Six weeks after Theo was born, someone asked me if I was “back to normal yet.” I was standing in my kitchen in leggings I’d worn three days running, holding a baby who’d been up since 4, and I genuinely did not know how to answer. Back to normal? There was no normal to go back to. There was just this new, enormous, disorienting life, and a body and a brain still scrambling to catch up to it.
I want to write the honest version of postpartum, because the version I absorbed from the internet (the one where you “bounce back”) did me real harm.
“Bounce back” is a lie, and a cruel one
Your body spent the better part of a year doing something genuinely miraculous and physically enormous. The idea that it should snap back to its old shape in a few weeks, like a rubber band, is quietly cruel. It takes the most ordinary thing in the world (a body that grew a person, looking like it grew a person) and reframes it as a problem to be fixed. I bought into it for a while, and I spent energy I did not have feeling bad about my own stomach. I would like that energy back.
NYC has its own particular version of the pressure
This city runs on a certain image of effortless put-togetherness, and it doesn’t politely pause for your fourth trimester. I’d see moms who looked camera-ready pushing strollers through Park Slope and feel like I was failing some test I hadn’t agreed to take. It took me far too long to realize I was comparing my exhausted insides to other people’s carefully curated outsides, the way you do on a bad scroll, except this was in real life, on my own block.
What was actually going on under the surface
The physical recovery was one thing. The mental part was bigger, and far less visible. The hormone crash. The identity whiplash of becoming someone’s mother overnight. The low, steady hum of anxiety underneath everything. Some of it was the normal, brutal adjustment everyone goes through. Some of it, I eventually understood, was tipping into something more — and talking to my doctor about it was the most important thing I did all year. If you’re reading this and the heaviness just isn’t lifting, please tell someone. It is common, it is not your fault, and it is treatable.
The feeding guilt belongs in this conversation too
So much of my early postpartum pain had nothing to do with my body at all. It was guilt about how I was feeding my son after my supply gave out. That deserves its own honest treatment, which is exactly why I wrote a whole separate piece on letting go of the combo-feeding guilt. But it belongs here too, because “bounce back” culture and “breast is best at any cost” culture are really the same machine, and both of them run on a tired new mother’s certainty that she is somehow doing it wrong.
What I’d tell you instead of “bounce back”
Settle in. Don’t bounce back. Let the recovery take exactly as long as it takes. Lower every standard that isn’t about keeping you and the baby fed and reasonably safe. Wear the comfortable clothes. Accept the help — or ask for it outright if it isn’t offered, which in this city it too often isn’t. And find the other honest mothers, the ones who’ll admit they cried in the shower too, instead of the ones performing serenity for an audience.
You did not fail to bounce back. You’re doing the slow, unglamorous, real work of becoming someone new, in a body that just did something extraordinary. That deserves patience. It does not deserve a deadline.
