the 4th trimester, books, and blogs

The “4th trimester” is a term that has growing in popularity recently (and with it better policies!). It refers to the first 3 months after a baby is born, when there is still substantial growing happening (the baby develops the ability to sweat, to produce tears, to hold his/her head up, etc).

The exciting part is just how much more this period of time is being acknowledged by the women’s health community, including by healthcare providers. People are realizing that this is a period that can be quite difficult for women to adjust to, as well as babies. More discussions about postpartum depression, as well as physiological changes that can happen to the women are being had  (like how many women find that their stomach muscles do not “bounce back” after birth whether its due to diastasis recti aka abdominal muscle separation, or from having issues with pelvic organ prolapse).

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists came out with a statement called “Optimizing Postpartum Care” this past May that talks about changes they believe should be included in the healthcare protocols/coverage, including an initial contact with the Ob/Gyn within 3 weeks of the baby being born, and then a comprehensive examination by 12 weeks to include “a full assessment of physical, social, and psychological well-being, including the following domains: mood and emotional well-being; infant care and feeding; sexuality, contraception, and birth spacing; sleep and fatigue; physical recovery from birth; chronic disease management; and health maintenance”.

There are also doctors out there like Eva Zasloff (the founder of Tova Health), who are trying to reform postpartum care even more by offering comprehensive combined mom and baby postpartum care via home visits. So instead of having to rush out to the doctors’ offices for all these check-ups, she (or someone from her team) comes to you to allow you and your baby to get checked from the comfort of your own home, which can also reduce the likelihood of getting infections/sicknesses from others coming in to see the doctor. Honest Mamas, a group of three moms who are also psychotherapists who make podcasts recently did an interview with Dr. Zasloff that can be found here.

My obsession about learning more about the 4th trimester (in tandem with my love of understanding how pregnancy, motherhood, and parenting are done in other countries) led me to this article called “How the World Nourishes Mothers” the other day on goop.com. They did a Q&A with Heng Ou, a mother and the creator of MotherBees, a company that does meal deliveries to new moms. The meals are based on zuo yuezi, a Chinese ideology of nourishing a new mom with specific warming foods to welcome her and help her transition into motherhood. Ou also wrote a book called The First Forty Days, which I plan to read (and use!) and will write up about afterwards in my books of the season post.

It’s interesting to think about how different cultures respond to new moms. For women that are blessed with communities and support systems, a wide array of behaviors can be seen, from how much rest time moms are expected to have, to what foods people bring them.

And lastly, since I first wrote this when I was getting quite close to my own due date, I’ve been looking to hear more about the 4th trimesters experience of new moms’. One morning, amidst a bout of insomnia, I came across this post by Jen Eddins on her blog Peanut Butter Runner. She talks about her life as a mom of a now 3-week old, her emotions, how her body is doing, etc.

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Hey, if what you read seemed dated or familiar, I’ve been combining all my other blogs’ content to this site. Please bear with me as I post older content.  🙂

on matrescence

If you follow news in the field of maternal health, you may have heard the term matrescence thrown around in the last year or so.

Often defined as the transition of a woman into motherhood, it has also been likened to going through adolescence again, mom-style, due to:

• the fluctuation in hormones,
• the rapid changes in the body,
• the newly forming identity of oneself and one’s place in society, as well as
• changes in one’s day to day life.

Alexandra Sacks, a psychiatrist, wrote a piece in the NY Times called The Birth of A Mother that proposes an idea for why this transition is so powerful, but often overlooked. She explains how a lot of this transition is overshadowed because society focuses on the baby and ignores how momentous of a change it is for the mother.

This lack of conversation around the realities of becoming a mother has been suspect in being one of the many factors that contributes to postpartum depression, as a mother may feel she is supposed to be ecstatic about her newborn baby, without expressing any negative emotions despite the magnitude of change her life has just undergone.

In effort to mitigate that mental divide, allowing mothers to express all their emotions, and to create recognition in society about the magnitude of change motherhood is, many companies, academic institutes, and individual professionals are researching and producing more information about this time, working to get the message across. Another huge player in the field is the clinical psychologist Aurélie Athan, whose focus is on reproductive psychology. She looks at both striving and struggling moms in order to normalize the transition to motherhood and continues to work to revive the term and meaning of matrescence. She has even worked on getting some of the first academic concentrations and graduate-level certificate programs created that focus on reproductive and maternal wellbeing because she recognizes the importance of getting health providers, activists, and others involved in the spread of awareness about matrescence.

So if you are a new mom wondering why you feel so off, so different, and how to deal with these feelings of ambivalence towards your new life, know that you are not alone and that you should definitely speak up about how you feel. It will help cultivate a culture of acceptance around our motherhood adolescence.

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Hey, if what you read seemed dated or familiar, I’ve been combining all my other blogs’ content to this site. Please bear with me as I post older content.  🙂 This is a quick blurb from the women’s health field (a field I find endlessly fascinating).

healing skin, hormones, and hot nights

It’s currently 3am and I’m awake despite the little one actually having been asleep since 830ish.

“Why on earth are you awake?”, you may be asking yourself, and rightly so.

Well let me tell you, internet reader. I am hot.

Now though the ambient temperature in the room feels cool, I know I set my thermostat a bit high (in my defense, with the skin disorder I’m usually always freezing, and the baby likes it warm too). However, I am not sweating. I’m just really warm. Warm enough to sleep in just a t-shirt and underwear, which I haven’t done since before my skin declared mutiny on my body (circa 20013?).

So as I’m over here pondering my existence in a semi-lucid state at 3 in the morning, the question that keeps popping up on the forefront of my mind is: this heat, what does this mean?

What does this mean? I’ve got a few theories.

1. My skin has shown an unprecedented amount of healing lately. I have soft skin on my face, stomach, back, and thighs. Perhaps I have done the majority of my topical steroid withdrawal pemance and am finally seeing the results, aka having skin of normal thickness and elasticity and with the ability to retain heat and moisture.  Maybe. Or, maybe,
2. I have finally hit the point where, despite still breastfeeding (which can delay this), my hormones are kicking back in, and I am soon to rejoin the ranks of menstruating-aged women. In which case, hormones could be the culprit for my heated sleep body. Or, perhaps,
3. My circadian rhythm is so butchered from having to wake up at all manner of times during the night shift for the last 7 months (more if you count pregnancy months too) that my body doesn’t know what to do with un-externally regulated sleep interruptions, and so in a desperate attempt to keep its new status quo, it’s driving me awake via continued thermoregulation fluctuations. Maybe that’s it.

Or maybe it’s some culmination of the three of those things because as is often the case with complex systems like humans, we don’t always have a simple solution.

At any rate, I’m enjoying the fact that my little one is getting so much sleep, and that I’m getting some silky smooth patches of skin. I’m not stressed and as I am awake I am making sure to hydrate, so I’m sure in time I’ll learn to sleep again. So c’est la vie et bonne nuit (that’s life and good night).