MOTHER ME, CONTINUED FROM PAGE 185
“THERE’S NOT EVEN HEALTHY DIALOGUE AROUND THIS CONCEPT, LET ALONE HEALTHY SOCIETAL AWARENESS AND INFORMATION”
Motherland is a strange and uncharted territory. We arrive feeling jet-lagged, bewildered, bruised, swollen and sore after an epic 10-month journey. On the way there, we encounter unknown parts of ourselves (and our partners). Yet we refuse to expect the unexpected upon arrival. As modern mothers-to-be, we use technology to efficiently track our pregnancies and plan the minutiae of our imminent Calmbirth, including the setting, snacks, soundtrack and staging (cue caftans and candles).
Post-birth, our plans become a little hazier. Our research often doesn’t extend that far. But we expect to breeze through the arrivals hall, barely missing a beat as we transit into picture-perfect parenthood. Our child will be sugar-free and wear cream, white or taupe. Steiner-style craft projects will be documented on social media. And we will get our pre-baby bikini bodies back faster than you can say Kim Kardashian.
Then we hit turbulence. Our arrival is bumpy, the jet lag far worse than we ever imagined. The terrain in this new world is steeper than expected. But we’re too shattered to search for easier trails in the guidebooks on our bedside tables.
After months of excited anticipation, suddenly we feel completely lost. Up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Meanwhile, cracked nipples and stitches down south are painful reminders we have arrived at our destination. And we can never go back.
But the post-natal period wasn’t always this way. Ironically, while our lives are more luxurious than our grandmothers in almost every way, the truth is they probably had a smoother journey into motherhood.
This is mainly because they made space for it. And the people around them did too, argues author and presenter Jamila Rizvi, who has edited a new book called The Motherhood (Viking), a collection of brutally honest letters to new mothers, written by Australian women such as Zoë Foster Blake, Jessica Rudd, Em Rusciano and Clare Bowditch, sharing the things they wish they’d known about life with a newborn baby.
“I was utterly unprepared for the seclusion,” writes Rizvi. “It’s only now that I realise how common my experience was. The loneliness of modern mothers isn’t the exception: it’s the rule. It didn’t used to be like this. It’s hard to imagine that a tiger-skin-clad mother would have been left alone in a cave to fend for herself with a newborn for days on end. If her spear-wielding baby-daddy had to go out for a few hours hunting boar or buffalo or dinosaurs or some such, she would have been safe and warm in the company of dozens of other women. Mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins and fellow tribespeople, all taking collective charge of the new family’s wellbeing.”
Every traditional culture in the world has post-partum recuperation rituals to support new mothers and their babies in the ‘fourth trimester’. In Korea, new mothers receive hot tea and seaweed soup for 21 days in a ritual known as san-ho-jori. During the ‘mother roasting’ period in India, new mothers are fed nourishing foods and warmed by a fire for 10 to 40 days. In Tibet, they are served meat broths. In south-east Asia, they endure or enjoy (depending how you see things) a 30 to 40 day confinement.
Aboriginal mothers receive multi-generational support. Mexican mothers are treated to 40 days of bed rest, massages, herbal baths, chicken soup and hot chocolate. Native Americans included sweat lodges and massage in the 10- to 30-day ‘lying-in time’. The Ayurvedic practice involves 42 days of daily massage, naps and slow-cooked foods. And ‘the sitting month’, or zuo yue zi, in China follows a similar theme of warming foods prepared by family members and no visitors (or showers). According to traditional Chinese medicine, the first 42 days govern the next 42 years. The common themes of these post-partum rituals are support (via an army of non-hired help), respect, rest and easy-to-digest, high-fat, nutrient-dense meals (prepared by someone else). “These old cultures knew the price if mothers weren’t allowed to recover fully,” says Dr Oscar Serrallach, who is the author of the new book The Postnatal Depletion Cure: A Complete Guide to Rebuilding Your Health and Reclaiming Your Energy for Mothers of Newborns, Toddlers and Young Children (Goop). “Our Western culture has done mothers a great disservice by not honouring them on their road to recovery and giving them the time they need to adjust to the monumental changes in their lives.”
The GP and father of three says life with a newborn baby becomes even harder than it should be when women remain physically, emotionally, nutritionally and hormonally depleted and sleep-deprived.
“I’ve treated women who were still depleted 10 years after their babies were born,” he says. “And if you then take into account the stress and sleeplessness associated with raising tweens and teenagers, coupled with the hormonal effects of perimenopause and menopause, it can become a pretty grim journey if mothers aren’t truly supported and allowed to recover.”
Post-natal depletion is different to the more widely known condition of post-natal depression that affects one in 10 Australian mothers. Interestingly, it seems the incidence of depression peaks at four to five years after the birth of the baby, rather than the first six months, as previously thought.
Yet Dr Serrallach says there is an overlap between the two conditions. “I have no doubt having post-natal depletion increases your chances of getting post-natal depression.”
The symptoms of post-natal depletion will sound familiar to almost all modern mothers. They include feeling hypervigilant or ‘tired but wired’, foggy-brained, frustrated, vulnerable, anxious, overwhelmed, isolated and having little libido. Post-natal depression sits at the other end of the spectrum. It’s a clinical condition with distinguishing symptoms that include middle insomnia (waking in the middle of the night and being unable to return to sleep) and a profound loss of joy.
Anxiety and depression during pregnancy and early parenthood (the perinatal period) affect almost 100,000 Australians every year, according to Gidget Foundation, a non-profit organisation that offers free support to new parents and their families.
Dr Serrallach says women often tell him they knew they were not postnatally depressed yet post-natal depletion was not mentioned as a likely alternative. “This is a huge hole in our thinking and treatment of new mothers,” he says. “Worse, it’s a hole that gets bigger and bigger, because it’s not discussed from a medical point of view. Post-partum depression, yes. Post-natal depletion? Say what? There’s not even healthy dialogue around this concept, let alone healthy societal awareness and information.”
He says it is important to note that post-natal depletion affects all new mothers. The three main causes are nutrient depletion, after raiding our own supplies to build, birth and feed a baby; exhaustion and sleep deprivation (the average mother loses up to 700 hours of sleep in the first year of her baby’s life); and a drastic change in roles and social isolation.
Dr Serrallach says while we talk about the psychological shifts that occur during the process of becoming a mother, we don’t focus enough on the biological transformations, including a major brain rewiring.
During pregnancy, the brain (which is 60 per cent fat) of a woman shrinks by about five per cent as she sends about seven grams of fat a day to the placenta to feed the fetal brain’s huge energy and fat requirements. The good news is it expands again during the first six months after birth.
Parts of her brain also get upgraded to ensure deep bonding with her baby occurs. Increased neurons in her amygdala increase her emotional intelligence. Her cognition gets a boost, making her smarter. Her sense of smell and taste become enhanced, and her mental processing slows, enabling her to be more attentive to her baby.
Dr Serrallach says this ‘ mothermorphosis’, or transition into motherhood, also involves a tsunami of hormones. Oestrogen and progesterone rise dramatically during pregnancy and then plummet within hours after birth. However, many important hormones, including DHEA (a hormone that helps us make sex hormones), growth hormone and melatonin are only made when we are asleep. So post-natal sleep deprivation makes it almost impossible to restore hormone balance.
“If you are not physically and emotionally nurtured in the early weeks after delivery, then your corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) will not return to normal levels,” says Dr Serrallach. Low CRH (which helps us make cortisol) causes lethargy, a sense of inertia, allergy flare-ups and can put women on a path to post-partum autoimmune disease. “If you have low oestrogen, low cortisol and low DHEA, thyroid imbalance and sleep deprivation, you may feel like you have been in a car crash,” he says.
Recent research shows there are key hormones made in the brain called neurosteroids and these also play a critical role in how the mother feels and how she is able to cope.
Dr Serrallach believes it takes at least a month of fully supported recovery to help mothers replace vital micronutrients and macronutrients, reset hormones, energy stores and sleep cycles after the birth of a baby.
Typically, he says, post-birth mothers have low levels of iron, zinc, vitamin B12, vitamin B9, iodine and selenium, omega-3 fats like DHA and low protein stores. “The more omega-3s you have in your diet, the better you will feel,” he says.
“If all goes well in the first six weeks post-partum and the mother is allowed to fully recover physically and hormonally then we have a happy, well adjusted mother,” he says.
Remember, you will also feel happier if you ask for help, says Rizvi. “In times gone by, the upbringing of children was everyone’s joy and everyone’s responsibility,” she says. “The trials and tribulations of life with a newborn, a baby, a toddler and even a teenager were made easier … because women did them together. Yes, it takes a village to raise a child and that village is in danger of being rendered the stuff of history unless we rebuild it.”