One Mom’s Successful Approach to Postpartum Recovery Support
When my husband Ben and I were preparing to become first-time parents, we had heard from other parents just how hard the first few days, weeks, months (ok, years) can be. But the newborn phase sounded particularly harrowing. Round-the-clock feedings, diaper changes, and soothing the baby sleep, all while recovering from pregnancy and childbirth – AND attempting some degree of self-care without losing our sanity? It’s a tall order. We couldn’t do it alone.
A robust network of friends, family, and neighbors, both near and far, wanted to support us in our parenting journey. It was up to us to figure out what kind of help we wanted and communicate that to our network. Here’s how we went about it, along with some tips for you to do the same.
Recruit Your Village
“It takes a village to raise a child.” I took that a bit literally.
I set up a website called ‘Join Our Village’ and shared it with loved ones. The site outlined the different kinds of support we would accept, and embedded Google forms and links for people to sign up as needed. We shared the link via email, group text, and Facebook post, but nothing public. I also ensured the site wasn’t indexed by Google, since I didn’t want our private information searchable on the web.
Of course, you can recruit your village the old-fashioned way – by reaching out to people close to you or making a note of who has asked to be helpful.
Either way, the first step in accepting help is to invite it explicitly. It’s likely that people in your life want to help, but they feel shy or they don’t want to intrude. Reassure them that their help is welcome and wanted.
Offer Options for How to Help
It was important that we invite our network to support us however they were able, acknowledging that some people live far away, don’t have much disposable income for gifts, don’t have time to visit in person, aren’t good cooks, or just aren’t that interested in babies. We wanted everyone we cared about to know that their contribution would be meaningful to us, in whatever form it took.
Our site outlined the following ways someone could help:
Sign up for our meal train
Send a gift from our baby registry
Come for a helpful visit (more on this later)
Offer words of encouragement/wisdom
By writing down all the ways we would accept help and putting it in one place, we could direct well-wishers to the site so they could select for themselves how to support us. This prevented the discomfort of asking someone for help they weren’t able to give. And by not making assumptions about people’s interest, budget, or availability, we were pleasantly surprised when acquaintances cooked us a delicious meal or distant relatives sent a generous gift.
Leverage Technology
New parents will hear a lot of ‘let me know if you need anything.’ But when you actually need something, it’s tough to know whom to reach out to, and how.
Whenever possible, use apps and digital communication tools to simplify coordinating help. That could mean setting up an email list or group chat thread.
What we chose to do was set up a Signal thread that would be broadcast-only, meaning my husband or I could send out messages to the group asking for help, but invite individuals to reply to us privately. We chose this to avoid spammy reply-all threads that folks might tune out, and to avoid the awkwardness of publicly choosing whom to accept help from if there were multiple offers. Anyone in our network could ask to be added to the thread via a Google form on our website.
Obviously baby registries are a great way to digitally communicate what supplies you need. Make sure your registries are publicly searchable. You can also try a store-agnostic baby registry like Babylist so that folks can purchase supplies from anywhere.
There are a plethora of free meal train apps to choose from that make postpartum meals easier, like Take Them a Meal or Mealtrain. A Google spreadsheet works, too, if you want to keep it simple. You could also request Instacart or Grubhub gift certificates – just let people know what email address to send them to.
By the way, for our postpartum recovery website we used Google sites, which is free and easy to use for non-developers. It was so helpful to have a centralized place to link to our registry, meal train, and all the other digital tools for our village.
Set Expectations for Visitors
The trickiest part of postpartum recovery is managing expectations for your visitors. The Unswaddled podcast has a great episode about distinguishing Visitors from Helpers: Visitors want to admire the baby and socialize with you, while Helpers are there to be put to work.
We laid out the ways Visitors can be Helpers: drop off supplies on our porch, do household chores, watch the baby while we shower/nap/rest, or give our cats some attention. We set the tone that visitors would be expected to help, and if we happen to be available to socialize as well, that was a bonus! But it gave us permission to be sleep-deprived blobs on the couch instead of feeling compelled to entertain guests.
To minimize the need to give instructions leading up to a visit, we outlined in advance any info a helper needs – our address, parking information, even whether they should ring the doorbell or text to be let in. We put labels on our cabinets and drawers in the kitchen, and labeled doors to rooms or closets – this was critical when asking a visitor to grab a towel from the linen closet or empty dishes from the dishwasher.
(This next part is entirely extra, but I documented instructions for various chores, like where to take out our trash and how to run our washing machine. I put this in a Google doc on the website. I really didn’t want to be trying to explain how to do things and where everything belongs while sleep deprived.)
This next part is where the boundaries come in.
On the page where we list the ways people can help, there’s a section of Do’s and Don’t. We wanted to be clear about what kinds of behavior was NOT helpful at this time, and what we needed to feel safe and respected.
Items on our Don’t list included:
Don’t visit if you are feeling ill or have had a COVID exposure
Don’t show up unannounced
Don’t ring the doorbell*
Don’t call our phones**
Don’t expect us to be particularly functional
*in case the baby was sleeping
**in case we were sleeping
That last one was a plea to absolve us from the embarrassment of being unkempt, messy, bleary, or even grumpy. I was expecting to be operating on one brain cell, so it was nice to keep expectations low.