There’s a trial getting a lot of national attention right now and I’m not going to wade into the specifics here. It isn’t mine to litigate and it isn’t what this post is about. But following the coverage, even at a distance, has cracked something open in me. It reminded me how much women carry after we give birth and how little the world checks in to see if we’re carrying it okay. So this isn’t about that case, more so about what it stirred up.

After my first son was born, as I felt him exit my body, I remember an exhaustion that arrived instantly, like someone had just unplugged me. I put my head back against the pillow. I looked down at the baby that the nurse placed on my stomach, this brand new person, and then I looked up. My cousin who was in the room with me, was gleaming, just full of joy. My husband was crying tears of pure joy, and I wondered what he was feeling in that exact moment. And I lay there thinking, how come I don’t feel anything?

I felt no rush of love. There was no wave of instantaneous joy. Nothing I could name. And I was too afraid to even say that out loud, so I didn’t. Not to the nurses, not to my cousin, not even really to myself. I filed it away as something was wrong with me and went on with the business of smiling outwardly with the expected maternal joy, and continued healing, feeding and surviving the first few weeks.

It wasn’t until four weeks later, when my husband asked me to go for a walk, that it came out. He asked how I was doing, just a simple question, and I broke down. I told him I didn’t feel connected to our baby. I asked him what was wrong with me. And what I’ve held onto since isn’t just that I said it, it’s that I felt safe enough to say it to him, and that he didn’t flinch or minimize it. He just understood that something was going on and stayed with me in it.

I think about how lucky I am. Not every woman has a husband that listens on that walk. Not every woman has a person who asks the plain question and actually waits for the real answer. And that really sucks. We are warriors, yes, and we also need to be tended to in these times.

Here’s what I wish I’d known back then, sitting in that hospital bed feeling broken for not feeling anything: what I went through has a name, and it isn’t rare.

Delayed bonding after birth is common enough that researchers study it as its own category, separate from postpartum depression, though the two often travel together. Studies put the rate of mild to moderate bonding difficulty somewhere between 3-24% of mothers, and most of the time it’s transient, meaning it eases with time rather than something feeling permanently broken in you. It’s also strongly linked to how the birth itself felt. Fear, pain, a sense of losing control during delivery, poor sleep, and lack of support all show up again and again as factors that make that early connection harder to feel, none of which have anything to do with how much a mother wants her child. And all of those feelings are present during deliveries, it is such a scary, unpredicted experience.

Postpartum Support International estimates that roughly one in five mothers will experience a perinatal mood disorder of some kind, which they describe as the most common complication of childbirth, more common than gestational diabetes or preeclampsia. And still it’s the thing we talk about least, the thing we’re most likely to hide.

Then there’s the systemic piece, the part that made me the most upset once I actually looked at it. In the weeks after birth, a baby is seen by a pediatrician repeatedly. Newborn visit, two week check, one month check, two month check, a steady rhythm of eyes on that baby’s growth and wellbeing. The mother who had carried and delivered that baby, who is recovering from a medical event that reshaped her body and her hormones and her identity, typically gets one comprehensive visit, and it’s scheduled for six to eight weeks out. One appointment to cover physical healing, mental health, infant feeding, and whatever else is happening, after which she’s largely on her own unless she flags a problem herself. I even had to go to a postpartum visit with my last child, and was nursing while I had my IUD placed in because of a lack of support. That was fun.

We built a system that watches the baby closely and checks on the mother once, later on, and only if she’s still standing by then.

I also hated the loneliness of maternity leave in a way that I feel guilty admitting, but I will because I know many of us feel the same. I love my babies and I was also alone in a house for hours at a stretch, feeling useless and unproductive. This had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with identity. That feeling got so loud that when COVID first hit, while I was pregnant with my second and nobody knew yet what the virus might do to a pregnancy, that I still wanted to go back into the hospital and work, despite the uncertainty. Almost because staying home and keeping my baby safe was being unhelpful to the world, which felt worse to me than the unknown. Of course, it was for the safety of my baby, which is a selfless job, but felt selfish to me to not help others, which I could quantify. And that is the thing, being a mom most days feels unquantifiable, while working, doing the errands that need to get done, checking the boxes that need to be checked all feel worth it because we can say we did it. Those days at home felt like a blur, when someone would ask what did I do all day, and I had nothing to answer. Looking back, I wish I could tell myself what I was doing was all worth it. The simple moments of sitting with your family or even with yourself are all worth it. We all deserve grace.

I don’t say any of this looking for a pat on the back. I say it because I think a lot of us are quietly negotiating with our own sense of usefulness during a season that’s supposed to be the most meaningful work we’ll ever do, and it can feel that way and also feel isolating and identity-erasing at the same time. Both things are true and neither cancels the other out.

There’s another kind of distance I didn’t expect, and that was the one between me and my husband. With our first, I never left the baby’s side except to go to work. The second I got home, I couldn’t even eat before I had to tend to him. My husband made the time for his own goals and hobbies, while I just threw myself to the side. I was always with a child, and my husband and I were always taking care of the baby, even on weekends. We just didn’t have time together anymore. Two people who loved each other, living in the same house, orbiting a baby instead of each other.

It took having our second for me to say something. I told my husband we needed to step out sometimes, just the two of us, so we started doing dinners here and there, nothing fancy, just leaving the house as a couple. Finally we asked for help from my parents to stay at home after putting the two kids to bed, to stay home so we can step out. Even then we had to wait until after bedtime. By the time we had three, we finally sought out some daily evening support, someone else in the house so we could actually breathe for a few minutes during the evening routines. And then, after four kids and five years of being in the thick of it, we managed to go away together, just us. We did three trips in one year that felt like bliss precisely because they were so hard won.

We don’t have that evening support anymore, so we’re back to something closer to where we started. Realistically, we probably can’t get away together again for a while. But I hold onto those trips as proof that it’s possible to find our way back to each other, even years in, even with four kids between us. It just takes someone naming the distance first. That is how you work through it. It is the first step in all of life.

What I keep coming back to is this. We need to check in on our moms more, not just our babies. We need more than a single box checked at six to eight weeks postpartum. We need to normalize asking for help before we’re in crisis, not after. Some of the research on this actually backs up what saved me that day on the walk, that a partner who stays engaged and asks and listens measurably lowers a mother’s depressive symptoms in those early months. It isn’t a small, soft thing, actually it’s protective.

And we need to give ourselves grace for the parts that don’t look like the movie version of birth. The tiredness that swallows the moment, the blank space where the flood of love was supposed to be, the resentment that creeps in next to the love, sometimes in the same hour. None of it means something is wrong with you. It might just mean nobody checked in on you soon enough, or often enough, or honestly enough, for you to say it out loud.

I said it on a walk, weeks later, to one person. I’m glad I did. I wish it hadn’t taken that long, and I wish it didn’t still take that long for so many of us. I do regret a lot of my postpartums, living like a zombie in such a blur. I wasn’t myself and sometimes I still think that is true right now. I want to do better, be better, to do right for my kids and for us all. 🫶🏽 I am here for you.