When I brought my daughter home from the hospital after birth and settled into early postpartum, I was shocked. Not by how hard it was, but by how easy. I had heard all the stories, how challenging the newborn stage is, particularly with the first child. I have a history of depression and anxiety, so I expected that I would develop postnatal depression. I was prepared, therapist on hand for that eventuality.

Yet… it never came.

I was not prepared for the ease I found in motherhood. The sense of purpose, the newfound awe of my body, a new confidence in myself. I kept waiting for the penny to drop. Not everyone gets to experience a positive and empowering postpartum. Spoiler alert: my second postpartum was the polar opposite. But that’s a story for another time.

Much like positive birth stories, positive postpartum stories appear to be rare. They surface reluctantly, with guilt-tinged caution. It’s no secret that our collective stories of postpartum are either hollow baby-centred bliss or horror tales. This is a symptom of a culture that is birth and newborn illiterate, resulting in new mums feeling utterly unqualified and questioning why they’ve been allowed to leave the hospital with their baby.

This is a deeply complex and nuanced issue.

Perinatal mood disorders are ever increasing, marked with the confronting statistic of more than a third of women experiencing birth trauma in our current maternity system. As a result, when someone experiences a positive birth and/or postpartum, they don’t want to admit it for fear of making others uncomfortable. It’s almost like we don’t want to jinx ourselves and we want to sell our experience short so as not to diminish the pain of others.

But perhaps a better way to diminish pain is by being open, honest and celebratory of our beautiful and empowering experiences and adding them to the collective narrative. Telling, listening and relating to stories is an inherently human experience that can help us to process, heal and plan.

So here is my positive postpartum story:

My first baby was born in the water at the hospital. I was the first one to touch her. I reached down and picked her tiny body out of the water. Her arms jerked as she tried to find me to cling to. She had a shock of dark hair and, as I lifted her, I saw she was a girl. I had a daughter. I saw her little face and thought: holy s**t, she looks like me.

I pulled her to my chest and sobbed – massive, tearless sobs. A short while later, I moved to the bed and my daughter was finding her way to my breast for her first feed. The well-meaning midwife grabbed my breast and attempted to move my daughter’s head to my nipple. Everything in my body tensed. I felt that our bubble and our bodies were being trespassed upon.

I calmly but firmly said, “No thank you, it’s okay. She is working it out. We are both working it out together.”

A little shocked, the midwife left me, my husband and our new baby for two golden hours of bonding.

I was shocked. The moment I birthed her, my intuition became LOUD. Intuition speaks through the body and all of a sudden my sensitivity to the feelings and sensations coursing through my body was heightened. It was like I had been trying to listen to my intuition through static and then birth switched the dial and suddenly the voice coming through became crisp. This clarity of my body’s messages, my own internal wisdom, continued through my postpartum and beyond, ebbing and flowing with my life.

The early days after birth were spent in quiet reverence of our tiny baby (on account of Covid… this was 2020 after all). We rested, we loved. My husband and I became closer than ever. I felt this sense of deep rest that I hadn’t experienced in my memory of adulthood. It was as if postpartum was the first time I gave myself permission to fully rest. Like most 90s children I was raised on a diet of, ‘your paid profession is your identity'. 

Motherhood allowed me to let go of the pressure of external achievement and just be. Be fully present in the moment. The shell I had created to survive in our world, the one that kept me safe but also kept me small began to crack. I became more of myself. And more sure of myself.

Though I wasn’t prepared for the bliss that followed my daughter’s birth, my newfound self lapped it up and soaked in it. And though my next postpartum was an immense struggle, I never lost what I had gained in my first: my connection to my intuition and my deeper sense of who I was.

Do you have a positive postpartum story? If so, honour it by sharing it.