After Giving Birth

The period following the birth of a child is always quite complex psychologically and demands a great deal of energy from the new mother. She must recover from the effort of childbirth, which abruptly stripped her of the identity of a pregnant woman that she had slowly built over nine months, and, day by day, build her relationship with the newborn. The demands increase further if there's another child to look after as well.

«It took several weeks before I could «see» myself as pregnant, even though from the very first day I'd «spy» on my silhouette in shop windows, hoping to catch some difference. Then my belly started to become noticeable, at first just a hint, then more and more evident. This time too, before the pregnancy I was afraid to watch my body change, wondering if I would still recognize myself with a belly… instead the changes happened so gradually and slowly that day by day I got used to a new version of myself… the one that childbirth erased within a few hours, leaving me once again with a question I don't know how to answer: who am I now that I've stopped being the pregnant woman of the last nine months? I'm certainly no longer the woman I was before getting pregnant, and not only because my size has changed for now… this pregnancy too has brought many changes to my inner world… as if, by bringing so many aspects of my childhood back to the surface, it had made me more mature, more aware of being an adult now, even though I, who am already a mother, have lately felt so much like a daughter, so much like a child, so in need of reassurance, of protection…. I, who until the moment of birth was the center of attention in my family, almost as much as my first little girl, have felt somewhat forgotten since the baby was born… at a time when, even though I'm happy, I often feel insecure, needing to be reassured that I'm able to meet the needs of both the newborn and my older daughter, who has to get used to the presence of a little sister with whom she'll share the family's affection.»

What Rossella describes happens to many women, even though the intensity of these feelings varies from person to person. It's important that the people around her (her partner, family members) are also aware of these physiological but complex dynamics, so they can offer the new mother, not just the newborn, the right kind of attention: care, understanding, and patience. Helping the woman handle her daily responsibilities frees up time and energy for her to rediscover herself and build the confidence and calm she needs to learn to relate to her baby in a pleasant way. For some women this happens easily, because it represents the continuation, the evolution, of the relationship they had already built during pregnancy. For others, however, childbirth marks a break from the preceding months, highlighting the gap between the image of the baby they had emotionally invested in during the wait and the real baby they gave birth to, experienced as a stranger, an outsider.