Your Home is Ready for the New Baby: But Are You?

I was three months postpartum when I went on my first overnight trip without my son. I wondered at first if it was too early for me to be away from him – and then remembered that my mother resumed her busy business travel schedule exactly three months after she had both me and my sister. I also talked about it with my therapist, and after meeting with her, I decided definitively that it would be a good idea to spend a couple of days out of my home after being home a whole lot – often alone – and my husband and family absolutely agreed with me on that.

So I rented a car (I made it a fun sports car) and got ready to leave for the weekend. I asked my sister to come down for a couple of days to give my husband a hand. I know he would have been fine solo, but at this point our son wasn’t sleeping through the night, and having another person around would mean that he could catch a nap or two during the day while handling all the night wake-ups and feedings. I left on a Friday afternoon and came home by Sunday evening – it wasn’t a long trip, nor was it too far away, but it was beyond helpful to have that time away. I spent precious time with some of my best friends, laughed so much that my face hurt from smiling, and got two whole nights of uninterrupted sleep for the first time since giving birth. By the time Sunday afternoon rolled around, I missed my baby more than I thought possible, and I was 100% ready to go home – but I went home feeling refreshed and more relaxed than I’d been when I left home.

This trip was a direct reflection of the support system I had in place during my postpartum period that helped to make my life manageable during that time. When I was nearing the end of my pregnancy, I gave some thought to what my life would be like postpartum, but I didn’t really know what it was going to be like – and honestly, after talking to a lof of my friends about it, I don’t think anyone really knows what it will be like before you’re there. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take some steps to get ready for it. If you’re getting ready for that postpartum time, here are a few things to consider to make that period a little better.

If you’re not in therapy, consider starting.

This topic actually came up when I was at my friend’s bachelorette, talking over breakfast at the AirBNB we’d rented. One of our friends on the trip was about six months pregnant and was asking the new moms in the room (there were four or five of us) for recommendations on getting ready for life with a baby. One of my other friends – who had two children at this point and had given birth to her first baby a few years before me – pointed to me and chimed in, “You should talk to Patrice about starting therapy so you already have it in place when you’re postpartum. It was really smart of her, and that’s something I wish I’d done.”

Therapy was a critical tool for me while I was in the process of getting ready to have a baby, and it was a lifesaver when I was postpartum. I had someone to talk to about everything I was feeling – from the serious to the trivial – and whose primary concern was helping me to manage everything I was experiencing. While I had a beyond-supportive husband, immediate family, and close friends, having access to someone who was not in my family/friends orbit was immensely helpful to explore how I was managing the biggest change I’d ever experienced in my life, give me some outside perspective, and come up with actionable next steps for challenges I was facing (and in the early days, as I’ve mentioned on this blog before, there were a handful in the beginning). If you’re not working with a therapist, I’d recommend considering your options, or even starting with an app if it’s difficult to find someone through your insurance (I had a good experience with TalkSpace before I went to find someone to work with on a more permanent basis).

Consider what the first few months of postpartum will be like for you – and make adjustments for those changes.

In my third trimester, my husband and I were about halfway through the courses at our doula company’s education center – one of the courses was on childbirth, and there was another just about postpartum. During the childbirth class, the instructor was discussing the importance of the hormone oxytocin during labor, and encouraged us to think about a comfortable space in our home that made me happy – that, she said, would be a good place to be when you start contractions, because when your body is producing oxytocin on its own, that hormone helps your labor to progress.

“Huh,” I thought to myself. “I wish I didn’t hate our bedroom so much, then.” And I did, I really hated our bedroom at the time. I knew doing a full room renovation wasn’t going to be possible before I had this baby, but I knew there were probably some small, cosmetic changes I could make to make that room a bit more comfortable.

It also occurred to me during that class that I was about to be in my home basically 24/7 for the next three months – so it would be a good idea to do what I could to make sure I was relatively happy with it. My husband and I were already busy getting stuff ready in our son’s nursery, so I didn’t have tons of time to dedicate to interior design – but I did add some touches here and there to make our home more comfortable, and more conducive to someone recovering from giving birth (big throw pillows to sit on for the floor of our living room, a couple of big blankets in our living spaces, new curtains in our bedroom to distract me from all the other things I couldn’t change in that damn room yet). They weren’t massive changes and I didn’t spend tons of money, but they made a difference.

Figure out who your support system consists of – and if you don’t have what you need, go find it.

My husband and I live two states over from both of our families,  and while we had been in our new city for a couple of years, we didn’t have an extensive support system yet – so we started to build one of our own. We hired our babysitter a few weeks after our son’s birth (shoutout to Care.com, where we found her), eventually brought on a second sometimes-babysitter for weekends when we wanted to do date nights, and talked with our families to figure out what would be reasonable in terms of asking them to visit occasionally to give us a hand watching our son when we needed some extra help for long work days, getting to appointments, and taking care of house projects that required both of us.

Now that our son is older, we don’t need as much help as we used to, but in the early days, having this level of support was what we needed. Before or right after your baby is born, I’d encourage you to start thinking about what that looks like in your life – and asking for the help that you need.