caring for our future grandmother selves
Vibrant, full of vigor, radiant energy, sustainable humor, joy, and playfulness. A golden version of what once was our youthful glow. Feeling a richer kind of beautiful.
How can we prepare for this, when as it is we’re feeling over-capacity? How can we plan for a graceful transition into our golden years, when our minds and hands feel like they’re not keeping up where we are now?
The first time this concept was set tangibly in my awareness was in Heng Ou’s “The First Forty Days.” She shares about her aunty’s very proudly earned good health in her post-menopausal years, after her children were grown and onto the next phases of their lives. Her Aunty Ou saying, “I took care of myself postpartum, that’s why I’m strong.”
In the traditional Chinese practice of zuo yuezi, women “sit the moon” after they give birth. This rest time is actually longer than just a lunar cycle, but can last around fifty-four days. Fifty-four days of confinement, dedication to restoring the energy lost in pregnancy and birth, and creating a deep bond with their newborn.
In Ayurveda, India’s “science of life” teachings, our experience of menopause is a direct reflection of how well we were able to recover and be restored in our postpartum time after childbirth.
This wisdom has continued to find me, among various places, topics, and teachers, and every time it does I feel this surge of quiet, solemn, motivating energy. That feeling of confirmation — like even my body is saying “yes, thank you. I appreciate the reminder.”
It took me four babies to really let this wisdom soak into my bones.
My younger self very much wanted to “bounce back” and fit into my pre-pregnancy wranglers. I really enjoy filling the woodshed and doing the garden work, working with the critters, sweating outside, keeping my body in motion. But the truth of it is, hard as it is to swallow, this isn’t our design and we gain no trophies that are worth more than the longevity of our health by avoiding rest when our babies are new.
As Rachelle Seliga says it, “Yes we have free will, but it’s the cosmic joke of the universe. We get to choose, but when we choose outside of our biologic design, we find sickness, injury, and death.”
And here I am, four babies in and weaving together the stories of my body that are now reminders of how I did not rest in my first three postpartum experiences, how clicky ligaments and imbalanced muscles can be a direct result of overworking with relaxin flowing through our blood, and insufficient intake of iron rich foods reaaaally does a number on a gal. Sheeshh. The old saying “do it right the first time” is no joke. Renourishing after being depleted is quite a different mountain than just having been properly fed and replenished (as our design calls for) in our first year postpartum. It’s like having a savings vs restoring an account that’s gone in the red while still paying the monthly bills. Tough, to say it kindly.
How many mommas are actually napping when their baby naps?
How many have regulated nervous systems that allow for them to simply be with their baby and rest? Meaning, how many feel safe to do so?
How many are aware of the effects of relaxin hormone on their muscles and ligaments in pregnancy and the early months postpartum? How does this directly mirror how women feel in their menopause and postmenopause years?
Why is it that women are accustomed to peeing when they sneeze after delivering a baby?
How is it that birth trauma can become buried and ignored, and then silently affect a woman’s sex drive for decades to come, but we don’t connect the dots?
How are we measuring a woman’s recovery post-birth, and how are we giving love, warmth, and support to the places of her that were not able to recover completely so that she can continue on into her mothering years fully well and established within herself?
How are we taking care of the menopausal women, when we’re abandoning care of our bodies post-birth?
This can look as many different ways as there are women on the planet. But the fundamentals remain true across all variations when we look to our physiologic blueprint for how to traverse this sacred time in a way that honors and supports our body — mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually.
An extended period of rest. This might vary anywhere from 21-90 days.
Warmth. Eating foods that are warm in temperature and nature (spices such cinnamon and black pepper, as examples), and staying bundled in a warm bed. Warmth inducing therapies such as using a heating pad or hot water bottle, and steam therapy, “mother roasting” as this is affectionately called.
Body work, massage, chiropractic, craniosacral / dynamic body balancing. Caring for the mother’s body after the immense work she’s done to bring forth a child (or children) is equivalent to caring for the baby. This keeps her lymph flowing as an immune system support as she’s resting, and gives life back into her tissues that have worked many months carrying, growing, stretching, birthing.
Connection. A mother should never be left alone. She should be surrounded only by people she loves and trusts. She should be comfortable being naked in her bed, nursing her baby, napping when baby naps, knowing she’s got someone to talk to, to share her concerns with, to confide her questions in, to laugh and to cry with.
I knew that birth calls us to surrender, but one of the biggest lessons from my most recent postpartum time was that to rest fully and diligently is also to surrender. In a completely different way, but surrender nonetheless.
Surrendering to how the household is typically run under your watch, while your support system rises to the occasion. Surrendering to the call to rest versus the temptation of “I should be…”. Allowing ourselves time away from the tv, the phones, the work load is certainly a surrendering when we’ve been so conditioned to be continually stimulated and endlessly productive.
A surrendering to the need of support, even when those parts of our selves who want to reject support and want to be able to “do all, all by ourselves” try to convince us we’re surely asking too much, needing too much, etc.
You know what I mean?
But in the surrendering of this time, we gain so much more than we could have by resisting to rest.
We gain ourselves back, potentially into greater strength than what we ever had had before. We gain a circle, a community of people who’ve lived this experience with us and can reflect back to us the things we may not remember on our own; a depth to our story beyond our perceptions. We gain the knowing that we have people we can trust and rely on, and in turn give our child a community of people who not only voice their support, but have been in the trenches with us. We find a new layer of ourselves that we couldn’t have had we not allowed space for her to surface.
We send our future, grandmother self the love she’ll need as she transitions into her next phases, her new roles,
so that she may do so with a full heart and an able, thriving body and mind.