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Sophie Messager

Tag: rest

  • Why I want to change the nature of postnatal support

    Why I want to change the nature of postnatal support

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    Earlier this week I wrote a blog that’s been playing on my mind for many years. It’s called “why I wish I had hired a postnatal doula“

    In this blog I explain how challenging I found new motherhood, how lonely and upset I felt through those early weeks and how I longed for some support but failed to reach out because of a mix of shame for not loving every minute of being a mother, and feeling like I couldn’t justify the expense.

    As a doula, I witness the same challenge in new mothers. Sometimes I do not even know they are struggling until weeks later, because, whilst they sit in the same pit of discomfort and shame as I did, thinking they are the only one that struggle, they don’t usually reach out for help do they?

    I have written before about the topic of making a postnatal recovery plan, and about what new mothers really need, and you’re not meant to be doing this on your own (hint: it’s not flowers or stuffed bears).

    The wisdom in traditional postpartum practises around the world is very simple really, it boils down to 4 main elements of support for the mother:

    • Rest (someone takes care of the chores)
    • Food ( someone takes care of cooking good, nutritious meals)
    • Social support (the new mother is never alone at home with a baby)
    • Bodywork (someone massages the new mother, along with wrapping her hips/abdomen)

    I have a strong urge to write more about this, to spread the word further, I have a list of blogs as long as my arm about this topic, and in fact I now am thinking I need to write a book, or possibly more than one book, about this topic. Something easy to share, I might start with an ebook, like the one I have already written about rebozo techniques.

    I’m a knowledge junkie, so since I started learning about some postpartum practises, I’ve asked everybody I’ve met about the traditional practices from their country, and you know what, every continent in the world has some form of specific nurturing, specific foods, and bodywork and wrapping.

    After all, you’ve not only grown and birthed a whole new human, your body has accommodated this through tremendous changes.

    During pregnancy, the uterus grows from the size of a pear to the size of a watermelon (pushing abdominal organs out of the way, changing the shape of your muscles, ligaments and spine as it does so), then back again after birth.

    It seems crazy to me that nobody makes sure that all the organs, muscles, joints and ligaments have safely returned where they belong.

    I bake a groaning cake for all mothers I support, and sometimes make a traditional Chinese chicken soup too (my husband is from Hong Kong, and there is still a very strong postpartum nurturing culture there)

    Learning to massage and wrap new mothers had lead me onto a journey of discovery about postpartum practises, got me to work closely with an osteopath, create a new type of massage, and develop my skills in an apprenticeship manner. The two combined led me to develop a deep practical knowledge of what happens to women bodies after birth.

    This has fuelled a fire that makes me want to shout from the rooftops that what we get in the Western world just isn’t good enough, and want to work hard to change that.

    If this resonates with you, and you would like to learn some of these nurturing skills, I am running some Rebozo and Postnatal Recovery Massage courses in July-see https://sophiemessager.com/workshops-birth-professionals/

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  • January : a time for rest and reflection

    January : a time for rest and reflection

    I’ve just had a lovely catchup with fellow doula Hazel Acland Tree with whom I have fortnightly accountability calls (I can’t recommend doing this enough by the way).

    During our call I expressed how frustrated I am with my desire to go forward and make plans now that we’re at the beginning of the year, and the energy I’m feeling instead, which is quite inward and not at all forward at the moment.

    Whilst chatting to Hazel I had a realisation that the energies right now, during the winter time, are indeed inwards, and that it doesn’t make sense that we are expected to make our yearly plans in January. We ought to make them in spring or summer, when our energy is high, and outwards looking.

    When I was a biology student, I went to a lecture on chronobiology, the science of “when” rather than “why” and “what”. This made so much sense to me and attracted me so much I ended up specialising in it, and doing my PhD and 2 postdocs on the genes the regulate our seasonal reproductive clock.

    I remember during the introduction lecture, the speaker explained that since we are regulated by daylight, our energy is naturally higher in the summer when days are longer, and that in the past, as most people farmed the land, they worked much harder during spring and summer than during the winter months when nothing grew. When school became obligatory, the farmers agreed to send their kids to school but said they’d need them back for the harvest, which is how the tradition of summer holidays started.

    Yet, even in our modern world, we still experience this annual peak and through of energy.

    Like trees losing their leaves and returning their energies inwards before the new growth can occur, we too, during winter, need this inwards and more restful time.

    As I talked about my plans and my frustration in trying to push through, but also about my knowledge that I want to lay down some feelings for the year ahead, meditate and make a vision board before I start getting down to the nitty gritty of what I’m going to do in 2019, my friend suggested very wisely suggested that rather than looking for the fruit I needed to tend to my roots first.

    I loved this very powerful image, especially as our culture is all focused on results, ie the fruits.

    But you can bear no fruits if you do not tend to, or nourish the roots.

    This also reminded me of another powerful story in the (surprisingly spiritual) book “The 7 habits of highly effective people” by Stephen Covey.

    ” Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.

    “What are you doing?” you ask.

    “Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.”

    “You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?”

    “Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! This is hard work.”

    “Well, why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire. “I’m sure it would go a lot faster.”

    “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,” the man says emphatically. “I’m too busy sawing!”

    Stephen Covey goes further in saying that

    ” Sharpen the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have–you. It means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual.”

    You can read example of such activities here

    There is true magic in stopping, resting and taking stock and seeing the forest for the trees.

    I have written about this topic before, but today I feel that I have embedded this knowledge at a deeper level.

    So I’m going to take my own counsel today and only attend to what really needs to be done, so I can rest and retreat inside myself a little, so I can tend to my roots.

    I know that doing this will allow for more beautiful flowers and fruits in the future.

  • Motherhood is f**king hard and you’re not meant to be doing this on your own

    Motherhood is f**king hard and you’re not meant to be doing this on your own

    Those of you who follow my blog know by now that most of my posts are inspired by something that happens to me in my work as a doula.

    Today is one of those days.

    I’ve just had a conversation with a new mother of two, who has a baby and a preschooler, and who wonders why she’s so exhausted, and why everybody else seems to be coping fine.

    She also feels guilty at the idea of asking for support.

    I’m so seriously pissed off at our society right now!

    I’ve written several times before about what new mothers really need, and I’d love to see a shift in our culture about how we support new mothers, with a mother centered, and mother supportive approach, rather than one that only gives gifts to the baby and encourages the new mother to “go back to normal” (as if there was such a thing!) as soon as possible after the birth of her baby-as if nothing of significance has happened.

    This post is about the lack of community support, how we’re not meant doing this on our own, and how much harm is caused to new mothers by a culture which encourages women to put up a brave face, and keep their challenging moments secret.

    This secret part means that women feel inadequate thinking they are alone in their struggle.

    I remember being a new mother and struggling massively with finding my new identity (another topic that isn’t discussed), but also being really tired, bored and lonely (all my social network was at work from 9 to 5) at home with my new baby, and feeling really GUILTY about it.

    I had this stupid romantic notion in my head that somehow, motherhood alone ought to make me feel fulfilled.

    Ah bloody ah!

    So I didn’t reach out and talked to anybody about it.

    Luckily I read a lot of books, and I remember feeling so vindicated when reading, in the book “The continuum concept” that it’s not normal for our species to be alone with a baby.

    We’re meant to be with other adults once we have babies, and babies are meant to be around many of people too.

    We’re meant to have experienced mothers around us, other women in our close community, who can help guide us and make us feel more normal and confidence as we navigate the treacherous waters of new motherhood.

    I love this article called ” In the Absence of the Village, Mothers Struggle Most”

    I was also amazed to read an article about the fact that women who live in traditional tribal societies have the same issues with breastfeeding as Western women but the difference is that they have the support of experienced women around them.

    We’re meant to have other people who can hold the baby for a while whilst we sleep, who can take care of chores and provide us with nutritious food whilst we rest and recover from growing and birthing a baby, and get to know our new baby too.

    So in our nuclear family culture, for the lack of a village around most of us, we shouldn’t feel guilty about asking for support, we should demand and expect support, because that’s what’s normal for our species.

    What’ not normal in the unusual situation Western culture puts us in.

    We also live in a strange, “fake” culture, one that is all about glossy Instagram pictures. Motherhood isn’t glossy. Motherhood is raw and messy. There are many moments in the day of a mother, that can be wonderful (the smiles and gurgles of a baby), and also many moments full of tedious drudgery, and many moments which are downright terrible. I love this article about it.

    Coming back to my early days of being a mother, my feelings of inadequacy were exacerbated by the fact that I didn’t talk to anybody about it. One of my biggest regrets to this day is not to have hired my birth doula, Maddie Mc Mahon, as a postnatal doula to help me through make sense of things through these first few weeks and months. Knowing the magic of doula support, I know it would have made a world of difference, to have someone witnessing my mothering and reflecting it back to me in a positive light ,and reframing it like I am trying to do with this blog.

    But hey I believed that I couldn’t justify spending money on myself, what with my reduced maternity leave pay and all that. It felt selfish and indulgent to spend money on myself.  Yet I bought so much useless crap for my baby. Somehow, I don’t think I even realised at the time that I was a victim of the low value our culture places on mothers and motherhood.

    Eventually I started going to baby classes, and met other mothers who became friends, and the informal discussions we had whilst feeding and playing with our babies were peppered with priceless nuggets of information-and made me realise that I was normal and not alone.

    As a doula I have had more occasions that I can remember when I’ve witness new mums going through the same feelings of inadequacy.

    “I’m not doing anything” they say. I usually reflect back to them that they are solely managing to keep a very helpless and very demanding tiny human alive-and that’s no mean feat!

    The problem is that our culture place such a low value on motherhood, and considers it to the a “non activity”, so people assume that mothers just get to relax all day. But nothing could be further from the truth.

    I remember when I went back to work when my son was a baby. I went back part time-working 4 days a week. On my day off , I hung out with my new mum friends, some of which had decided not to go back to work. One of them said “I don’t know how you do it”- referring to the fact that she thought that balancing work and being a mother was really difficult. I replied “no, I don’t know how YOU do it”, then proceeded to explain to her that the hard days weren’t the ones at work, but the ones at home.  I told her that on my work days I got uninterrupted coffee and lunch breaks-complete with adult conversation, and that I even got to go to the toilet on my own (anybody with a small child knows that as soon as you sit on the loo they need your attention for something).

    There is no breaks in the day of a new mum, no pauses, no quiet, uninterrupted time, no appraisals, no pats on the back, and no bonuses.

    The days can be 14-16 hour long or more.

    You cannot see the results of your mothering at the end of each day, the results of all the effort, all the patience, all the time and all the love you have poured into your child.

    I love this dad’s response to a friend asking what his stay at home wife does all day.

    The “I’m a crap mum” worry is another common one. We focus on where we’re failing, on the moment when we’re exhausted and loose our shit with our kids, not on all the love with pour into them all day. I did that a lot in the early days, I saw other mums do stuff I wasn’t doing with my kid, and I felt like I was lacking. I never did focus on the stuff I was doing well.

    I have said many times before that there should be some kind of “bad mothers club” (a bit like AA but for mums), where mothers could safely talk about the less pleasant sides of motherhood without being judged.

    I was inspired today by reading this story of a mum who hunted around her toddler’s bedroom for the source of the bad smell, only to find her toddler had done a poo behind the curtain, on the windowsill at that. (warning-graphic picture of a poo if you open the link).

    This mum was judged and shamed on social media for posting this.

    And yet this can be the reality of motherhood for many of us.

    I once had my baby in a sling and he had an explosive poo which leaked all the way down his legs and onto the sling. And yes I was out in a park when this happened.

    I for one, wish more mothers had the guts to post stories and pictures like the mum who wrote the toddler poo story.

    We need a “real motherhood” Instagram account!

    Let’s leave the glossy culture behind, the one that keeps on portraying motherhood as filled only with joy, let’s stop only sharing the perfect pictures, and let’s stop pretending that everything in our life is perfect.

    Because if more mothers shared the less glamorous stories as well as the joyful moments, more of us would realise that we’re not alone and that motherhood comes with enormous highs, but also with terrible lows. And all within the same day, sometimes within minutes even.

    More of us would feel connected, normal, and would have a good laugh in the process too!

    Only in sharing the joys and the lows can we truly connect with each other.

    If you resonate with this, please comment, and also please share stories of raw moments of motherhood.

     

  • Why postnatal recovery starts before the birth

    rest

    I had a lightbulb moment this afternoon whilst chatting with my lovely yoga teacher and therapist friend Stephanie Satriawan. We were musing over the fact that we see more and more women working right up to their due date. It isn’t usual these days to hear stories of women going into labour at work, or the day after their maternity leave started.

    In a culture that glorifies busy, and is also focused entirely on the health of the baby, not the mother, is it perhaps not surprising, especially as mothers want to keep their maternity leave for when they feel it matters most, after their baby is there. I can’t help but wonder if expectant first time mothers also believe that somehow they will get their rest once their baby has arrived.

    But, I can’t help but wonder, are we missing something very important there?

    My instinct tells me that this period of “doing nothing” before the birth is very important indeed. It feels that the mother needs the rest physically (that’s a given: most of us feel pretty tired during the third trimester of pregnancy), but beyond that I feel that she needs the time to just “be”, to connect with her baby, and to build her strength, both mentally and physically, for the birth and postnatal period afterwards. This article, “the last days of pregnancy-a place in between” describes this very well.

    I cannot help but wonder how much impact this has on women’s physical and mental wellbeing. I can’t help but wonder what the outcomes would be if women maternity leave was automatically starting a few weeks before their due date (This is the case in France, you stop work 6 weeks before, but then women only have about 2.5 months left after birth which is another story).

    I started to wonder if there was some actual peer reviewed research on this topic, so I searched for articles and was quite pleasantly surprised to find a couple of papers on the subject-I didn’t even know that this had been studied! One Canadian study found that the risks of obstetric complications during labour decreased with the duration of leave, an American study found that women who stopped work at 36 weeks were 4 times less likely to have a cesarean than women who worked right up to they gave birth. A Mexican study also linked no antenatal leave with low birth weight. There are also several studies showing a link between short antenatal leave and preterm births and low birth weight.

    This really exemplifies the  fact that our culture has little understanding of how important the perinatal period is, on both sides of the birth!

    I want to make something clear : I am certainly not blaming women for this, and I know that some women work until they give birth because they have no choice, for example for economic reasons. I feel that the blame should rest squarely on a culture that fails to understand and support the needs of birthing women, rather than on women themselves.

    Still, because a shift in cultural treatment of expectant women, I would like to encourage women and birthworkers to think that postnatal recovery starts before the birth.

    I am going to start adding that to my discussions with pregnant women.

    rest relax enjoy