Postpartum Mental Health: You Can Love Motherhood and Still Struggle

Having a baby is often described as one of life's most wonderful experiences.

And it can be.

You can be completely in love with your baby, grateful to be a parent, and still find yourself thinking, What just happened to my life?

Because while a new baby enters your world, your entire world changes around them. Your routines change. Your relationships change. Your priorities change. Your sleep changes—dramatically. Even your understanding of what it means to be tired may change.

I joke with my husband that I used to think I was tired. I used to think I was busy.

I had absolutely no idea.

And apparently, even my understanding of pain needed to be recalibrated. I remember being in the hospital on the second day after having my son when a nurse asked me to rate my pain. I remember asking her, “On my old scale or my new one?”

It was a joke, but it also captured something real.

So much of postpartum life is an adjustment to a reality you couldn't fully understand until you were living it.

You Can Love This and Still Struggle With the Change

As a therapist, one of the things I find myself saying most often to new mothers is that struggling with this transition doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong.

I think we sometimes put a lot of pressure on ourselves to feel grateful during the postpartum period. After all, you wanted this baby. You love this baby. This is supposed to be one of the happiest times of your life.

So why are you exhausted?

Why do you miss your old routine?

Why do you sometimes want five minutes where nobody needs anything from you?

Why can you feel completely overwhelmed by something you love so much?

This is where holding dialectics comes in because two things can be true at the same time.

You can love being a mother and miss parts of your life before motherhood.

You can love that your body carried and delivered your baby and still not love how your body feels in the postpartum period.

You can feel incredibly connected to your baby and still feel disconnected from yourself.

You can feel disconnected from your partner, even when you have a supportive partner who is right there beside you.

You can be grateful for this new chapter and still grieve parts of what you've left behind.

You can be doing a wonderful job and still find this really, really hard.

None of those things cancel each other out.

You Have a New Hat

One of the biggest changes isn't just what you're doing. It's who you are now.

You've added a whole new role to your identity: mother.

I sometimes think about this as adding another hat.

At work, you might put on your work hat. When the workday ends, you get to take it off. You might put on your friend hat when you meet up with someone. Your partner hat. Your daughter or sister hat.

But the mom hat?

That one can feel like it stays on all the time. Even when you're trying to sleep, part of your brain may still be listening for the baby. Even when you're doing something for yourself, there can be a running list of what needs to be done next.

Your time is no longer entirely your own. Your body may not feel entirely like your own, either.

And sometimes, you just want nobody to touch you.

Not because you don't love your baby. You just spend so much of your day being touched, held, needed, and physically responsible for someone else that sometimes you want five minutes where nobody needs anything from you—or your body.

And this shift can affect your relationships, too.

Conversations with your partner can start to revolve around schedules, bottles, diapers, sleep, and who is doing what next. There may be less time for the parts of your relationship that existed before the baby.

And when you're both exhausted, it can be hard to remember that you're partners and not just two very tired people trying to keep a tiny human alive.

That doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong with your relationship. You're both adjusting to a completely different life.

Maybe the answer isn't that you need to find your way back to exactly who you were before. Maybe you're figuring out who you are now.

The Mental Health Piece Matters, Too

There is an important difference between struggling with a major life transition and experiencing a postpartum mental health condition.

The postpartum period can come with a lot of emotional ups and downs. But if sadness, anxiety, hopelessness, irritability, or overwhelm feel intense, persistent, or start interfering with your ability to function, it is worth reaching out for support.

Postpartum depression is talked about more often now, but I think postpartum anxiety deserves much more attention.

Anxiety after having a baby can look like constant worry, racing thoughts, feeling unable to relax, difficulty sleeping even when the baby is sleeping, or intrusive thoughts that feel frightening or difficult to control.

Sometimes anxiety doesn't look like what we expect anxiety to look like. You may not feel panicked. You may simply feel like your brain never shuts off.

Having these experiences doesn't mean you're failing at motherhood. It means you may need some additional support.

You don't have to wait until things feel unbearable to ask for help.

Making Space for the Adjustment

I think sometimes we focus so much on how to take care of the baby that we forget that the person caring for the baby is adjusting, too.

Your entire life has been rearranged around another human being who needs you.

That is beautiful.

It is also a lot.

And maybe the goal isn't to figure out how to get everything back to the way it was before.

Maybe it's to slowly figure out what this new version of life looks like.

What parts of yourself do you want to hold onto?

What needs to change?

What do you need more of?

What do you miss?

What are you discovering that you actually like about this new version of yourself?

There may not be an immediate answer to any of those questions.

That's okay.

Identity doesn't have to be figured out all at once.

When You Don't Feel Like Yourself

Maybe you're reading this with a sleeping baby on your chest. Maybe you're exhausted. Maybe you haven't showered. Maybe you're touched out and desperately want five minutes where nobody needs you.

Maybe you're completely in love with this little person and still miss your old life.

Maybe you feel like yourself one day and wonder where you went the next.

None of that makes you a bad mother.

You're adjusting to a life that changed in ways you couldn't fully understand until you were living it.

So if you're somewhere in the middle of loving this new life and missing pieces of the old one, you're not doing it wrong.

You're adjusting. And that's allowed to take time.