Welcome to Motherhood: You May Thrive, but You’re Going to Suffer Too (And That’s Okay)

A diagnosis can be helpful when suffering postpartum, but new moms don’t have to wait to get help

Whether postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety, new moms are told to look out for mental health issues after having a baby. Of course, this is important—a diagnosis can be integral to getting new moms the help they need. Particularly at the six- or eight-week checkup, providers like obstetricians, general practitioners, and pediatricians all use diagnosis to get their new parent patients to a therapist, psychiatrist, or special maternal mental health organization. However, you don’t have to wait for postpartum suffering to get so bad it qualifies for a diagnosis before seeking help. 

To be clear, a diagnosis can be very helpful for new moms. It’s a way to categorize pain and suffering, which can give moms a framework to understand their struggles. Learning that there is a word to encompass these experiences—that they aren’t completely unknown and un-categorized—can be a relief. Postpartum suffering can seem amorphous and abstract and thus, scary. A diagnosis can make it more comprehensible and permit new moms to seek help, particularly in our society that divides everything into binaries like sick or not sick, suffering or not suffering.

Suffering during maternity, though, is not so black and white. New moms may not feel depressed or anxious enough to fit within the bounds of a diagnosis, but they may still feel off and not quite themselves. These same moms may hesitate to seek help, which can limit the care they receive or lead them to minimize their experiences of suffering both to themselves and others. The truth is new parenthood is a time of pain—normal, transitional pain that can seem manageable (though still quite painful) and extreme pain that feels very unmanageable. Both deserve help.

Suffering is not unusual postpartum: That doesn’t mean it isn’t serious

Often the time of maternity is hard. Just how hard, though, can be surprising, especially when it’s not the idyllic mix of hard and blissful we’re frequently sold. Transitions in life are usually stressful and messy, and the transition to parenthood, no matter if this is your first child or third, is a challenging one. You can feel unconnected from yourself, your baby, your partner, and your life. You can lose creativity in how to get through the day or period of maternity leave. You can feel more dissatisfied, ambivalent, lonely, sad, worried, stressed, and ungrounded. You may feel a loss of control over your body and the changes taking place or sad about the state of the world in which you find yourself and your kid. Many things can come to the surface at this time, including (but certainly not limited to) how you feel about giving and receiving care, your finances and career, your relationship, sex, your friendships, your family, your body, your identity, and your sense of safety in the world. These can also feel more severe than they had previously.

This is all suffering, which I use to mean pain that does not let up. Whether feeling a well of sad, mad, flustered, listless, unable to shake off or understand the pain, or just plain shitty, this suffering can be difficult to square in the supposedly happy, joyful time of new parenthood. 

Growth hurts: Suffering can be a normal part of the transition into parenthood 

These experiences of postpartum suffering are so normal. Why? Because you’re growing a new part of yourself (the self) and doing it all while you’re sleep-deprived, learning new baby care skills, and consumed by this new person who is completely dependent on you.

Most growth is at least a bit painful. During puberty, we experience physical growing pains. When we transition to financial independence in adulthood, we work more hours, scrimp and save, and grind through jobs we don’t love to get to what we want. The first time we break up with someone (or the 30th), it hurts because something is changing indefinitely. Growing requires us to learn, not get, be bad at something for a while, learn from our mistakes, and come to terms with our place in this process of change and grieve the change. We usually have to feel a decent amount of pain (no pain, no gain) to move into an updated way of being. 

New motherhood is no different. You’re taking on a new role with someone quite new to you and literally entirely dependent on you. That alone is a lot to take in. Your relationship with your partner also previously had a rhythm that was instantly disrupted and you’re both trying to find your new wavelength. Then, there is the often more unexpected part of postpartum suffering: just how much of your own childhood, how you were parented, and your relationship with your parents comes up during this period, more than any other time. So too with your partner’s relationship with their own family. It can be overwhelming to take care of a new baby, yourself, and a partner, as well as sort out your new role as a parent and as a mom when you, too, have a mom.

Waiting for a diagnosis can overlook and exacerbate this normal but serious suffering

While new moms can experience extreme suffering that far surpasses this normal transitional suffering, only relying on a diagnosis before seeking help can drive new moms to push down their transitional suffering. Any amount of suffering benefits from help. There’s no reason to suck it up and bear through. In fact, getting help earlier prevents suffering from accumulating and becoming bad enough that it fits a diagnosis. It’s similar to a physical injury: When an injury, which may have easily healed with some minor heat, stretching, and massage, is ignored, it can turn severe enough to need intense physical therapy or surgery. Similarly, emotional suffering, when not processed, can transform into anxiety and depression as you avoid talking about one thing and another and another. Like an injury too, our capitalist culture often rewards pushing through pain in order to not inconvenience others or slow down “progress” (i.e. school, jobs, the economy, families). There can be pressure to avoid feeling the full weight of transitions because that requires slowing down.

But slowing down is sometimes necessary and this is where therapy comes in. Therapy is a place where you can unpack and understand suffering, take it seriously, and be curious about it so you don’t get stuck in these unprocessed feelings. When you avoid working through suffering, it can turn into something more severe.

Therapy can help you make meaning from what your suffering is trying to tell you 

Suffering is more than just a symptom on a list. It’s telling you that something is at work, often that you’re experiencing something you could not plan for or predict. Maybe baby care is harder than you thought it would be or you were blindsided by a medical issue for you or your baby. You might be underdeveloped around certain requirements of parenthood like being depended on entirely and flooded with care and responsibility. Maybe you need time to process the past experiences that came up, whether events that happened during conception, pregnancy, and birth or the impact of your childhood on what you’re feeling now. 

Therapy can help you listen to what your suffering is telling you. Is this a new pain? An old pain? Is this a known pain you didn’t feel (or allow yourself to feel) before? Then, with a therapist, you can find a way to make use of the suffering. What do you need to know more about related to new parenting? What do you need to be more curious about? What do you need to understand more about yourself or your partner? What do you need to shift focus or perspective on? What has internally changed for you during this transition? Therapy can help you grieve the permanent changes occurring during this transition (for example, that you’re no longer childless without a dependent or the changes to your relationship/relationships) and determine a way forward with more understanding about yourself, your partner, your family, and your growth into this new role.

–Rachael Benjamin