Published in 2016 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang
An imprint of ABRAMS
Text copyright © 2016 Heng Ou, Amely Greeven, and Marisa Belger
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948994
ISBN: 978-1-61769-183-6
eISBN: 978-1-61312-941-8
EDITOR: Holly Dolce
DESIGNER: Laura Palese
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Anet Sirna-Bruder
PHOTOGRAPHER: Jenny Nelson
FOOD STYLIST: Nicole Kruzick
Stewart, Tabori & Chang books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.
None of what follows is intended to replace the care and advice offered by your physician or health-care provider. Please use the food and advice in The First Forty Days to enhance and improve your day-to-day experience, not to remedy actual medical issues. However, should you experience any unusual or uncomfortable symptoms before or after the baby arrives that aren’t resolved by your health-care provider, use this book as a launching pad toward an experienced Chinese medicine doctor. He or she may be able to offer you herbs and treatment that can be extremely effective in supporting your body to heal and find its balance for the future.
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WITH GRATITUDE. . .
To my children Khefri, India, and Jude; and to their father who helped me create these three bright stars.
To my courageous writers Amely Greeven and Marisa Belger, who, inspired by the challenges of their own postpartum experiences, took on this project with me, determined to create a guidepost for all the mothers who will come after them; and to my agent, Marc Gerald, the connector who brought us together. Without this dynamic literary trio, this book would not have been seen by Holly Dolce, Rebecca Kaplan, and the rest of the fabulous Abrams team.
Big thanks and love to all the experts who shared their wisdom and the beautiful mothers who invited us into their first forty days, giving us a peek into daily life with their new babies. Thank you Jenny Nelson, for your unique photographic perspective and invaluable organizational skills; Nicole Kruzick, for the luscious food styling; and to all of the guides and friends who make up my family: Linda Costigan, Ani Compton, Jessica Janney, Stacy Sindlinger, Toni Spencer, Ian Scanlan, Joe Sturges, Rob Lam, Davi Khalsa, James Ballard, Hsuan Ou, my mama, and the MotherBees team.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
my story
CHAPTER 2
from the old ways to our way:
postpartum for a new world
CHAPTER 3
the gathering
CHAPTER 4
the passage
CHAPTER 5
the gateway:
the first forty days
CHAPTER 6
filling your cup:
what to eat
CHAPTER 7
the first forty days recipes
AFTERWORD: BEYOND THE FIRST FORTY DAYS
INTRODUCTION
The first forty days is a period of time unlike any other. It is a short season of life that follows the delivery of your child—an almost six-week-long period that arrives after many weeks of pregnancy and who knows how many hours of labor—in which you recover from birth, your baby unfurls slowly into the world of bright lights and sounds, and together you devote yourselves to forging your relationship outside the womb.
Though brief, it is a time of amazing intensity and massive adjustment.
Your body transforms—again—and your heart throbs with more feelings than you ever knew possible. Your internal rhythms ping-pong as days and nights merge. Your stamina and serenity get tested like never before. Your connections to the world you knew before loosen, or even come undone, and your sense of who you are begins to change and morph.
In other times, and in other places around the world, a postpartum period of healing and adjustment was expected and allowed. After the rigorous and demanding act of birth, it was considered critically necessary for the whole family—and for society at large—that a woman be given the first forty days to heal and rest. Other people in her community would feed her, nurture her, and take all responsibilities off her plate, so that she could focus on one thing only: transitioning healthily and happily from expectant woman to mother.
For the first forty days—or sometimes the first thirty or twenty-one, depending on the culture—a new mother stayed secluded from the busy stream of life, tucked indoors with her infant at her side. She received special meals to rebuild energy, replenish lost nutrients, and help her body produce breast milk. She followed traditional practices of keeping rested and warm to prevent exhaustion and depletion.
The understanding was that the new mother was as vulnerable as her newborn, requiring her own steady stream of attention and care. A dedicated time of postpartum recovery could help to keep future illness—and equally important, depression—at bay.
Today in the West, we are waking up to the importance of cocooning baby in the weeks following birth. The understanding that he (or she) is not quite ready to meet the world-at-large when he emerges and is still in an early stage of development that’s come to be known as the “fourth trimester” has awakened us to the value of holding him close and sheltered for some weeks, so he can shift slowly and gradually into life outside the womb.
But somehow, we have forgotten the time-honored wisdom that this special cocoon of care should extend to the mother as well. In those first forty days, which roughly correlate with the six-week phase that Western medicine calls the postpartum period, the old ways teach that an amazing opportunity presents itself to a woman. During this time, she can revitalize herself and replenish her reserves, creating a solid foundation from which to tackle the demands of mothering (whether for the first time, the second, or more). Furthermore, they teach that with the right postpartum care, a mother can preserve her reproductive health for future children or eventually experience an easy menopause, aging gracefully over the decades to come.
Perhaps because pregnancy and birth get all the magazine covers and headlines—no surprise, as these events sell more stuff—we’ve overlooked this last part of the childbearing story. A woman’s postpartum experience might be given a brief nod at the end of a pregnancy book, or thirty seconds of footage at the end of a TV show, but a deeper look almost never occurs. Rather than get invited to take a sacred time-out after delivering her child, the new mother is more likely met with pressure to “bounce back”—back to her pre-pregnancy productivity, back to her pre-pregnancy body, and back to her pre-pregnancy spirits.
But when it comes to becoming a mother, there is no back; there is only through. After birthing her child, every woman must pass through this initial adjustment phase. It is a strange and beautiful limbo zone that is both exhausting and exciting, mysterious and monotonous. When she arrives at the other side of the postpartum phase after roughly a month and a half, she will most certainly be facing forward, prepared to take her next steps into motherhood.
The First Forty Days is a gentle guide to this transformative time. Its simple plan of nourishment and support is inspired by the global traditions of maternal care that have existed for millennia. It shares simple wisdom about the healing foods to eat, the teas and herbs to drink, and the small steps you can take to prepare for postpartum. But it is a new guide for a new era, intended to help a modern mother move through her first weeks of motherhood with gusto and grace.
It was born of my own postpartum experience as the American-born descendant of a line of Chinese healers. My relatives inducted me into the Chinese tradition of postpartum care known as zuo yuezi, and the experience led me to create a business devoted to feeding mothers the nourishing foods they need to thrive after birth. Having fed scores of moms in the days and weeks following their deliveries, I’ve become convinced that nutrient-rich postpartum meals, served along with a hearty dose of TLC, play a pivotal role in supporting mom’s physical recovery and her mental state, helping to instill in her confidence and calm.
The book includes my favorite postpartum recipes for healing soups, replenishing meals and snacks, and warming, calming, lactation-boosting teas. The recipes are rooted in traditional ways of cooking and use a few specialty ingredients, but the emphasis is on simplicity. The nurturing and therapeutic dishes feature easy-to-source staple foods, appealing handfuls of fresh produce, and effortless cooking techniques that fit the way we use our kitchens today. And these foods can be put together by almost anyone, so that mom and her partner can get on with the good stuff—learning everything there is to know about their beloved child.
I’ve also had a front-row view of what is sorely lacking in our contemporary culture—a dedicated space and time that allows a woman to “become” a mother at her own pace. It’s hard to reconcile the unique needs of postpartum with the demands of our fast-paced, highly productive society—how can we slow down and do less in a world that’s continually asking us to do more? All too often, women experience a stressful clash of the two. For many mothers, the joy of a baby’s arrival is mixed up with harder feelings: isolation and loneliness after the initial welcoming buzz subsides; bewildering fatigue from trying to hold it all together, or confusion and shame when they cannot.
To help bring balance back into this conundrum, The First Forty Days tucks its recommendations for healing foods inside a broader universe of care. I’ll share some advice on asking for and arranging a system of help during your postpartum period, creating an optimal environment for restoration and breastfeeding, preparing your relationship for the changes to come, and tending kindly to your body and mind with small acts of self-care. You’ll also find insights and words of inspiration from some wise women—and a couple of men—who have hundreds of years of postpartum experience among them. These are this book’s version of a circle of elders—something that used to be a presence in every village or community—and they will be there for you should you need them on a long or lonely night, or in the trying moments when the magic of mothering slips into the mundane (as it will definitely do). The First Forty Days is much more than a cookbook; it is a field guide to making the most of this wonderfully unpredictable phase of life. It exists to put the spotlight of attention and care on the mother—the very person whose needs can sometimes get lost in the excitement of a new baby.
Just as traditional ways brought a circle of women together to care for a new mother, The First Forty Days is also a collective effort. When I had the idea for this book, I reached out to a writer friend, Amely Greeven, to help bring my thoughts to life. She, in turn, brought in another writer and friend, Marisa Belger, to collaborate on wordsmithing the project. Between the three of us, we were mothering six children as we wrote The First Forty Days, ranging in ages from under one to eleven years old. We had unique postpartum experiences, yet were united by a clear vision and goal: to empower women to seek the care and nurturing they deserve after bringing a baby into the world. A fourth friend, recipe developer and photographer Jenny Nelson, joined our village to lovingly cook and test each recipe, ensuring that the food and drinks were as simple to make as I’d intended, and beautiful to look at, too. Writing late at night and between nap times and school runs, and cooking vats of bone broths and hearty stews alongside kids’ breakfasts, we captured and recorded the information in this book. Throughout the process, we kept one another inspired and uplifted with honest stories from our own first weeks with our babies. We examined and reexamined what would have made that fundamental period better, easier, and sweeter, and then put the answers in this book. My hope is that you, too, will feel our presences beside you, and know that by committing to give yourself the first forty days to heal and adjust to being a mom (at any level and in any way), you are connecting to a web of women who truly have walked in your shoes.
The First Forty Days is not a medical book about pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. There are plenty of those. It will not tell you everything about “what to expect.” Instead, it is an invitation to lay the groundwork for a healthy and happy postpartum period as deliberately as you prepared for pregnancy and birth. (Albeit with a light touch and the ability to adapt; as with anything child-related, we know that nothing ever goes quite to plan.) It is a book for the mother-to-be to read before the baby comes and afterward, in the snippets of time she might have between feeding and rocking. Just as important, it is for the people who love the mother and her child and who want to show up for both of them in the most helpful ways they can.
The spectrum of women’s experiences is wide after childbirth, encompassing the woman with minimal maternity leave and the one who plans to stay home indefinitely. But pretty much everyone experiences how the first forty days are inherently imperfect, rife with confusing and clumsy moments, dotted with messy and awkward parts, and sometimes even streaked with melancholy. If you can create space for all the ups and downs, including challenging feelings, and if you can do just a few small things to take good care of yourself during this time, you can help to create the conditions recommended by the old wise ones. You can enjoy a safe, supportive, healing environment that benefits mother and baby today and in the future, and practice staying connected to yourself even while taking care of another. The transition into motherhood—or motherhood again—is an incredibly important time of your life, and there is always an opportunity to bring sacredness into the experience of caring for a new baby. Even if you didn’t enjoy it with your first child, or your second, this book serves to make sacredness part of your mothering experience now.
Our generation is in the middle of a grand rethinking about how we birth and how we mother. Through sharing our personal experiences about pregnancy, birth, and parenting without reserve—in mothers’ groups and online forums—we are moving toward a new way of mothering that is more thoughtful and authentic, and that reconsiders what we and our children truly need. In a society that applies pressure from all sides to be faster and more productive, to “bounce back” and charge forward, women are beginning to invite one another to slow down, take a breath, and make choices that meet those needs in a more generous way. Bringing attention and care to the postpartum period is a key part of the puzzle.
This book was designed to be your ally as you move through the first tender weeks with your baby. It was written under the pulsing beat of one guiding question: What does a new mother need to feel supported and nurtured? I invite you to lean on the knowledge and recipes contained in these pages and then pass this book on to the next mother-to-be, telling her which parts of it inspired, helped, or fed you best. In that way, the wisdom gets carried on in a ripple effect, touching more women, widening the circle of support. It’s time to start a new tradition—a movement—of postpartum care: one that honors the past and that will carry us, and our children, more kindly and happily into the future.
MY EXTENDED CHINESE-AMERICAN FAMILY INCLUDES quite a few legendary characters, but few can match my Auntie Ou for sheer personality. She is a phenomenon to herself: a petite dynamo of a woman whose passion for her art of Chinese healing is as strong today as when she first began practicing in the seventies. Auntie Ou can diagnose you with a glance at your tongue and her fingers on your pulse. Her no-frills clinic in Oakland, California, hasn’t changed a bit in decades. Its jumble of herb jars, meridian charts, and medical textbooks will never need a makeover, because she is renowned, along with my other aunt and my uncle, also acupuncturists and herbalists, for her ability to help women with every aspect of their reproductive health.
Of equal renown is the fifty-four-day stint of zuo yuezi that Auntie Ou did after the birth of her daughter Wendy, back in China. Zuo yuezi, sometimes translated as “sitting the month,” is a very Chinese tradition: a health and wellness protocol that is devoted to the needs of the new mother and that starts within minutes of baby being delivered. Lesser women than she would follow this protocol for a mere thirty days—approximately one lunar cycle—but Auntie Ou, the descendant of many Chinese healers, took it to the next level. For almost two months, she will proudly tell you, she stayed indoors with her newborn, sheltered from cold and wind; she ate two pork kidneys a day to rebuild her jing, the life essence stored in her own kidneys; and she dutifully drank whatever healing soup or tea her mother-in-law served. She also refrained from bathing or washing her hair for a whole month, as tradition dictates. Auntie Ou firmly believes that this dedicated confinement care in her twenties—“confinement” is the most commonly used English translation of zuo yuezi—is responsible for the vibrancy, resiliency, and youthful good looks she enjoys today, in her mid-sixties. “I took care of myself postpartum, that’s why I’m so strong,” she likes to say, as her arthritis-free hands deftly cut up a chicken for the pot and her face displays its notably wrinkle-free glow.
This maternal endurance feat was a secret to me as a child. Although I could often be found hovering at my aunts’ and grandmother’s sides in the kitchen when my brother and I visited from St. Louis, devouring everything they told us about healing with herbs and food, and fascinated by the skillful way they combined ingredients in the pot, I never heard Auntie Ou speak about the ancient ways of mother care. Until the day came that I gave birth myself.
By this time, I was living quite a different existence, six hours south and a world away from my Chinese-immigrant relatives. After graduating from art school, becoming a graphic designer, and subsequently traveling and working overseas, I’d settled in Los Angeles to start a family. “Traditional” wasn’t exactly a word that described me; “free spirit” might be more like it. I’ve never liked constraints or been good at following rules. And as a first-generation Asian kid from Middle America with a strong case of wanderlust, I have always been the bohemian black sheep, an outsider wherever I go. I’ve learned to embrace that—traveling at the drop of a hat, exploring back alley street markets, and merging into new cultures and peoples to discover how they live. This freedom from convention has informed my cooking and my whole approach to business and life. My heritage surrounds me like incense smoke—memories and inspirations guide much of what I design and cook—but in everyday life, I wear flip-flops and I like to surf.
So it was a surprise when the ancient ways of China showed up at my door. One day after my newborn daughter Khefri and I returned home from the hospital’s birthing center, Auntie Ou arrived to initiate me into zuo yuezi with her grown daughter Wendy by her side. Fresh off the bus from Oakland, their arms were filled with groceries they’d picked up in downtown LA’s Chinese markets. Wrinkled chicken feet and knobs of fragrant ginger; bottles of rice wine and bags of peanuts; flaky, jade green seaweed and voluptuous papayas—and the pièce de résistance, some scary-looking pig hooves. They cheerfully yelled at me to stay in my room with the baby and marched into my kitchen to set up camp. With a clang of pots and pans, they began the process of making the traditional dishes that would restore me after birth.
I quickly discovered that Auntie Ou’s “confinement care” came with a set of commandments: For one week after birth, I was to eat especially slowly, because my digestion was weak, and prioritize soft, traditional foods like black sesame with rice powder and ginger or congee with black sugar. Absolutely no cold food or drinks were to pass my lips, because these would slow down the circulation of blood necessary for optimal healing. After one week, I could graduate to eating the special postpartum soups they were creating from long-simmered bone broth and fish stock—these would help amplify and enrich my breast milk and balance my hormones so that my mood stayed elevated. Meanwhile, I was to stay in bed—or close to it—at all times, keeping my activity levels ultralow, and clothe myself in thick woolen socks, a cozy hat, and extra blankets so that my body stayed very warm. My computer, cell phone, and even my beloved tower of night-table books were hidden away, so that I wasn’t tempted to distract myself when I should be sleeping.
According to Chinese medicine, birth is a shift from a yang state, in which the pregnant woman’s body is warm with the high volume of circulating blood and full due to the presence of baby in her womb, to a more yin state—the empty and cold counterbalance to yang. Women in general tend to be quite yin by nature; after birth, the sages say, this yin tendency is exaggerated, and combined with the depletion in energy levels after the efforts of delivery, it makes the new mother especially susceptible to exhaustion or illness. Exposure to drafty air, eating chilled or heavy food, and overexerting myself would make it easier for “cold and wind”—two of the “six evils” that adversely affect our health—to penetrate my body, said Auntie Ou as she tucked me into bed with baby Khefri. According to Chinese medicine, lingering cold and wind are responsible for many of the maladies that mothers all-too-often report: headaches and period pain, joint pain, and depression. By staying calm and quiet during this vulnerable postpartum period to conserve my precious chi or “life force,” and by rebuilding my constitutional jing energy with nourishment, I could sidestep those disturbances and sail smoothly out of pregnancy and birth and into a lifetime of healthy mothering. As an extra protective step, my feisty auntie clucked her tongue at too many visitors like a watchful guard at the castle doors. She kept a pot of germ-fighting black vinegar on the stove to purify the air as well, just as her grandmother and great-grandmother had done before her for women in my shoes.
Black sheep or not, who was I to argue with Auntie Ou? I was weary, sore, and consumed with getting the tiny newborn in my arms to nurse and sleep. Besides, like most pregnant women I knew, I had invested plenty of planning into having a healthy pregnancy and birth, but self-care after the delivery registered barely a blip in my mind. I had assumed that after a few days of postdelivery R & R, I’d be getting back to the normal responsibilities of life—shopping, cooking, cleaning, working—just with an adorably dozy newborn wrapped on my chest. A modern, independent woman like me, I guessed, was supposed to get back in the saddle quickly. Plus, family and friends would be waiting to meet my daughter. Didn’t I owe it to them to be shiny and presentable so they could celebrate with me and claim their photo op with baby?
My aunt’s old code of feminine knowledge put the kibosh on those assumptions. “Confinement” reduced my universe to three essential to-dos: recovery, rest, and feeding my baby. As I rode the waves of joy and tiredness and fumbled my way through the first weeks of breastfeeding, I had to unlearn everything I had thought about a woman’s responsibility to others. I was humbled by how little energy or attention I had for anything as productive as making a meal for myself—or even making the bed—let alone hosting well-wishers! I surrendered to my aunt’s edicts gratefully.
In Chinese culture, food is love and bossy treatment means you care. Homemade chicken soup and goji berry tea are as nurturing as kisses and hugs. The care I received from my female relatives in those first uncertain weeks as a mother carried me forward on a fueling wave of food, and held me in a net of support. When they departed after a couple of weeks—the busy Oakland clinic demanded Auntie Ou’s return a little earlier than she would have liked—they left a freezer full of soups, a pantry stocked with teas, and careful instructions to continue this conservative routine of rest, minimal activity, and reliance on my husband and friends to serve me with food, water, and kindness for at least two more weeks, and ideally longer.
Now happy to comply, I noticed how the commitment to slowing down my life had opened a new space for me to hear my body’s signals. Chills could be resolved with a pot of warming red date tea; anxious thoughts could be soothed with comforting chicken porridge. The tools I needed to maintain myself were within reach in my kitchen. And, at about week six, I detected a shift: I felt more energized and capable, confident that my daughter and I had found our groove. We were ready to step out from the cocoon and start this mother-baby gig for real—one “baby” step at a time.
The births of my other two children over the subsequent five years brought very different postpartum experiences. My second daughter, India, was born at home soon after I launched a new company. Caught in the rush and convinced I was Supermom—maybe I really had been fortified by the first round of zuo yuezi—I literally forgot that earlier education. Wearing India in a sling against my body, I jumped back to my desk five days after delivery, sustaining my business while rocking my infant. Soon enough, though, my euphoria gave way to anxiety and a fatigue I couldn’t shake. I had lost connection to my intuition and let my head overrule the signs from my body. Thankfully, the sight of tiny India’s sleeping face on my chest gave me a wake-up call. I, too, required a sweet and gentle routine of slumber and food.
After the birth of baby Jude three years later, an unexpected curveball hit my family. My marriage ended and I found myself tending to my little boy and two young daughters as a single mom. Caught in emotional free fall, I fell into an easy trap for the self-reliant modern mother: the belief that as long as my children were safe, fed, and loved, I could soldier through any suffering of my own. Plus, by baby number three, it felt almost embarrassing to ask for assistance. This time, it took the wise eyes of my visiting midwife to detect how this deeply taxing time had invited a “coldness” to settle into my body and my surroundings, creating a physical weakness and a sense of withdrawal that she found deeply concerning. Suddenly remembering my aunt’s warnings about warmth, and shaken by how little I’d noticed this prelude to depression, I accepted my midwife’s prescription of hot soup and homeopathic remedies and rallied the energy to build a circle of support around me. I reached out to girlfriends to request urgent help. These women became my family in this time—a village of sorts—and with their deliveries of food and help around the house, and their gentle companionship, my body, mind, and spirit began to warm up. This time, it took me a little longer than six weeks to find my center again—demonstrating that it can take quite some time for true healing and adjustment to click in.
My three postpartum experiences became my greatest teachers. They woke me up to the range of potential for today’s postpartum mother, from being fully nourished in the weeks after delivery to becoming worryingly starved. And they brought into focus a dilemma that goes under-discussed in the excitement around pregnancy and birth. A mom-to-be is surrounded by countless resources and support for almost ten months of pregnancy, but once the umbilical cord is cut, the attention shifts almost completely to baby, and she can easily feel dropped. Ironically, it is precisely this time that her well-being must come first. She is the source from which all life springs. But if her cup runs dry, then nobody drinks.
My mission became to fill that cup for the new mothers in my life. The most supportive thing a woman and her partner can receive in those wild and unpredictable early days postpartum is the thing that can most easily fall through the cracks: food. If sustenance keeps coming, the challenges of suddenly having a baby are daunting, but doable. If it doesn’t—everything’s tougher. Yet who in this moment has the time and energy to plan shopping and cooking? Too often, mom ends up hunched over the kitchen counter feeling woozy with hunger, piecing together a meal of tortilla chips and cheese, or rifling through takeout menus before exhaustion hits. Though she might have spent months taking utmost care of her nutritional needs while baby was in utero, her well-being often goes out the window once he is out of the womb.
The kitchen became my version of my auntie’s healing clinic. I cooked for women I knew personally but also for my girlfriends’ friends, giving food to moms however I could. With memories of soups and stews from my first postpartum experience dancing around my mind, I made specially crafted meals with traditional Eastern and Western ingredients to fortify and strengthen a body that is bruised and exhausted, and to encourage lactation and calm the nervous system. My dishes would include hits of inspiration from a trip overseas, or ingredients that called to me that week at the market. I’d then stir in a giant serving of care and tenderness, ladle it into jars, affix a label, and deliver the gifts with love. (If I could have bottled oxytocin—the hormone of love and connecting—I’d have thrown in a dash of that for mom as well.)
Within a few months, these ideas crystallized into a business: a postpartum food-delivery service that I called MotherBees. It proved surprisingly self-pollinating. One woman shared it with the next and our meals soon became popular baby shower gifts—something that would care for baby by caring first and foremost for mom. Sometimes, one or two weeks’ worth of MotherBees meals would be ordered by friends or family members as a way of enveloping a woman in a circle of love even when the giver couldn’t be there in person. As MotherBees grew, we delivered resources along with the soup, for no extra charge: a sore-nipple remedy picked up along the way, the names of postpartum doulas who were available to help, or connections to massage therapists or chiropractors or acupuncturists—or house cleaners!—who were tuned in to maternal needs. We became a hive of mother care that helped women get through their first weeks with baby more easily. Today, the business is expanding beyond California to include a line of healthy postpartum foods in packaged form that can be delivered to a mom no matter where she lives.
When I bring meals to a mother, I try to drop off the food unseen and slip away, leaving her fed but undisturbed. But sometimes I get invited in for a chat and a moment of connection. The women I meet have had vastly different births—at the hospital or at home, with drugs or without, vaginally or surgically. They are living in different neighborhoods, in different marital configurations, and with different resources available to them. Many are breastfeeding, a few are bottle-feeding, still others may be receiving breast milk from another mother to augment their own supply. But despite these differences, they are united by a common postpartum experience. The brand-new mom is dealing with change on every level—the shape of her family, body, even her identity has shifted, but nothing is yet defined. She is discovering that despite what she might have thought about the effort of birthing a baby, the period after labor is when the real work begins. And it is sweaty, achy, leaky-boobed work at that! It can also be lonely work. In current-day America, partners and family members often work long hours far from home, leaving mom and baby alone for most of the day. And friends don’t usually understand or remember what is happening back there in the postpartum bedroom, unless they have very recently been there themselves.
Add to that other common new-mom pressures like taking care of other children, worrying about money, and dreading the return to a job, and the total experience of the first days and weeks at home with baby can feel overwhelming. I have gotten used to exhausted moms opening the door and looking part awed and part shocked at what’s just befallen them. Over a cup of tea or bowl of soup at the kitchen table, they might say, half laughing and half crying, “Why didn’t anyone tell me it would be like this?”
I don’t say anything, but smile and push the pot of tea or bowl of soup closer. Have another sip.
Over the years of delivering my goodie-filled coolers of soups, teas, and smoothies, I’ve discovered that offering food to the new mom does more than simply fuel her cells. The giving part is just as important. It’s an exchange of energy and care that fills her up from the inside, making her feel stronger if she feels unmoored and uncertain; connected to others if she feels alone; and seen for what she truly needs, if she feels invisible or forgotten.
I have also pondered how the scale of possibility for a new mother has tipped so far toward isolation, exhaustion, and junk food, and away from hugs and soothing soups and stews. How did we forget to honor this fleeting period of time after birth and give it special treatment? How did we forget to put a system in place that ensured the community at large, and the mom herself, knew what to expect in the days after birth—and knew that consistent help would be there?
Caretaking traditions that were once second nature have gotten buried, remembered only by the elders in the family, and barely talked about by the young ones. But mothers need them now more than ever before! For one thing, most parents invest endless effort and resources to ensure the best starts for their children. But mothers need a strong start, too. The old ways teach us that the biggest investment is made up front. If mom begins rested and nourished, calm and centered, she can provide the patience and sensitivity—the maternal devotion—that her baby truly deserves. This is much harder to do if she’s pushed to the edge of emotion and exhaustion.
Furthermore, levels of stress, burnout, and depression among mothers—whether they work outside the home as well or are working full-time for the family—are soaring. Customs that insist on rest, recovery, and surrendering responsibility for a few weeks at the get-go force a woman to stop all her doing and simply receive. The takeaway is profound: It can open our eyes to asking for and receiving help so that we can give fully as mothers without giving everything away.
What if we looked at the old ways with creative eyes to see what wisdom they could give us for today? Could modern women approach postpartum with new eyes, not rushing through it in a state of fatigue or stress but enjoying this short season of our lives where we get to play by totally different rules? Could we reclaim this sacred time of recovery and bonding after birth, borrowing from the heritages of our aunties, grandmothers, and mothers-in-law, whoever and wherever they may be? After all, we experience the first forty days only once with each child.
I became fueled by a mission to take back what we forgot and create a new code of knowledge about postpartum care. A mission to support all of the mothers I know now and those I have not yet met; and to pass these ways forward to our daughters, and their daughters, and theirs. Pregnancy and childbirth is the most creative act of the human experience. Bringing a new life to fruition is a phenomenal achievement—some call it miraculous. We need to draw off that creative power to shape a new way of mothering the mother, one that works for a new woman in a new time and that gives her the nurturing she needs, but often fails to request. To move boldly forward in this way, however, first we need to look back.
IT TURNS OUT THAT THERE is an institution of postpartum care that dates back centuries and that stretches across continents. Because this care goes on behind the closed doors of family homes, and is passed on woman to woman—from grandmother to granddaughter and midwife to client—it’s not exactly written in scientific literature or discussed in ten-minute doctor visits. You have to dig a little to find it. But it is there. Like a golden rope connecting women from one generation to the next, the protocol of caring for the new mother by unburdening her of responsibilities and ensuring she rests and eats shows up in wildly diverse places, from India to Mexico, from Burma to Arizona, from Russia to Cambodia, from areas of the Middle East to ethnic communities in North American cities. This rope of care is long and it is strong; it holds families—and societies—together. Its individual threads are the millions of aunts, mothers-in-law, grandmothers, and neighbors who have, since time immemorial, shown up with soup and clean sheets and a listening ear to serve the woman who has just given birth.
These global grandmotherly customs have different flavors depending on the locale, featuring diverse but always nutritious foods, from creamy lentil dal to blue cornmeal mush. They have contrasting sensibilities, too. Some treat mom as gently as the newborn, with warm milk drinks and transcendent hot-oil massages; others, like my elders’ zuo yuezi, have a no-nonsense attitude, seeing this care as an investment for the future—ensuring that the mother’s health, beauty, and ancestral lineage endure. But at their core lies universal wisdom about overexertion after childbirth having serious consequences, and constant sleep deprivation taking a toll on mental and physical health. For mother, there was no “returning to normal” right after birth. Far from it.
In its purest form, traditional Chinese zuo yuezi advises a tough-love approach of sponge baths instead of showers (to reduce the chance of catching a chill), no books in case reading strains the eyes, and no movies in case sad scenes upset you and disrupt your flow of chi—while others take over all your household duties, of course. Zuo yuezi is often referred to as “the Gateway,” as it is a threshold between one way of being (your life before baby) and an entirely new existence (life with baby). The reward for spending dedicated time in this revitalizing in-between space? The mother can emerge more beautiful and rejuvenated than before. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) doctors say that if the woman shirks this recovery, she may experience a yin deficiency, resulting in insomnia, excessive night sweats, hair loss, anxiety, or headaches. Chinese-American families frequently do a bit of zuo yuezi without even realizing it. Many a relative has shown up to visit mom and newborn at the hospital with traditional chicken soup, appalled at the idea of her picking at a limp tuna sandwich from the canteen cooler. (A customary gift of dried longan fruit might come with the soup.) That small warming gesture in itself is tradition in action.
In many parts of Latin America, a forty-day period known as la cuarentena—it literally means “quarantine” yet also plays off the Spanish word for “forty,” cuarenta—has female relatives take on all domestic duties to ensure the new mother rests at home, in order to safeguard against future exhaustion-related illnesses or ailments. Her midwife may visit frequently over the first two weeks to check on baby and mother’s well-being, and homemade chicken soup simmers on the stove (overly spicy or heavy dishes are nixed). The new mother’s abdomen is wrapped in a faja or cloth to help keep her belly warm.
In many Native American tribes, ceremony is key: The customary “lying in” period after birth culminates in ritualistic bathing, a baby-naming ceremony, and going to a sweat lodge to boost circulation and help mom’s body eliminate any toxins. The Hopi people in the southwestern United States recall practices of twenty-day seclusion periods for mother and babe, during which the mother might be served blue corn piki bread, a ceremonial food. Prepared in an hours-long process by a wise elder woman of the community, the flaky, thin-as-air bread was served to honor rites of passage.
In India, the new mother often returns to her parents’ home with her newborn for up to three months of focused care. There, many pairs of hands are on call throughout the day. The women of the family cook soft and nurturing foods, boil fresh milk three times in a row to break down its proteins, and stir in melted ghee (clarified butter) and special spices, so it becomes easy to digest and restores the mother’s depleted state. These loving hands also hold the baby whenever mom needs a break. If members of the new mother’s family are versed in Ayurveda—the five-thousand-year-old healing art of India—she may drink herbal tonics for energy, immunity, and lactation and receive daily, warm-oil massages from a specially trained technician to soothe her nerves by calming the excess vata or “wind” in her system after birth. She even gets taught how to gently massage her little one’s body as well—a relaxing and bonding experience for both parties.
Korea’s postpartum tradition of samchilil decrees a period of at least twenty-one days, and ideally thirty days, of specialized maternal care dedicated to keeping mom warm, snug, and well fed. Miyeokguk, a traditional seaweed soup with beef, chicken, or anchovies, is served several times a day, every day, to boost circulation, restore lost nutrients, and enrich breast milk. Gums are tender so icy foods are banned to avoid dental problems later. At one hundred days, the baby is introduced to the wider family for the first time with a baek-il ceremony—a kind of fourth-trimester graduation party! This also ends the close-up focus on mom care—she’s ready to graduate, too.
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