The Love Affair With The Puerperium
It is called the puerperium or quarantine at 40 days after delivery, a moment that is constituted as a stage of knowledge and readjustment to our new physical and psychological reality.
We must know that although today the concept is different, respect for this period derives from past societies in which women took care of the children and the new mother in a community way while men were in charge of procuring food .
However, the social reality that we live in today is very different. We often live isolated or far from our primary family, which cannot support and help us cope with simple household tasks that new parents need.
However, the fact that the current situation does not allow us to maintain that support network does not mean that we no longer need it. In fact, All puerperal women need social support so as not to collapse before the physical and emotional wounds derived from childbirth.
Taking care of ourselves in the puerperium is to guarantee family happiness
We have to bear in mind that we must recover and rebuild our social, biological and psychological schemes. Becoming a “mother-baby” is synonymous with living with the most absolute chaos and “going a little crazy.”
That is why the mother at this time needs the emotional support of those who love her and who allow her to abandon the rational world of schedules, obligations and logical decisions to immerse herself in her dream and in abandoning the material world for certain moments.
This is one of the sensations that the puerperal mother misses the most and, without a doubt, it is the sacrifice that is most difficult to balance in this hard process of understanding towards herself, towards her child and towards others.
Loss of identity during the puerperium
Facing the new atmosphere of our recent identity as a mother-baby means that we must “step outside” the world that until now we knew or with which until now we shared rules.
This means having to accept before our own perplexity that work, friendships and interests that until then consumed our energy become distant memories drowned by the cry of our baby.
All this happens to us internally as a kind of mourning, since we end up believing that we will never again be those wonderful, active, charming, intelligent and dedicated women that it had taken us so long to build.
This happens because, in the first place and in addition to the physical and emotional destructuring to which we are subjected, we also lose contact with our places of reference (the workplace, our field of study, the leisure or recreational areas to which we we used to go, etc).
During quarantine and well beyond, we became people with a single role: to be a mother-baby. Something that makes us contemplate the world with the baby’s eyes and not recognize ourselves when we look in the mirror.
In fact, the strong attunement or connection with our maternal facet makes us feel extremely sensitive or emotional, with a fuzzy brain, confused feelings and distortion as a flag.
To the extent that we understand this, we will know that emotional support is not a luxury in the puerperal mother, but rather a priority. That is why we must invite the people we surround ourselves with to understand this, as well as to offer ourselves emotional resources that turn the puerperium into a place of encounter with oneself and with others.
