I’m Still Here — After the birth of your baby
There’s so much interest in you and the baby within you, when you’re pregnant. Appointments, how you’re feeling, how you’re sleeping, your body, what’s happened this week.
And then you have your baby, and they’re their own person, and the interest switches to them.
And that’s wonderful. Your baby should be loved and cared for. But sometimes, somewhere in that shift, it can feel like you disappear from the picture a bit.
You’re still there. Your body is recovering. You’re adjusting to an enormous change. And you still need to be able to talk about how you are. “I’m still here”, you might think. “I grew a human. I birthed an actual human and yet I’m still here a person in my own right”.
I’ve been teaching pregnancy and postnatal yoga in E14 since 2011. I’ve worked with thousands of women in that time. And the same thing has come up again and again, in classes, in messages, in the things women say to me quietly after everyone else has gone home.
The support that was there during pregnancy tends to fall away once the baby is born. The appointments stop. The checks become about the baby. And she’s left to work it out.
I noticed it. And then I remembered I’d lived it.
When I was pregnant with my eldest, I had an ovarian tumour. At seven weeks it twisted, and I ended up in surgery to remove my ovary and fallopian tube. I kept my son. But I was recovering from surgery and pregnancy at the same time.
Then he arrived, and I was trying to breastfeed, and it wasn’t working, and I was recovering from pregnancy while my body was still dealing with everything else. I had people around me. But I didn’t feel like myself. And I carried guilt for a lot of my children’s early lives, for not being in the best health.
There was nothing clinically wrong with me. I didn’t need a medical intervention. But I really needed an additional layer of support. Someone who was thinking about me, not just the baby. I didn’t have the words for most of it at the time. I just knew something was missing.
Later, when my youngest was born, my dad’s decline began. A different kind of hard, at the same time as everything else.
I tell you this not because I figured it out and you haven’t. I tell you because I know what it feels like to be in the middle of it and not have the words, and to need someone who isn’t looking at the baby.
I see the same thing in my postnatal classes now. Women who apologise for not coming to class earlier, whose babies are six or seven months old, who say it was hard but can’t really explain where the hard is. It’s a massive combination of exhaustion and overwhelm, and that nagging feeling that doesn’t go away, and feeling like she’s behind, and always apologising for something. For taking up space. Always apologising.
And then there are the women who come to postnatal classes far too early, not because they’re ready, but because they don’t want to be alone in their house with a crying baby all day, every day.
Both of those things are signs of the same gap.
I recognise them because I lived a version of it. Not the same as yours. Your hard is yours. But the shape of it, the feeling of disappearing behind the job of looking after everyone else, that part I know.
Women who grew a human and birthed an actual human, and who need that to be seen. It’s easy to be blasé about pregnancy and birth, but for the woman doing it, it’s a huge deal. And I want you to know that I see you. I know what an amazing thing you’ve done, and what you continue to do.
We lose ourselves a bit. Everything becomes about the baby. We need a little bit of time and attention for ourselves.
That’s why I created The Maternal Pathway.
It’s a private 12-week programme where I work with you individually after your baby arrives. It’s not a course. It’s not six yoga sessions. It’s me, in your corner, for 12 weeks during your baby’s first year.
You don’t need to know exactly what you need when we start.
We figure that out together.
I only work with three women at a time. I’m keeping it small on purpose.
I’m not advertising it widely. If it sounds like something you’d want to know more about, send me a message. I’ll send you the full picture, and we can have a conversation about whether it’s right for you. No pressure, no follow-up.
I created the support I wish I’d had.
Because when everyone else is looking at the baby, I want you to know that I’m looking at you. You’re still here.
And I see you.
Shar E14YogaCoach
