Things I Do for My Postpartum Friends As A Perinatal Psychiatrist

Tips by time period to help your friend who is about to have a mini friend

Let’s start with a few assumptions before we get into this article and what I’ve learned so far being an aunt, a friend, and physician to new parents.

In our society, there is a lot of focus on the primary core of community being the nuclear family. You know this already, and so do I. Especially for women, the story of a meaningful life has been almost exclusively around marriage and having children. There are many parts of the internet and my own writings that get at questioning the overvaluation of this component of life that also devalues other forms of love, community, and meaning.

Paradoxically, within this world view comes a set of ideas that women will automatically know how to mother, how to care for a family, and that other women will know almost magically how to care for the mother. This is all care work, and it is a set of skills that can be learned. However, many people are stuck in the socialized story that if you don’t have these skills immediately, then something is wrong. The implication being the damning story that there is something not maternal, not caring, not feminine enough about you. This story keeps women separated from one another, especially when some women are having children and mothering, others are not, and all of them feel bad for the current status of their life and a sense that somehow, always, they are doing something wrong.

This article is for people who are in kind and caring friendships or communities where you think it would be a delight to be able to be with your friend during this period, but you don’t know where to start. This article is not an exploration of if your friend is there for you in your life as much as they want from you in their parenthood, if there is prior resentment in the friendship, or a sense that one woman’s stage of life is no longer as interesting or mature as the other’s. That article should be written, but it isn’t this one.