Ever find yourself recounting your birth story to someone, and then ending it with a laugh and “it doesn’t matter, as long as my baby’s healthy”? Or maybe you’ve been on the receiving end of this story, and you’ve just heard a traumatic story filled with medical gaslighting and interventions bordering on violent, such as forced birth positions or performing procedures without anesthesia or pain meds.

Have you heard the phrase "happy mom, happy baby"? Or has someone ever told you to relax, you're causing the baby to fuss?

There's a moment that a lot of new mothers know. It's maybe week three or four. Your partner has gone back to work. The house is quiet in a way that doesn't feel peaceful. The baby is fed and sleeping, and you are sitting there, exhausted, anxious, and wondering why no one told you it would feel like this.

What is a good mother to you? If you’re drawing a blank, think about all of the things that you have seen on Instagram, on TV shows and movies in your life that depict a good mother. Think about the qualities that that mother has, or those mothers have. Write those down, seriously, everything that you feel makes up a good mother.

This weekend in the US is daylight savings, so you’ve likely seen an onslaught of social media posts on how to prepare your baby for the time change. Tips will range from fine-tuning nap times and bed times in 15-minute increments to shifting your whole day by an hour, complete with tables to calculate wake windows for each stage of babyhood.

We all know about the dangers of social media. There’s the unrealistic portrayals, the comparison game, the toxicity of the comments section. But when you are newly postpartum, those 3am Instagram reels are probably one of the worst things you can do to your brain.

We are taught from a young age that we can do anything we set our minds to. Women can have it all: career, family, and a loving partner. What we don’t get taught is how hard it is to have it all. Climbing the career ladder is hard. Finding a loving, equitable partnership is hard. And raising children without a village is hard. But we’re given this script that when we have children, we need to be everything for that child. We need to know everything there is to know about bottle feeding and chestfeeding and which is better and why pacifiers are bad but why they might also be good, and why daycare is bad for your kid but also if you stay at home you’re not a good role model for your kids, and that you need to buy all the right toys to engage your newborn but your house needs to be spotless. It’s an impossible goal to aim for. And the reason you feel like you’re running yourself ragged is simple: the standard for modern motherhood is physically and logistically unsustainable.

You’ve had your baby. You’re in the thick of the newborn haze, soaking in the snuggles, healing your body. But your house is also a wreck, you’ve been eating takeout for weeks, and you don’t know the last time you showered. Perhaps your partner has returned to paid work (if they were able to get any time off at all) and you are spending hours alone, caring for a newborn. You might be wondering, at this point: “Where the heck is my village?”

You’ve just finished feeding your newborn, burped them, changed their diaper, and set them down for their nap. Finally, some time for yourself! But then you see your baby start wriggling and grunting. They’re turning their head from side to side, chewing on their fists—how can they possibly be hungry again? And then, a thought comes into your tired, postpartum brain: Am I making enough milk?

You’re having a baby! Congratulations, now what? There’s no shortage of Baby Registry Must-Haves and Checklists, selling you every gadget under the sun: baby monitors, special socks, cribs that rock and hush your baby, formula makers that rival the fanciest espresso machine, toys that promise to improve baby’s cognition week by week. But really, what do you need for your newborn baby?

Modern medicine has tricked us into thinking that postpartum only lasts the first 6-8 weeks, but in reality, it lasts a lot longer. Some say the entire first year, some say until you stop chestfeeding, others say it can last up to 7 years, and then there’s the fact that infancy lasts up to age 3. The truth is, the identity shift you experience as a mother, even if it’s not your first baby, lasts forever. You are always discovering new parts of yourself as your children age and come into their own.

Having a baby should be the happiest time of your life, right? After 9-10 long months, several hours of labor, to say nothing of the planning you may have gone through to even get pregnant, your bundle of joy is finally here. But you feel…lonely. Why is that? And why does no one talk about it?

You’ve planned out your pregnancy, your birth, the nursery, even the outfit your new baby will come home in. But have you planned out your postpartum experience?

While announcing your pregnancy to family, friends, and coworkers is a personal choice, I advocate for telling your manager—if you feel safe to do so—about your pregnancy earlier rather than later. Why do I advise this? First trimester.