the advice I got was, “Just get to the end of 12 weeks and your baby will wake up to the world and be so happy and engage and give you something back and get on a schedule.” And I thought, “Well, God, that’s exactly when I go back to work.” And so I realized that there’s actually an additional trimester. It’s a fifth trimester, and it’s when the working mom is born.
So when I did the research for my book, I interviewed and surveyed new parents. The women I interviewed told me that they felt better, kind of more back to normal physically at about the 5.5 month mark after having a baby. And I was careful to define that as not necessarily back in your pre-pregnancy jeans. That’s not what I meant. It’s really more about feeling comfortable in your skin.
And then these were women who had kind of all approaches to career and motherhood. There were single moms, adoptive moms. There were mothers who worked an hourly wage working jobs and more professional jobs, really as broad a spectrum of approaches as I could find. And so these women reported feeling back to normal physically after 5.5 months. Emotionally, it was actually a little longer. It was 5.8 months.
Now, of course, I haven’t even talked about sleep deprivation, but the women I surveyed were, on average… I asked them when they were sleeping through the night. So they reported sleeping through the night, moms’ sleep, not babies’ sleep, but moms’ sleep of a steady seven hours straight at about the seven month mark, on average. We know that most American women are back at work. The average, I think, is about 8.5 weeks. So they’ve been back at work months and months without sleeping.
One of the sleep scientists I talked to who’s fascinating said that she tells new mothers that if they’re coming back to work, if you have two bad nights of sleep in a row and you show up at work, you’re showing up at work at 9:00 AM as impaired as if you were drunk. And these are my words, not hers. This is not your roommate in college who you can roll on her side and give her a glass of water and have her sleep it off. No, you have to work your day at work and then, by the way, go home to your second shift at night and keep a human baby alive and do a good job at that too.
So it’s a lot which is really interesting because when you look at the science of what a good parental leave looks like, it is six months of paid leave. After six months of paid leave, a mother is much less likely to suffer from a postpartum mood disorder or anxiety disorder. That is also six months of paid leave is the protective amount for babies’ health. Babies who have had mothers who have been able to take that amount of leave paid are much more likely to be vaccinated on time, are actually less likely to have ear infections and respiratory infections.
It’s basically all of the science shows that it takes at least six months to start really feeling normal again, and that’s because you are hormonal. Your body has been through the most enormous change any body could go through, and yet, you are expected to be back on the job just the way you were before. You may even come back feeling like people have covered for you and therefore, you need to double down on working harder. Emotionally, women want their work to have more meaning in this moment than it has before which the job may not have changed, but your internal compromises that you’re making for being there do. And so you want to see more value in it. And it’s a very loaded time.
Conquering Mom Guilt
Mom guilt is, unfortunately, kind of a universal. A lot of women blame themselves, first and foremost, when life doesn’t feel in balance or in check in terms of managing career and family and home. And it’s really, really… it’s not reasonable to expect that anybody would have that imbalance, given the lack of respect that our country shows for new parenthood.
Now, that said, I don’t mean to blame the victim, but it is something that we can kind of control. So there were some mothers who felt really guilty leaving their baby to go back to work and leaving the baby in someone’s care who they felt like maybe was not quite as capable as they would be themselves of loving the baby. There were other people who actually felt guilty because they loved being back at work.
And I experienced both of those feelings when I went back to work after having my first son and my second. My husband was in his medical residency. There was no real choice for me to make about the income that our family needed. And so I didn’t feel terribly conflicted about going back to work. It just felt like it was too soon and it was not in the most supportive cultural circumstances that I would have wanted.
So what I say to women is, first of all, guilt implies that you’ve made some sort of wrong decision, that there’s some other better, less guilty working mom out there who you should aspire to be like, but erase that idea because every single mother out there will admit to feeling guilt in one way or another, right? So if it is just a lowest common denominator, let’s just erase it and treat for whatever feeling we actually have. If you feel regretful, if you feel conflicted, if you feel overwhelmed, if you feel unsupported, let’s solve that problem rather than writing something off universally as mom guilt.
You don’t really hear people talk about dad guilt, and I would actually really welcome that conversation. And I think dads would actually quite like to be a part of that conversation. It feels kind of anti-feminist, actually, to just call all of this conflict that we have about this transition back to work after baby to call it mom guilt. And it’s something that’s perpetuated. If you don’t acknowledge sort of the reasons for why you’re having these feelings early on, they snowball, and they can make it harder and harder for women to stay in the workplace. We know that 30% of professional women drop out of the workplace within a year of having a baby.
I want us to live in a post-mom guilt world. If every single mom talks about feeling guilty and it means different things to every single mom, there is no other better mom to compare yourself to. Nobody’s doing a better job than you are, and you’re doing nothing wrong. If you say you feel guilty, it implies that you’ve done something wrong. No, you were doing the very best you can in the circumstances that you were living in to be a good mom providing for your child.