How Finding My Gentle Parenting Tribe Helped Me In My Recovery With Post-Partum Depression and Anxiety
I always knew I would practice gentle parenting but parenting in a different way to your friends and family is exhausting and can be lonely. I would come away from conversations with my closest people and feel ashamed like I was failing and that I was at fault for my daughter not sleeping at night and wanting to be held all the time. This only increased as she got older and was ‘still’ breastfeeding, very dependent on me, uncomfortable in the car, and co-sleeping with us. They deemed how she was towards these things as my fault because I ‘didn’t let her cry, ‘she manipulated me’ and ‘if I didn’t change the way I was with her then she would never sleep, and she would rule the household’. It was all background noise and didn’t affect the decisions I made but it was hard to feel much joy. This continued and I could feel my mental health declining as the feelings of isolation and loneliness built up. The crux came at a close friend’s hen do. I was only attending for the daytime, much to their dismay. Another mother, who was there, had sleep-trained their baby and was comfortable leaving their baby overnight. At the dinner table, the mother was asked if they had any advice for me as to how I could ‘parent better’. I felt a sinking feeling. I knew at home I had a wonderful, bubbly, happy, snuggly little girl who was healthily dependent on me and felt safe yet in the eyes of my peers and the people I cared about I felt like I was failing
During the postpartum period, your hormones feel like a permanent rollercoaster ride, and I knew my sensitivity to their opinions was increased. The loneliness of COVID-19 and the social rejection I was feeling, real or imagined, was leading me down the path of postpartum depression. I didn’t want people to visit, I didn’t want to leave the house because I felt like a failure in other people’s eyes and felt like I would be criticized all the time. Inside the house, with my partner and my baby, I was having a wonderful time bonding and celebrating all the milestones, but the outside world and the predominant way society parents felt too overwhelming. I couldn’t recognize myself in this anxious, timid, sad state that I was taking the world in through.
I was seeing a therapist during this period, and this was helping. I have worked with this therapist for a long time, and she was able to recognize the symptoms and helped me to get to the bottom of these feelings and the decline in my postpartum mental health.
As the restrictions lifted, I made a real effort to find my tribe and once I found them I put in a great deal of effort to establish a circle of mum friends that parented similarly and had values that aligned with mine. This gave me confidence and helped me to elevate my voice, my self-belief, and my pride in the way I parent.
how do you find your tribe?
I found my close group of mum friends through barefoot shoes and in particular Vivo Barefoot Shoes. I didn’t plan for that to be the initial bonding factor, but it worked! A mum approached me in the park because her child was also wearing Vivos. Our toddlers were close in age, and we chatted about parenting, outdoor parenting, Montessori, gentle parenting, breastfeeding, and co-sleeping. You can’t approach every mum in the park or in baby and toddler groups. It feels a bit like speed dating! So I chose this as a starting point as to who I would strike up conversation with. A bit like knowing your ‘type’. Although it has now become almost a uniform for the group as everyone who has formed the group wears Vivo Barefoot Shoes! We formed a little Whatsapp group, and we meet twice weekly. The children have formed lovely little friendships. I truly feel like I have found a parenting village. We can offer support, lighten the load, organize meal trains, and offer childcare as our children all feel safe and connected to the adults within the group. We parent in very similar ways and so the explanations given when we are struggling with toddler sharing or big emotions are all aligned. Parenting in this way with a group of like-minded adults is truly a joy. I can feel the heaviness of the cloud lifting, I can feel my positivity returning and my body grounding in parenting decisions I am making rather than spiralling with constant anxiety, intrusive thoughts, and negative thinking. I come away from our meetups feeling uplifted and full of life, with a full heart and a happy mother and child.
The other tribe that I leaned into was online. Through the @heysleepybaby community, I have gained so much peace and clarity about the way I parent, and the way my baby sleeps and I feel connected to people around the world who parent similarly. I love reading sleep without sleep training success stories and toddler development anecdotes and it warms my heart to read these from a global community.
I still meet up with friends and family who parent very differently but I feel so much happier and more confident in myself that their parenting advice and comments don’t phase me. I know that they parent their way and I feel happy and confident in my parenting choices. I can assert myself if boundaries are crossed but most of the time I just continue to parent in my way and have learned to smile at their eyerolls as I can see how far I have come in my postpartum mental health journey.
As I begin to think about having another child, I feel full of excitement about the support network I have built around me. I have a wonderful group of friends that I trust, and I can lean into whenever I need the support, a wealth of online knowledge from @heysleepybaby and a thriving happy daughter who is all the evidence I need for this way of parenting.
For me postpartum anxiety and depression was a lonely and isolating experience. Finding a community and village was a huge turning point in recovering from this.
