Скачать или смотреть My mother-in-law convinced my husband I was unstable - I had been recording everything for 6 weeks

My name is Claire Navarro and I am thirty-one years old, and I want to start this story by telling you something about the first weeks of motherhood that most people do not say out loud, which is that they are the most vulnerable weeks of a woman's life. Not just physically, though the physical dimension is real and significant and largely underestimated by everyone who has not been through it. But psychologically. Emotionally. In the specific way that vulnerability operates when you are simultaneously responsible for a completely helpless new person and running on three hours of fractured sleep and navigating a body that does not yet feel like your own and trying to hold together the inner landscape of yourself while everything around you is shifting and loud and demanding and new.
I say this not as a complaint. I say it because it is true, and because the truth of it is the context without which what happened to me in those first eight weeks cannot be understood. The vulnerability is real. It is documented. It is something that every medical professional who works with new mothers understands and takes seriously, the elevated risk of postpartum mood disorders, the importance of support and sleep and the absence of additional stressors during the postnatal period.