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 didn’t 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 that were still catching 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.
The “bounce back” thing is a lie, and a cruel one
Your body spent the better part of a year doing something 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 frames the most ordinary thing in the world (a body that grew a human looking like it grew a human) as a problem to be fixed. I bought into it for a while and spent energy I did not have feeling bad about my own stomach. I’d like that energy back.
NYC has its own particular pressure
This city runs on a certain image of effortless put-togetherness, and that doesn’t pause for the fourth trimester. I’d see moms who looked camera-ready pushing strollers through Park Slope and feel like I was failing some test. It took me too long to realize I was comparing my exhausted insides to other people’s curated outsides, the way you do on a bad scroll, except 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 less visible. The hormone crash, the identity whiplash of becoming someone’s mother overnight, the low-grade anxiety that hummed under everything. Some of it was the normal, brutal adjustment. Some of it, I eventually understood, was edging 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 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 wasn’t about 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 why I wrote a whole separate piece on letting go of the combo-feeding guilt. But it belongs here, because “bounce back” culture and “breast is best at any cost” culture are the same machine, and both of them feed on a tired new mother’s certainty that she’s doing it wrong.
What I’d tell you instead of “bounce back”
Settle in, don’t bounce back. Let the recovery take 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 if it isn’t offered, which in this city it often isn’t. And find the other honest mothers, the ones who’ll tell you they cried in the shower too, not the ones performing serenity for an audience.
You did not fail to bounce back. You’re doing the slow, real work of becoming someone new, in a body that just did something extraordinary. That deserves patience, not a deadline.