A New Way of Looking at Self Care for New Moms
in this post:
self care tips:
get curious about what needs you need to take care of in order to perform effective self care
figure out what activities, rituals, connections help you meet the needs you have identified
Self care as a concept has always left me feeling slightly awful about myself. There were never enough hours in the day to do yoga, have a bath, go for a a run, journalling, bullet journalling, learning a new skill, making overnight oats and ensuring eight hours uninterrupted sleep. I am a terrible sleeper and would berate myself for not being able to complete the perfect self care task list and assign this as the reason I did not get the desired amount and type of slumber. After I had had my daughter this feeling of not getting self care right and not doing enough quadrupled and I felt guilty for everything all the time. Everywhere I turned during the fourth trimester and in the first two years of being a new mom it was there, self care for new moms, self care for mothers, self care makes you a better mom, prioritize self care! Any snatched time I did get I would spend paralyzed by the decision of where to start that I wouldn’t be able to do anything and then would spend time afterwards criticizing myself for not using the time productively. My relationship with self care was not a positive one and it took a lot of reframing, a ton of unpacking what self care actually meant for me and then a great deal of patience to learn the skill of advocating for myself and prioritizing self care time. Not only did I have to find my voice amongst other people to be able to carve out this time but I also had to establish a new relationship with myself and my habits that were continually sabotaging my ability to practice any self care. So here are a few of my most useful self care tips for moms.
1. Get curious about what needs you need to take care of in order to perform effective self care.
The first thing that needs to happen is to recognize that the term self care is not something that is tangible. A bubble bath, a run or yoga are not going to be self care for you if that is not what your physical, mental and emotional body requires right now. This took a lot of time to learn. I was fortunate enough to work alongside a therapist as I navigated what self care looked like for me as a new mom. I needed to get in touch with how I was feeling, to find out what was going on for me right now. This was not easy for me and I found it especially difficult as I navigated a new world of my daughter’s needs as well. However, I did find that being able to think about what was going on for my daughter, figuring out what she needed, was she hungry, was she thirsty, was she cold, did she need a cuddle, was she overstimulated etc was the beginning of understanding self care. I was creating space for her needs and we were working together to form the foundations of a relationship where we looked after her needs through co-regulation. By doing this I cultivated the ability to give myself the same attention. I got curious about my own needs, was I hungry, was I thirsty, was I sad, was I resentful, was I at capacity, was I overstimulated. By asking myself these questions I began to quickly attune to how I was feeling and what my needs might be. Allowing myself the time and space to have needs felt so alien to me and is something I continue to work on but for me is definitely an essential step in effective self care for postpartum moms and parents as a whole. As a side note, I found this a wonderful stepping stone into gentle parenting as a whole.
2. Figure out what activities, rituals, connections help you to meet the needs you have identified.
One of the most effective pieces of advice my therapist gave me was to play with this stage and to get intensely curious about the results. I found this much easier to understand with my daughter. My daughter is very sensitive and needs a lot of sensory input but she’s incredibly strong willed and it took a long time to find out the different type of sensory input she needed. If she’s overtired and fidgety she needs deep pressure to soothe her nervous system, before she can access her fine motor development she needs big movement etc, she needs closeness, contact and warmth to sleep etc. As I began checking in with my own needs I was able to build an effective self care toolkit. As a new mother who was breastfeeding I found myself experiencing the feeling of being touched out. Resentment would build up, my thoughts would begin to spiral and I realized I needed to move, have space, and have a shower or a bath and I would be regulated. In the mornings after a long night of breastfeeding and co-sleeping I need ten minutes to adjust, to gather my thoughts, to check in and breathe ready to go again as a mother. My partner works away a lot and I could feel my body getting tense and anxious thoughts creeping in when I hadn’t had enough connection and now for my own self care I prioritize meeting up with other mom’s and children so that I can have some conversation and care. The mental load of motherhood and being the default parent meant that the constant need to make decisions was causing me to feel overwhelmed and fatigued and through trial and error I was able to find ways of lowering this so that I wasn’t always at capacity and recognizing when it was all building up.
3. Prioritize practicing the above two skills
The biggest act of self-care is to be able to work out how you are feeling, what you need and how to take care of this before it turns into an explosion of overwhelm. When I reach this point my ability to tune in to myself and then as a result my ability to soothe are both hindered by the spiraling caused by being at capacity. Gentle parenting, gentle partnering, and gentle self care all become a lot more difficult when our needs have built up to the point of desperation. HOWEVER, it is really important that at this point we don’t slip into self criticism that we have somehow failed and let our needs get to this point but that we remain compassionate and curious. We need initially to soothe and then again tune in to the questions, what did I need to prioritize, what can I do differently next time to see if it works better etc.
Practicing self care in this way is a lifelong skill. I would often need my therapist to remind me of this when I had got myself into a spiral about not making progress. Cultivating this relationship with yourself takes time and progress will ebb and flow, regressions will happen, new circumstances will be thrown in, but adopting this philosophy around self care can really revolutionize the way you look after yourself and can take the ambiguous concept of self care into something that is meaningful and effective and can help as you navigate life as a new mama.
