Beginning Again

Just after welcoming her sixth baby, Michelle Nott reflects on life with a newborn. 

I just had my sixth baby two weeks ago and have been in the full swing of life with a newborn. It seems so strange to think of what life was like without a baby in the house just a mere few weeks ago, but it also seems like forever ago. Everything blurs together.  

I find it interesting how everyone wants to share their birth stories, but most don’t want to share their postpartum stories. Birth is such a miraculous and beautiful moment. Postpartum, however, is messy. And uncomfortable. And to be honest, it’s also scary.  

This might seem a little farfetched, but it makes me think of a quote by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen:

Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday. (source) 

The difficult moments behind the beautiful miracle

Birth stories are beautiful because they are stories about the miracle of our babies entering into the world. They are the miracle, or the “Easter Sunday.” But behind the miracles are the moments that lead to it and the moments that resulted from it. Pregnancy and postpartum are difficult and both are a part of welcoming a new life into the world. They are the “Good Friday” in the story. 

The postpartum time is a weird time for moms. We spend nine months growing a baby and then, once we give birth, enter into the postpartum period. We feel like strangers in our own skin, skin that is now very stretched out, and want to quickly get back to what our bodies were like before baby. But much like our bodies stretched out over the nine months, so did our minds and hearts. We made room for another little one to love and take care of and are no longer the same women we were before baby. Everything has changed and will keep changing.  

The postpartum days: a humbling experience

Postpartum has always been a humbling experience for me personally. I’m exhausted and sore and still have to help take care of the other kids at home. It’s hard to accept all the changes my body has gone through. I like to be able to handle everything on my own, and making time to slow down and recover is difficult for me to do.  

This time around, I wasn’t struggling to slow down — I was forced to slow down. This has been a rough recovery for me and took me a little by surprise. I assumed that it would be uncomfortable like the rest of my recoveries, but manageable. However, I developed more complications, whether it is because this is my sixth baby in seven years, or the fact that I’m older now, or both.  

As a result, I found myself back at the OBGYN emergency department on the Fourth of July. Not how I wanted to spend my holiday. It turns out I'd developed high blood pressure and now am on medication to manage it. Thankfully, I am feeling better now and am actually starting to feel more like myself.  

But even when I was feeling sick during the week after having my son, I kept fighting the feeling that something was not right. I wanted to be able to recover on my own without needing to go back to the doctor. It was a lesson in humility that I needed to learn. It’s okay to slow down, and it’s okay to need help during a time of transition. And it’s also necessary to talk about it.  

What were Mary's postpartum days like?

I think of what postpartum must have been like for Mary. She immediately welcomed guests after giving birth to meet her son, and then was forced to flee to Egypt to make sure her family stayed safe. She didn’t try to fight that decision, but instead humbly accepted it. She accepted gifts from the Wise Men, which more than likely helped provide for her family during their flight to Egypt. She allowed visitors to celebrate the birth of their Savior.

And then the Holy Family quietly fled to safety. They accepted the change in their life, knowing they couldn’t go back to the way things were before.  

This is what women do during the postpartum period. We have to embrace the virtue of humility so we can accept help when we need it, and also learn to accept that our life has changed. It can be scary, but it’s also beautiful and a result of the miracle of birth.  

Moms need to know that they do not only have to talk about the birth of their child. They can also share the struggles of adjusting to life afterwards, because that is also a normal part of the journey! By doing so, mothers not only embrace humility but call out for the community of support that they need to get through the postpartum period. 

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Copyright 2024 Michelle Nott
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