Motherhood in the Trenches: What Do We Owe Postpartum Women?

What are mothers due in the months after giving birth? I am not here to defend or denounce Lindsay Clancy. But as a mother of six children ranging in ages 14 to 3 years old, it’s been impossible for me not to think about this question in light of the recent mistrial and divided public response. If we fail to provide an answer, we fail to lay the foundation required for a pronatalist society.

Motherhood is forged in the intensity of the time that we call postpartum. Unavoidably concrete, it is as necessary a passage as the birth canal, as identifiable as biophysical markers and dates on a calendar, as real as the categories of male and female. Yet, the postpartum period is mysterious. We know too little. We often treat symptoms as if they are in a woman’s mind, something that will clear up once the fog of birth lifts. 

The Darkness I Never Expected

I had my first four children without much incident. The months after their births were characterized by a sweeping sense of awe and gratitude—this is the greatest experience of my life!—mixed with the normal fatigue and mood swings brought on by a disrupted sleep schedule and a cocktail of maternal hormones. Because newborns need to eat every few hours, this often meant the longest stretch of sleep I ever got was a couple of hours at a time. My babies tended to be poor sleepers, so I accrued quite a sleep deficit. But I was doing a hard thing, and it felt good; as my baby was developing, I was also being made. 

But something dark and unexpected entered after my fifth child was born. I could not sleep, and I became increasingly agitated, prone to fits of rage and aggression, which terrified and confused me, leaving me sobbing violently in the fetal position on the floor after each episode. I was unprepared for such ferocity. I had always been described by others as patient and kind. I wanted to be a mother from the time I was a girl; it was my main ambition! I loved being pregnant, I loved the power of giving birth, and I loved being with my children. So, then, what the hell was this?

After one breakdown, I reached out to a trusted spiritual mentor and to an exceptionally gifted Catholic counselor who introduced me to cognitive behavioral therapy and accompanied me out of the darkness. I had a sixth baby, and it felt like a redemptive experience. He was born on Christmas Eve and came home on Christmas Day. He was a cherub, and I applied all the lessons of the last birth to set up supports and to give myself the grace to nap when I could and to temporarily lower expectations in most other areas of life so that I could instead focus on enjoying our new baby. I look back to that peaceful, joyful time with fondness. 

We often treat postpartum symptoms as if they are in a woman’s mind, something that will clear up once the fog of birth lifts.

But just when I thought I was out of the woods because the baby was a year old, that dark thing entered again. I had to wrestle with it, often late in the night, terrified and confused by the violent thoughts rushing at me and the visceral reality of emotions turned into bodily symptoms like a racing heart, sweaty palms, and clenched fists. 

One night I wrote in my journal, 

I feel like in these outbursts I'm begging for help, for some way to release the intense pressure I feel. I wish to die. I say violent things. I talk about suicide. I say crazy things, my voice changes, I jump and gesticulate and am unrecognizable. I started packing a bag today, saying I needed to go check into hospital, or at least go somewhere else. 

During Holy Week that year, I could not sleep for multiple days in a row. Images started to intrude in my mind’s eye:  an apple I'm cutting turns to brown rot, an old man lying dead on a cot lifts his head to look at me with hollow golden eyes, a ship splits and sinks, dots of light stream at me like snow in a blizzard. Sleep deprivation is so strange, and the mind is so fragile. I clung to prayer, though I felt little consolation in those moments. Still, I continued offering it up, carrying the cross alongside the One who carries it for me, taking it one moment at a time. 

And things were fine until they were not—the back and forth was maddening. So I went for psychiatric evaluation at a well-regarded institution. I was told that I met diagnostic criteria for rapid cycling bipolar 2, but this was said tentatively—as it was also possible that this was a postpartum issue that would resolve with time. 

Solidarity of the Shaken 

Perhaps counterintuitively, my postpartum experience gave me a recognition of the challenges facing young men. When I hear about deaths of despair or men talking about struggles with failure and addiction, I recognize in their stories the familiar arc of breakdown. I feel a sort of kinship—the “solidarity of the shaken” that Czech philosopher Jan Patočka once described. 

This also helps me to understand another unlikely pairing: the once-common historical comparison of mothers and soldiers. As Erika Bachiochi has written,

Historically, in many important public policy debates in our country, mothers were explicitly and favorably compared to soldiers and war veterans. Like soldiers, mothers were understood to serve the common good in a uniquely sacrificial way. Speaking to the Congress of Mothers in 1908 at their First International Congress for the Welfare of the Child, President Theodore Roosevelt declared: ‘This is the one body that I put even ahead of the veterans of the Civil War; because when all is said and done it is the mother, and the mother only, who is a better citizen even than the soldier who fights for his country … the mother is the one supreme asset of national life.’ Unlike today, this early twentieth-century maternalist rhetoric was culturally ubiquitous and matched by material support.

It’s not that mothers are hypersensitive and weak, but that motherhood requires that women draw on deep reserves of strength, particularly in the postpartum period because of its round-the-clock nature, physical recovery after birth, and sleep deprivation. Disrupted sleep seems especially relevant as a shared condition between new mothers and soldiers. For example, there is evidence that sleep insufficiencies are a key driver of psychiatric symptoms among military personnel. Moreover, both veterans and postpartum mothers face heightened risk of suicide.

Gaps in Maternal Care Erode Trust

When I went back to the psychiatrist several months after my initial evaluation, I had to see a new therapist because my old one left. Which meant I had to repeat my whole story again—the darkest moments of my life spilled out on the table for a note-taking stranger. She told me the same thing. I felt unnerved by her flatline response. I left feeling like I’d gone to confession, but without the relief of absolution. Even so, I booked another appointment for a few months later, as a kind of accountability against insanity, I suppose. It is what you are supposed to do when you no longer understand or can trust yourself. 

Again, I was met by a different psychiatrist, this time for neuropsychological testing. I arranged a babysitter and completed a battery of online tests. I remember feeling like time to myself with child care was such a precious thing and wondered if heading to a coffee shop with a book might turn out to be more healing than this regimen. 

Pro-family conservatives need not fear discussing the complexities of women’s postpartum health. It’s actually a place where our loving response is especially needed.

A few weeks later, there was still no response about my results. I was told to follow up, which I did, even directly reaching out to the psychiatrist. But I never received a reply. By this point, my baby was two years old, and I was feeling like I’d come out of a strange tunnel and had been restored to myself. So, I dropped it. But I wondered: what might have happened if I had been in crisis?

The system is overloaded by high demand. As I know from my own circle of mom friends, postpartum issues are not uncommon. But it can be disheartening to discover that even professionals seem mystified by the postpartum period and uncertain about what to do. 

Supporting New Moms

Now that my youngest child is almost four years old, my instinct is to close the book on that chapter of life. I catch myself getting annoyed when I hear other mothers talking about their challenges. Frankly, I’ve lost interest. Or maybe it’s too unpleasant to remember. I want to say, “Things will get better. Don’t worry so much about it!” There is some wisdom in that outlook. I’m tempted to look back at myself and think I should have just been a little tougher. 

But the Lindsay Clancy case has forced me to reconsider what is incredibly uncomfortable to look back on. 

Time. When I reflect on what brought me out of that dark tunnel, I believe that time had a lot to do with it. Now that I’m not pregnant or breastfeeding, and am sleeping through the night, the same things that used to irritate me or push me past my limits do not feel like a big deal. It was helpful when I was in the thick of things to talk with other moms who were slightly older and could both tell me that they could relate to my experience and that it would get better. And it has. My kids are older; they help out with chores and with each other. 

Relieve the Pressure. Something else that has been helpful is to take the pressure off myself. Well-intentioned pressure on moms comes from two different fronts: the career-minded, and the attachment-theorists. On the one hand, mothers are pressured to be contributing members of society, which too often is understood to mean paid work. On the other hand, we are pressured to be fully present for our children at all times, which can leave us without boundaries or structure, or the ability to accomplish necessary tasks—all of which contribute to the feeling of being overwhelmed. 

But I think there is a way to prioritize motherhood without being consumed by it. One of the people who helped me learn this was a dear priest, a conservative and one of 10 children, who led a small group for moms that I attended during my postpartum struggles. I remember being surprised when he told me how his own mother took time for herself every day, and that the kids knew to respect that time. 

When I was feeling overwhelmed, my first instinct was to cut back on everything else and focus on motherhood. My priest friend gently encouraged me in a different direction. He said that he spends a lot of time counseling mothers who are facing identity crises after their kids leave home. He encouraged me to not give up the other God-given interests and callings in my life. Motherhood was my vocation—but not my sole identity. 

What if instead of trial-and-error prescriptions and rounds of appointments, our first course of action for mothers in crisis was simply an opportunity for rest?

Refreshment for Moms. I also started taking short trips every few months, inspired by a friend whose husband had taken their daughters to his parents for a week to give his wife a “mommy vacation,” and by another friend who gracefully combined travel and motherhood without guilt. During these trips, I  visit a friend, do some reading and writing, or go on retreat. These experiences marked a new season for me. Something about going away and then coming back provides a reality check: I feel extra grateful for my children and delighted by our time together. Everyone needs rest and opportunities for lifelong learning, as Charlotte Mason reminded mothers over a hundred years ago, during a time when she noted that “the ‘break-downs’ of mothers” were “growing more frequent every day.”

Which makes me wonder—what if instead of trial-and-error prescriptions and rounds of appointments, our first course of action for mothers in crisis was simply an opportunity for rest? Ideally, a woman’s own network of family and friends might step in to watch older children and take care of all practical needs so that an exhausted mother might be given permission to focus on nothing but sleeping, eating, and caring for her baby for a few days. 

Educating Dads. Of course, fathers are an essential support—though in intense postpartum times they may be at sea in their own way. I didn’t realize back then how stressed and confused my husband David was in response to the changes he was seeing in me. Often, he was heroic; sometimes, he would shut down. Fathers of postpartum mothers might be uncertain what to do, and in need of their own support. Educating fathers about the postpartum period and possible red flags, as well as making it a norm for insurance to cover marital counseling in the early years after birth could both be godsends for couples facing this stress.

Because sometimes, even when you have a supportive community, outside help is necessary. Even though I have a thick web of loving people in my life, there were moments when I felt desperate for rest but for some reason could not bring myself to ask for it from the people closest to me. I’d even wish I was dying so that I would have an excuse to do nothing but lie in a hospital bed and sleep. But I had already asked so much from so many people who had their own busy lives—how could I ask for more without being a burden? 

Hospitality for Postpartum Moms. For mothers without supportive networks, or who have already exhausted the resources of their networks, what if there was another option? I can imagine houses of hospitality for new mothers—homey and welcoming like birthing centers and made for postpartum mothers who are not yet in a full-blown psychiatric crisis but feel the need for respite. 

Maybe this is something that the pro-life movement—with its network of women’s centers and its mission to love both mother and baby—could build as the next logical extension of its work? Houses of worship, whose buildings are often underutilized during the week, could even play a role in this kind of care, much as they have stepped in to start preschool and mothers-day-out programs. Postpartum services for mothers do exist, but it would be be helpful for this kind of care to become more mainstream, and even better if it could be covered by insurance. 

Pro-family conservatives need not fear discussing the complexities of women’s postpartum health. It’s actually a place where our loving response is especially needed—and where dedicated study of what helps postpartum moms thrive could give real life to the pronatalist vision.

Amber Lapp is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, an adviser at American Compass, and co-investigator of the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Institute for Family Studies.

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