Corinne Crossley - Self-Care for New Moms: Thriving Through Your Postpartum Year

Interview quotes have been edited for content and clarity.

Due to the confidential nature of psychotherapy, names and circumstances have been changed to protect client identities and interactions. In some cases, composite clients have been created to protect anonymity and preserve clarity.

Copyright 2020 by Corinne Crossley

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Daniel Brount

Cover illustrations by gettyimages

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-5515-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-5516-1

Printed in China

For the loves of my lifeCroz, Bear & my lucky bug. I love you all the time. For all the moms, but most of all my mom. Proof that a good enough mother is perfect for her children.

Table of Contents

Introduction

I am twenty years old and more than twelve years away from becoming a mother. I sit low on the leather couch despising the overhead fluorescent lights. My new therapist Heidi sits opposite me, her face gentle and welcoming. I feel like a mess. Hard-charging through the last three years of my academic career, when professors started urging me to consider graduate school, I splintered. I feel full-on adulthood rushing at me like a bullet train. I cant eat. Sleep is spotty. Tears are constant. Occasionally, I wretch from anxiety.

Heidi meets my eyes and emphasizes, There are three things that we all need to do every day. She ticks off each with a finger, You have to eat. Even if you dont feel like it. At least a little. You have to regulate yourself with a steady amount of food. Second, sleep. Six to eight hours. I know its hard, but you need sleep. Third, you have to interact with people. Preferably, out in the world. These are the things you need to do. They arent cure-alls. But, when we dont do them, things get a lot worse.

I nod solemnly. Always eager to please others, I have my marching orders. Eat, sleep, talk to someone. Got it. Except food makes me feel sick, I cant stop my brain from reeling, and I can barely hold my shit together on the train ride to campus. But okay. Ill try anything at this point.

It takes several months, but in a game of inches I pull away from anxietys vice grip. I keep eating and eventually remember when I am hungry. I try sleeping and then someday it lasts through the night. I go to class and then work my way back to social gatherings, then stores and malls. The sobbing stops. The shaking stops. Hand over hand, I gain more rope on my side of the tug-of-war with my brain. With good therapy, support, and the wish to do other things, I got better. I graduated, got a job, hung out with friends, met a really good guy, went to graduate school for counseling (keeping good on my vow to help other people struggling with mental health issues), built a therapy practice, and had a couple of babies. Bullet points, but you get the idea.

That day in my therapists office is now literally half my life ago. Since then, in the hundreds of hours spent in school and trainings, I never heard anything more vital than the words that Heidi offered me that day. Eat, sleep, be in the world. It was our work together where the importance of self-care became evident. Now that I am a therapist, just about every single client who comes to me in crisis gets what I call my Heidi speech. We all need a foundation of self-care.

Self-Care for New Moms?

What do we mean when we say self-care? The term self-care is so oversaturated that people misunderstand the definition of it, Emily Silver, NP, responds when I ask about her definition of self-care. Co-owner of Boston NAPS, an infant care and parent education company, the issue is close to her heart. As moms, our first mistake is we confuse self-care with basic human needs like eating or showering. I want people to do those things, but thats not enough. Passionate about the health of babies and moms, Emily explained how she and her co-owner Jamie ODay used essential tenets of self-care to inform the name of their practice. NAPS is an acronym intended as a reminder for self-care.

N is for nutrition or nourishment. Prioritizing feeding yourself sustaining meals and snacks is a major cornerstone of self-care. This is especially the case for new moms. We spend forty-five minutes straight packing diaper bags with bottles, nursing covers, diapers, sippy cups, and teething puffs, but forget to include a sandwich for ourselves. Adequate nourishment is a non-negotiable feature of self-care.

A is for alone time. Yes, time for yourself is an essential. Going for a baby-free walk, reading a book, or watching a show that does not involve puppets or cartoons.

P is for people. Not only does this entail being with people in general, it is important to find your support system. Who are the folks who have your back? What new connections can you make?

S is for sleep. Sleep is essential to your mental and physical health, and a rare commodity in the life of a postpartum mom.

Twenty years after that initial therapy session, though Emily is in an entirely different profession, she reiterated the same tenets I heard there. Self-care is not a luxury. It is a necessity. Motherhood is a marathon, yet we treat ourselves as anything but athletes. We often feed our babies, partners, older children, friends, and even pets before we sit down to a meal for ourselves. Imagine asking a marathoner to run her race fueled on leftover chicken nuggets and three hours of sleep. That is completely unreasonable! Yet, millions of women ask themselves to do that every day.

Whats the Big Deal about Self-Care? I Dont Think I Really Need It.

Lots of moms (but certainly not all moms) fall desperately in love with their babies, tempting them into a state of needlessness. We adore this new creature and feel fulfilled by caring for them. We need for nothing. This is an illusion. Usually this happens while swimming in an ocean of hormones. We all have needs. Eventually this feeling recedes, and if we abandon self-care, we surface feeling utterly haggard.

In other cases, we feel torn between quality time with our babies and time for ourselves. I really want to go to yoga, but I feel so guilty being away from my girls, I went to the library to read my book and I kept thinking how much I just wanted the baby there with me, or even I know how helpful physical therapy would be for me at this point, but that takes away from the little time in the evening I have with my kids, are all phrases I hear in my office regularly. The truth is, sometimes pursuing self-care is not easy. Sometimes it is its own sacrifice. While we feel nourished by time on our own, we simultaneously miss our babies. We are wired to feel this way. It is evolutionarily advantageous for us to feel this way. However, this does not mean that we are supposed to spend every waking moment with our babies. Stepping away for periods of time to focus on ourselves is a vital practice that we do not want to erode.