The Good Life Postpartum Wellness Services

The Good Life Postpartum Wellness Services Mother-centered postpartum care for whole family wellness.

Last-minute openings available for Complete Belly Care Sessions, Closing of the Bones Sessions, and Postpartum Care. Boo...
04/20/2023

Last-minute openings available for Complete Belly Care Sessions, Closing of the Bones Sessions, and Postpartum Care. Book now before they disappear at www.thegoodlife.love

I planned to sleep train my daughter. I was fully bought in. I read all the books. Happy family, happy baby. A baby shou...
04/18/2023

I planned to sleep train my daughter.
I was fully bought in. I read all the books. Happy family, happy baby. A baby shouldn’t disrupt everyone’s sleep. A baby should fit into a family, not the other way around.
Yeah.
Things did not go to plan.

She was born colicky.
What some might call a “high-needs baby.”
Even the L&D nurses remarked on how she wouldn’t sleep.
When she was awake, she was like a ticking time bomb.
As much as I tried not to feel this way, my days became dreadful.
There were some nights that I didn’t sleep at all.
Not even a few minutes.
By the time she was six weeks old, I was losing my mind.
I cried all the time—especially at night.
I googled “can you die of sleep deprivation?”
It went on and on and on. Eight weeks. Three months. Six months. A year!!
I was told that I would damage her, myself, my marriage, and our family if I didn’t sleep train her.
Why didn’t I do it?

As a new mom, I was awash in advice.
Every imaginable kind of advice.
It was like being adrift on a sea.
The wind blew from all angles. It wanted to send me this way, that way, every way at once.
My rudder was the way I felt in my gut.
And when I thought of allowing my daughter to cry alone, I felt… Awful. Terrible. Sick.
So I didn’t do it.
Many times I decided I would do it…but then I thought, I’ll start tomorrow.
I could get through one more day.
And I did.
Until it got better.
(It did get better.)

We have to do what we have to do.
But don’t forget to listen to how you FEEL.
Your new mother consciousness is mammalian.
It lives in a part of you that you may not be used to inhabiting.
It arises from your sacred, intelligent body.
This deeply-rooted intelligence is your rudder in a stormy sea.
Mothers know.
You know.

If you don’t want to sleep train, but you feel like you have to, I have strategies for you to try. You can get some rest without having to do something that feels wrong to you.

0 likes, 0 comments - Jacqui Adams 🦋 Pregnancy + Postpartum Doula () on Instagram: "I planned to sleep train my daughter. I was fully bought in. I read all the books. Happy family,..."

*Content warning: This post touches on postpartum psychosis, su***de, and child death, while not going into detail.*This...
03/15/2023

*Content warning: This post touches on postpartum psychosis, su***de, and child death, while not going into detail.*

This morning someone sent me the New Yorker article “What We Still Don’t Understand About Postpartum Psychosis”.

Several women are named in this article. All of them had children under a year old. Those children are now dead, and their parents’ lives are destroyed.

All of the women sought help multiple times. What they received instead of help was meds, and being sent home to the same environments in which they had been living when their symptoms arose.

Their husbands kept going to work. They themselves kept mothering and running their households. The world turned, and everyone around them acted like everything was normal.

Until it wasn’t.

There are few things that sadden and enrage me more than their stories.

I want to write alternate endings for them.

Their husbands got year-long paternity leaves. Their mothers and sisters came to live with them. Their friends surrounded them all the time. They didn’t have to cook a meal or clean a room for the first year after their babies were born. They were fed properly, given relaxing touch daily. They had occasional nights of broken sleep, but not many. They healed from their births, body and soul.

I have a question about these stories, and what we seem to be taking from them. Is motherhood killing mothers? If not, then what is? If so, then why is it so dangerous? Is this simply how it has to be? Is motherhood like this in every culture? Are we thinking about this scientifically? Are we examining this issue like people who want to change it? Or like people enjoying a spectacle and a sacrifice, saying: it has to be someone. Glad it’s not me.

If we conceptualize motherhood as a trial by fire, as a battle, then it follows that some will not survive.

If we are going to conceptualize motherhood this way, then we owe it to the fallen to look them in the face and say: we did this to you.

We joked about how sleep deprivation is literal torture, and then left you to be subjected to it endlessly, while small children were in your care.

We joked about how all you eat is leftover chicken nuggets and coffee, about how when you see another adult you can’t stop talking because you’re so lonely, about how your husband is like another child in your household, about how you work around the clock for no money.

We told you to have a glass of wine when things hurt, because not doing the things was never an option.

We piled all of this weight on you—the weight that broke you.

Perhaps there was a fault, a seam, but would it have given way had we not thrown the world on top of it?

The pain I feel when writing about this is so deep, it’s numbing.

We’re all numb to this. Why is everyone so resigned?

We don’t have to do things this way.

What should happen is that our broken society should evolve towards repairing this gaping hole through which children and their mothers are tumbling, day after day after day.

But I understand that that’s close to impossible. Fine. If we can’t fix the way we do motherhood—if we can’t keep the husbands home to help, live with the aunties and sisters, let the mothers be cared for organically, within the fabric of an intact culture that already knows what to do—then we can do it the new-fangled way, and hire skilled help.

What would these families’ fates have been if they had had postpartum care?

I don’t want to be arrogant and say that a doula could have prevented this. We’re not actually magic, as much as the world likes to see us that way.

But on the other hand, that’s why many of us got into this work. Because we’ve been there, or we see what’s going on, and we see what needs to happen to stop it, and nobody’s doing it, so here we are. I believe we can prevent many of these types of tragedies, and many smaller tragedies too.

Our whole purpose is to keep mothers from becoming sacrificial lambs. We don’t want to live in a world where that’s how it works.

Lindsay Clancy and her children deserved to live.

What they got instead was the trap that every single family in our culture is forced to walk into the moment they have children. We need to collectively throw this trap out forever.

I am sincerely begging the families of women beginning their childbearing journeys: Hire your beloved person help. Hire them extensive help. Don’t think that the way everyone does it is good enough for them, or for you, or for their kids. It’s NOT good enough. It is in fact a cruel game of roulette, with dismal odds.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Lindsay Clancy and her children deserved to live. What they got instead was admission into the trap that every single family in our culture is forced to walk into when they decide to have children.

Yesterday I watched a new mother shed beautiful tears after being held in a pregnancy closing ceremony. We call this cer...
03/02/2023

Yesterday I watched a new mother shed beautiful tears after being held in a pregnancy closing ceremony. We call this ceremony “Closing Of the Bones” after the Mexican tradition, but it has many names.

Her body was wrapped up tightly in cloth, like a gentle hug, like a swaddle. Her body that had changed shape, grown and then shrunk, that had no clear delineations yet in her nervous system. Where are the boundaries? Where are the lines? Where do I begin and my baby ends? Where am I in time and space?

The wrappings said: Here. Here. Here.

There was a tangible drawing-in of her energy. A gelling.

She lay in darkness, felt constricted, got too hot, wanted to be let out.

She was released from her wrappings. Her body piece by piece let into the world again, to be touched by the light and the air, to take up space.

She radiated. She breathed. She cried.

I wondered, for the millionth time, what happens to those emotions when they’re carried into parenthood? Where do they go?

What happens to your soul when you undergo so a radical transformation, and then just continue on as if everything is the same?

Does a part of you get left behind?

Does a part of you get tucked away?

Does a part of you riot to be seen and heard?

Does a part of you constrict the rest of you from growing, expanding, being free?

When we grow and birth a new human, we grow and birth ourselves.

This closing ceremony walks us through that process—the binding, the heat, the claustrophobia, the release and the exposure. It is our symbolic dance of being born.

When we rise up, we can begin.

It was forty-two weeks and two days into my pregnancy, and I was completely out of patience. Between the heartburn, the ...
02/22/2023

It was forty-two weeks and two days into my pregnancy, and I was completely out of patience. Between the heartburn, the pelvic pain, and the anxiety, I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night in a month. I was DONE. So on Sunday morning, I said damn the torpedoes, and ate two servings of Ina May’s castor oil eggs.

What happened next surprised me.

It was forty-two weeks and two days into my pregnancy, and I was completely out of patience. Between the heartburn, the back pain, and the anxiety, I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night in a month. I was DONE. So on Sunday morning, I said damn the torpedoes, and ate two servings of Ina May....

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