Becoming a mother is the greatest life change you will ever experience!!! When you marry, you take on a new roommate, friend, partner. It is an enormous change in your life!! You are no longer an individual, you are part of a team. You go places together, make decisions together, consider the thoughts and feelings of the other. However this other person can dress himself, feed himself, make choices and express himself. When you become a parent you do not have these luxuries!
When you become a parent you have responsibility for the very survival of an innocent helpless individual! This baby can do literally nothing for herself!!!!! You are her only option! In addition, you are recovering from nine months of growing another human. You are healing from labor, perhaps major surgery, you are learning a New Normal. Everything in your life has changed!
YOU NEED HELP!!!! In ages past family has come in to support new families. Grandmas and aunties encourage Mommy. They have ‘been there, done that’ and bring a wealth of experience to the table. Dads and uncles help new Fathers navigate the path they are on, helping Mommy, learning to comfort and support.
In our urbanized culture this wealth of information and support is sometimes lacking. Thus, the insurgence of the Postpartum Doula Industry!!! Women who have ‘been there done that’ and want to assist you in smoothing the way to success.
Postpartum Doulas Are The Support System All New Mothers Need
Heather Marcoux Apr 02, 2019
https://www.mother.ly/news/postpartum-doulas-are-the-support-system-new-mothers-need
When we look back through history it is rare to find cultures where a mother’s extended family and community did not support her during the perinatal period, but the modern emphasis on independence and individualism has changed that.
Becoming a mother is the greatest change you will ever make.
Many of us do not have a built-in social support network to help us in those difficult days of early motherhood. A new mom in 2019 may find her close relatives live on the other side of the country, and she doesn’t know her neighbor’s names. Or, she may be surrounded by people who would love to support her—but simply don’t have the experience or time to be of service to her.
This is why we need more postpartum doulas and why more women should have access to them.
Like birth doulas, who help a mother during birth, postpartum doulas aim to empower and support mothers during a vulnerable time in their lives.
They are part lactation consultant, part baby-whisperer, part parenting coach and part therapist, and they can help new parents feel less alone and more confident as their lives change so drastically. But getting a postpartum doula to help you through the fourth trimester can be expensive. As Today recently reported, in America, the cost of hiring a doula “varies from state to state and most people pay out of pocket.” It can be thousands of dollars, a cost too high for many families.
But in America and other western nations where mothers no longer have that built-in community, women are hoping to make doula services more accessible, and suggest we need to stop acting like hiring a doula is akin to hiring a housekeeper and incorporate the service into health care funding. “It seems like a luxury, but for many cultures it [postnatal care] was just a necessity, and I think we need to start looking at it like that too,” Shelley McClure, a postnatal doula and educator in Australia tells ABC News.
One of McClure’s clients, Taycee-Lee Jones, decided to pay for a postpartum doula after welcoming her fourth baby. Paying McClure to help her wasn’t a luxury. It was what she needed to do to survive as her partner had to go back to work quickly. “We don’t have that support that we used to have from our community. We don’t have sisters and aunties all coming to provide that support,” she says. “Shelley as a postpartum doula, came around, brought food, did my dishes, gave me a foot rub, checked in with how I was doing,” she explains, suggesting that the kind of in-home care she received from Shelley could help prevent postpartum depression and should be standard.
Shannon Sproule, a postpartum doula with Full Circle Birth Collective in Edmonton, Canada, agrees. She tells Global News her packages start at $120 for one four-hour session of in-home postpartum care. She recognizes that not everyone can afford that, and believed the future of postpartum care needs to include access to doulas through public programs.
Eastman Doula Services Blog 