In a world where social media can portray perfect, I am keeping it real this week and sharing my experience postpartum, so that people who don’t feel like things with a newborn are perfect and also don’t feel alone. In this episode, I share my experience on maternity leave, why exactly I couldn’t wait to go back to work when I was so blessed to have a baby, and exactly how I took control of things to bounce back to a close version of my former self because having a baby does change you.
Table of Contents
ToggleResources:
- Follow Tiny Transitions on Instagram
- Book a Complimentary Discovery Call
- For Support: Postpartum Support International
Episode Highlights:
- My struggle with postpartum anxiety and intrusive thoughts
- Lack of sleep & lack of control
- Unrealistic expectations of new moms
- How to balance life and motherhood
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Podcast Episode Transcripts:
Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.
Welcome to the kids sleep show, podcast where we dive into the magical world of sleep and all things parenting. Join us as we embark on a journey filled with expert advice, practical tips and heartwarming stories that will transform your little ones into sleep superheroes and empower you to navigate the beautiful chaos of parenting. I’m your host, Courtney Zenz, and I’m on a mission to change how the world views sleep and provide accessible sleep coaching resources for all families to build healthy sleep habits in their home for children and adults of all ages. As an award winning speaker, author and pediatric sleep expert, myself and my team of consultants work intimately with families around the world to teach healthy sleep habits to children and adults. I believe wholeheartedly that sleep is the foundation for which a happy home is built. So let’s sleep together. Hey everyone, welcome to this week’s episode. I am not going to lie, I hated postpartum, and we’re going to talk about it today, because I think it’s super important that not everything is as perfect and beautiful as social media makes it. And so I had my son 10 years ago, things were certainly different. I was working full time in a corporate role where I had a team of direct reports and I didn’t know what I was doing. And I had my son on april 28 and it was month end. So my husband had to go back to work on the 29th because he had to close the books, and he was working for eBay at the time, and he was the only person as the International controller that could do that. So I was pretty much home from the hospital and thrust into motherhood. It was not this perfect experience that I think everyone makes it out to be. I had a nice diaper on. I had milk coming out of my boobs. They were bleeding and cracking. I was sleep deprived. I remember the first night walking around with my son just sobbing. I had no idea what was going on. It was two in the morning. My husband was sleeping, and I just cried. I cried and I walked our little split level kind of kitchen to dining room to living room, three bedroom, house in concert, Hawk and and I sobbed. And I was like, what did we do with this? Why did we do this? What do you want? Why are you crying? Like, I just fed you. You just woke up. I just changed you. Like, what do you need? You know, I didn’t know at the time he was hungry. And nobody ever told me that your breast milk doesn’t actually come in. And so it took a couple days for me to figure out, like he was hungry, you know, the colostrum was not satisfying him enough. I couldn’t bear the bleeding and cracking that was happening on my nipple, so to put him back on my boob after he just sat there for 20 minutes, wasn’t you know what I really knew to do. Frankly, I didn’t have any experience as some Bob, I came home from the hospital with this baby, and they made darn sure I wasn’t leaving till they checked that car seat 45 times. And that is just a terrible strategy. You know, we have so many rules, like, it’s harder to adopt a dog around here than it is to have a child. And we came home from the hospital left that day with the car seat perfectly buckled, which, again, I understand the importance of but that was it. It it was like, good luck, peace out. Hope you can raise this kid all by yourself. And my gosh, we are failing so many mothers these days and fathers too. You know, it’s, it’s, it is a struggle. I came home and I had what was called postpartum intrusive thoughts, meaning that I didn’t want to harm Max. But I I was almost paralyzed to do anything, because everything I thought to do resulted in my mind going to like dark places, like, well, I can’t go up the stairs to go to the bathroom, because what if I trip on the steps and I’m baby wearing and then I crack his head because I fall and I fall and smush him, right? I mean, they were just like the most ludicrous thoughts, but you can’t control them, right? And they can become very intrusive. I wouldn’t go outside because I was afraid I would trip on the sidewalk, and I didn’t want to drive. And there is still a bridge in Conshohocken that just recently I went over for the first time since having kids, because I was afraid I would veer the wheel off and take it down into 70 6am. Just a very weird time for me, because I was a very type a person. I am still very structured. I enjoy and thrive when I sleep eight hours a night. I want to be the best mother, the best wife, the best friend, the best sister, you know, the best daughter that I can to my family and try to be all things to all people. And yet I was failing myself in this postpartum period. And I didn’t have anybody to talk to. I didn’t have a village my dad was living, God knows where at the time, um, my brother was recently going through a divorce, so it was. I didn’t really have anyone to like, lean on, to say, like, what the heck is happening here? Except my best friend, Lindsay, at the time, lived one block over from me. They were just moving. She was three years ahead of us with regards to having her first kid, but she was really my outlet, who I could call and go, Hey,
I need help here. You know, something’s not right. I don’t feel my best right now. And she was really great about just listening to me. She’s like, you have postpartum anxiety, you have postpartum intrusive thoughts, you have postpartum depression, like she she had no, you know, kind of qualms about calling it like it was. But I didn’t even know. I didn’t see it. I didn’t know, and I didn’t know what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect what was happening at this moment, you know? So it was just a very crazy postpartum period, and I just want that to be normal for people like, your baby is not supposed to sleep through the night. They will not sleep through the night. But you know what? Like, I had breastfeeding shoved down my throat. And as a lactation counselor, I totally understand the importance of breastfeeding in that relationship. But you know it’s not for everybody, and I spiraled into such a crazy obsession about only feeding my son breast milk for the first 12 months of his life that it was borderline harmful to my mental health. Okay? I didn’t know what I didn’t know at the time, right? And I only knew what I was told. And my girlfriend, I remember, Serena, came over, and Max was up crying, and I didn’t know what was going on. And it turns out he was hungry, but he was three days old, and I had just nursed him, and I didn’t know what’s happening, and he was screaming. It was two in the morning. She came over the next morning, and I’m like, Dude, I don’t know what’s going on. I just fed him, I changed him, I tried to rock him. He just screams and screams and screams and screams, and I don’t know what to do. She’s like, where’s the sample formula bottles that they shipped you in the mail. And she grabbed one, threw a nipple on it, and gave it to him, and he passed out. He was hungry. I didn’t know yet that my milk hadn’t come in and that he could have perhaps been hungry when I just fed him 4000 times, to the point where, at three days, my nipples were already cracked and bleeding. Nobody told me that. They just said, I’ll keep trying. It’s a beautiful breastfeeding journey. And it was we figured it out, but I also supplemented where I need to, as my daughter came along, right? Because the whole first 12 months of my life, I was really conditioned by so many professionals to be like, breast is best, breast is the only way. And again, I get it. But like, after having my daughter, it was just such a different perspective on that, because I drove myself to a borderline needing help from like an institutional standpoint, because I went to talk to somebody, finally, it ended up not being the right fit for a variety of reasons, and I had my friends, and I relied on them, and I talked to my husband, and I, you know, I think I got also more confident in parenting, right, which happens as our kids grow. But it was just like, Oh my gosh. Like, this is not this perfect kumbaya 12 weeks of beautiful baby bliss that everybody makes maternity leave out to be, and that bringing a new parent in is like a vacation where you sit me Bon Bons, like I was crumbling on the inside at eight weeks we were driving to the beach, and I vividly remember the conversation, if you live in the Philadelphia area, we were on the 42 freeway, which connects 76 to the AC expressway to go to the beach. Max was sleeping in the back. We had only had max at this point. Savella wasn’t born. Wasn’t born. Max was eight weeks old, and I begged my husband to go back to work at eight weeks I could not wait to go back to work. Go to daycare. You’ll get some structure. I’ll get some structure. Peace out. That was my perspective, because I was so overwhelmed and ill prepared for motherhood. And I think the reason that I wanted to go back to work so bad was that because I didn’t love my son. I do innately love working. I still work full time. I that is my personality. So that works for our family. I love working, and I love the flexibility that owning this business has afforded me to be able to do it on my own terms, but I just loved the structure of the day and the fact that I knew I could drop them off, I knew when to pick them up. I knew I could have my own day of managing a team and thriving and making an impact in the world and doing all this. But I also had boundaries, right? And I thrived in a very type a structure. I still do. I have so much in my head at all times, but my day is very like structured and organized. I know exactly what I’m doing, so people don’t understand it, but I thrive on being busy and doing things that are soothing to me, even though. Seems like I’m always busy, you know, like for me, cutting the grass is soothing, working out is soothing. Helping others is soothing to me. Like painting a bedroom is soothing to me. Like I’m not the type of person to sit and read a book. I’m the type of person who likes to be busy and with a baby, that’s not always what you can and feel like doing. So it was just really sort of a tough period for me, but I wanted to talk about it because I think so much I see where it’s like this perfect Instagram esthetic of motherhood that is just so far from what so many women face. Like my husband and I are very much a team, and I talk about that a lot. We didn’t have traditional quote roles, but I felt like when I brought Max home, that I had to fall into this mold because he was working all day and I was sitting home I was supposed to have the laundry done in the house clean and the car washed and the grass cut and the garden planted and the vegetables picked and dinner on the table while nursing and milk flowing from my boobs like wine was supposed to be happening, and I was waddling around in an ice diaper trying to figure out what the heck was going on, trying not to drive off to the bridge, trying to to raise a little one, you know, and figure out how to get my sleep again, because I was losing my mind that I wasn’t sleeping Now my husband, I did figure out a good method that I actually teach a lot of my newborn sleep coaching clients these days, which was introducing a bottle like on day one, of either expressed breast milk or formula. And I would handle all day, and then my husband would do the bedtime bottle. I would pump and take a shower, and I would go right to bed, pretty much right after Savella, because at this point we had our second and we figured this out, right? And then at that point, I was also a certified lactation counselor. I was, you know, running tiny transitions from a sleep consulting standpoint. So, you know, we were starting to get better at this whole parenting thing, right? But that’s what we did, and it worked beautifully. Like he would do I would nurse, or he would do a bottle of bed, right? It was kind of either way, depending if, you know, he wanted to have some bonding time to that work trust. And then I would express, if I did nurse, I would just pump after, you know, I put Max down. And then that bottle that I expressed would be used for 10 o’clock. So we would do a dream feeding. So I would go to bed right at like, eight o’clock, and my husband would take the first quote shift. So he would go in at 10pm and wake up Savella, and then bring her out to the living room, offer a full feeding. He would grab some freezer stash or formula, whatever milk we had at the time, and he would offer a full feeding at 10 o’clock. And then I was basically up the rest of the night whenever Savella would wake because I had to be anyway to get the boobs emptied, because by, you know, going to bed at eight, at one or two o’clock when she woke up again, they were ready to go, right? So we had this nice little system that allowed me to get, like, six hours of sleep, and then he slept the rest of the night. So he got six hours of sleep. So we we built this nice little rhythm, and then it also prevented this total association with just the boob, because we introduced the bottle on day one. Now I hear a lot of times lactation counselors will talk about nipple confusion. I will tell you, as a lactation counselor for the past eight years and a sleep consultant for 10 years, I have never had a client whose baby had nipple confusion when they did this. Okay, you do have to watch the speed of the flow, so sometimes I will advise that you use a preemie nipple versus a number one when you have a newborn who you are introducing a bottle to to make sure that it’s not too coming out too quickly, for a variety of reasons. But that worked well for us, and it started to give me a semblance of normalcy pretty quickly with Savella that I just didn’t have with Max. And at eight weeks with Max, driving to the beach, my husband, you know what he said to me, just get a whiteboard. A whiteboard. That’s what he told me, just get a whiteboard. I wanted to punch him in his face when we were driving and passive aggressively, I ordered the biggest whiteboard Amazon sold at the time, and I literally wrote down every single thing that needed to be done. Now I took that and turned it into what we now sell@tinytransitions.com
called Tiny task boards, and it is a beautiful plexiglass acrylic that you can put right up on the fridge that allows guests, spouse, partner, family, friends, when they come over to just look at what needs to be done, they don’t gotta ask you, because the last thing I wanted to do when he came home from work was be like, could you change the diapers? Could you do the laundry? Could you go pick up the groceries? Like I didn’t want to have to think anymore. I was tired. Here’s the baby. I need a minute, right? And so it really was that first, like, kind of game changer moment for us, where we were like, Okay, if we can’t be type a super plenty pants with kids, what we can do is we can try to organize and structure life as. As we could, and that worked well for my mental capacity, for both our first kid and with our second daughter, Savella, you know, and we’re eight and 10 years in now. I mean, it does get easier, but it’s different, man, it’s just every year is different. Every year is something new that we’re learning as parents, that I try to pass on to you as you know, our clients here at Tiny transitions, but like, if you’re just coming home with a newborn and you are trying to figure it out, it is hard ask for help, seek guidance from myself. We have a vast amount of experience on the team from a professional like, find your village, and I promise we will be that for you if you need it. You know, we were just talking recently about, as our team grows in Philadelphia here, doing like in homes and almost being like, you know, a mother’s friend or right? And I forget what we were trying to call it. We’re gonna have lunch next week to talk a little bit more about it. But, you know, it’s like, sometimes you just want somebody to talk to during postpartum. It’s lonely just to come over and maybe hold the baby, maybe just chat, maybe share some things about sleep, lactation, car seats, you name it. We know it, right? And so we were talking about like, Hey, should we just, like, build a package that allows parents to kind of book us to come to their house and help them with whatever they need. And I hate the defined roles, right? Like in our space of postpartum, there’s like a doula that does this thing, then there’s a sleep consultant that does this thing, then there’s a lactation counselor that does this thing, then there’s maybe a dietitian that does this thing, right? And there’s so many of these defined roles, but it’s like, well, sometimes I just need, like, somebody to come over and sort of tackle all of it, and that’s what we’re talking about doing, because sometimes you just want a friend. Like, I remember craving somebody just stopping by. She’s like, What do you need? I’m like, toilet paper. We don’t have any toilet paper. And I was, like, freaking out. I’m like, but I didn’t want to leave the house. And she brought 12 rolls of toilet paper. Her name was Laura. She used to date her friend Mark, and I’ll never forget that she brought me 12 rolls of toilet paper because I was out of toilet paper, and I was too afraid to leave the house with Max. And I was just like, sometimes I just, I just want to talk to somebody. I just need a friend. I need someone to I don’t know, just stare at me while I cried. And she didn’t have kids at the time, but it was like, so darn lonely. And I just think we suck at supporting parents about it, you know? So I just want you to know if you’re in the period of postpartum, like, ask for help. There are ways that you can build good sleep balance. There are ways that you can build good intake with your baby, right? There’s ways that we can balance the mental load, because motherhood sucks. It’s hard. It’s the most beautiful and yet the most challenging experience of my life. And I’m so blessed that I was able to have two healthy children, but I am tested daily with different aspects of it, and I’m not always perfect, but I’m trying to raise like decent humans and do the best I can at it and not put up some esthetic that life’s perfect, because it’s not, you know. So I just want you to know, in solidarity with you, I’m here to tell you that it’ll be okay, and if you need a village, we will happily do that for you. As I said, I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t love the first 12 weeks of life with a newborn, but that was just me, and that was my experience, and I think it’s important to talk about it. And I very much love my kids. I always have. My husband does as well. We’re a great team, but it’s not always perfect, and I just want you to know that I know that we’re here to help you, if you should ever need it, you can learn more about tiny transitions out@tinytransitions.com We’ve got lots of education. I have an amazing newborn ebook. It’s like 40 pages long. I give it away for free intentionally, because I want you to feel supported too, and it’s right out in our sleep resource library on the website, along with all of our other downloads, like we give away so much stuff out there, not to be overwhelming, but to be educated, so that you understand what you’re doing. And you know, you can start somewhere to get some support. And we want to be that. We want to be that village for you. So thanks so much for listening. Be sure to tune in. We try to do new episodes every single week, sleep guests, you name it, we’ve got them here, and I appreciate if you leave a review and subscribe to the podcast if you like it, all right, until next week. Everybody. Bye for now. One more thing before you go, don’t forget to subscribe. Leave a review or share this episode with someone you know who could use a little more sleep in their life. For tips and resources. Be sure to visit us@tinytransitions.com or follow us across social media, here’s to better sleep, brighter days and healthier, happier families. You.