I love to talk about birth plans, write about birth plans, and help people make birth plans. You’ve probably heard about birth plans. What a lot of people don’t often hear about are postpartum plans. As much as I love birth plans, I might argue that postpartum planning is equally, if not more, important.

What is Postpartum Planning?

To simplify, it’s just the process of thinking about and planning what your postpartum recovery time will be like. What happens AFTER birth? In the recorded interview below with postpartum doula, Amy Tucker, she describes a postpartum plan as a continuation of the birth plan. She recommends going through a similar process in making this plan as you would a birth plan. It takes a lot of thought and many conversations with loved ones and partners. You want to spend some real time and energy on this. It might sound like an unpleasant homework assignment, but it might be as bad as you think, and will likely save you so much frustration and stress later on. You want to prepare yourself to have the most peaceful and restorative postpartum experience possible. This can help set you up for a lifetime of better health and parenting.

Why is it Important?

When you are pregnant, you usually get to be the center of attention. Your needs and your health become top priority. You get parties and gifts, and people hold the door open for you more often. People might tell you you’re beautiful and “glowing”, and you might even feel like that! After the baby comes, things change. Most of the attention shifts to the baby. Your attention has to shift a lot, but it’s likely true for the people around you too. You might not have much support or encouragement at a time you need it the most. I like to suggest that your most important job is taking care of your baby, but everyone else should be taking care of you! Instead of offering to hold the baby for you, a friend or family member could offer to bring you a cup of tea or fold a load of laundry.

Your body is doing some BIG healing from pregnancy and birth, and it’s important to rest and support that healing. In some other cultures, there are specific recommendations and rituals related to postpartum healing. Communities are set up to provide care and feeding for the postpartum parent. They continue to be top priority. Unfortunately, in our modern Western culture, the expectation is that we hurry up and get back to our bodies and life as usual… only new and improved and WITH a new baby. This is not real. Even if you can fit into your jeans and get things done, you might not be truly healed on the inside. I mean your organs and soft tissues, AND your emotional state.

After birth, most people do experience some big changes in their mental health. Even when things are “normal”, postpartum emotions can be hard to manage. You might not feel like yourself for at least a few weeks. Most people feel overwhelmed, weepy, irritable, tired, or foggy at least some of the time. This is normal, but it can also become something more difficult to manage especially when you don’t get proper care or if you have some risk factors. You need help from others, and you also need to learn how to take care of yourself.

Like Amy says in the interview, a family is a system. When one part of the system is not functioning well, the whole system suffers. Your baby is an important part of that system, and so are you. Postpartum planning can help you be a healthy part of that system.

How to Make a Postpartum Plan

You can just sit down and make a list. You might get everything covered, or you might not. To make the most of your efforts, Amy recommends following some guidelines when you’re creating a postpartum plan. If you want even more guidance, the Life with Baby Workbook is a great tool!

• Talk about it. You’ll want to have some conversations with the people who will be supporting you and your family. Find out how they intend to help, or ask for what you think you’ll need. It’s important to figure out what your resources are before you make a plan.
• Write it down. Once you have a better idea of what is available to you, write out many paragraphs, or an outline, or a list. You might organize it or just rough it. The point is to get everything down on paper. You can refine it later.
• Get feedback. Once you have your document, you might want to go over it with people who can offer encouragement or helpful suggestions. Your sister might notice that you didn’t ask for help with meals on your plan and might be able to give you some suggestions for that.
• Share it. Once you feel good about the document, you can share it with all the people who might be supporting you in the postpartum period. This can include medical professionals and doulas, but also your partner and any family or friends who might be spending time with you after you get home with your baby.
• Remember that this is a living document. This is not a POSTPARTUM PLAN. (period) This is a postpartum plan… You can and should change your mind about some things. It’s so important to be flexible. When you’re actually in the postpartum period, you might notice that you need more than you thought, or just different things. Change it! People can change a lot from pregnancy to postpartum. Your expectations about what it would be like to have a new baby might be completely different from your reality. That’s OK. I would even say that it’s a great character asset to be able to say, “This is not what I thought I would do. Oh well, I guess I need to adjust!” You might have planned to use cloth diapers, but then feel like you want to switch to disposable. Or maybe you thought you’d want your baby in their own room right away, and now you want your baby right next to your bed, or even in your bed. This happens to all parents. No one has it all figured out at the beginning. Parenting is a journey of learning. We never stop learning new things about our kids and about ourselves. It’s part of the beauty.
• Remember that this is just a guideline. So many of us enter pregnancy with the desire to control our experiences and our lives. We can even start to feel some sense of control when things go well. At some point, we all have to come to realize that control is an illusion. If you think you have it, it’s just luck. But luck runs out at some point, and you have to recognize that you can’t actually control everything. Having children can expedite this understanding for a lot of parents! These little people have their own ideas about life and how they want to do things. Postpartum recovery is the same. It’s impossible to predict what might happen during birth and during our recovery. A postpartum plan can’t give you absolute control, but it can give you a framework and something to refer to for options and help when things don’t go exactly as planned. It can’t offer you total control, but it can offer you direction.

What to Include on a Postpartum Plan

If you’d like to be very organized with your document, you might divide your list into sections, categories, or buckets as Amy calls them. It can be helpful to start with this framework even when you’re just having conversations or organizing your thoughts.

• Your emotional health/support: Consider what you might go through emotionally after giving birth. Do you have a history of or any risk factors for a mood disorder? How do you handle difficult emotions? What do you need to support your mental health?
• Everyday basics: Think about the stuff you do on a daily or weekly basis. Do you wash dishes, do laundry, walk the dogs, eat, sleep, stretch, take medicine, make and keep appointments, etc, etc, etc. What about during postpartum recovery? Remembering that you’ll want to take care of your baby and let other people take care of you and the rest, who can you enlist to help with some or all of these things?
• Transitional preferences: If you have a co-parent/partner, it’s really important to figure out these things together on a postpartum plan. Do you plan to stay home with the baby for some amount of time? What about your partner? What happens when you or your partner go back to work? What does this mean for your planning, breastfeeding, childcare, etc.?
• Communication/relationships: It can be so hard to ask for help, but a postpartum plan is a great way to organize your needs and then communicate them. It can also be a lot easier to do this before the baby arrives when you’re not so overwhelmed that it’s much harder to ask for help. Since you’ll share that plan with your support system ahead of time, hopefully, they can step up and provide the help and support you need when the time comes. You might also need to ask for more, or remind people. You might have very strong emotions that make communication difficult. Your postpartum plan can provide some direction for you in this way too. You might set up some time for you and your partner to meet and talk or connect on a regular basis. You might include some information about how you would best like to communicate needs or frustrations with your partner during this time. Maybe you’ll write things down instead of speaking. Maybe you choose a “safe word” to use when you’re feeling very overwhelmed so your partner can understand that they might not be doing something especially wrong, but that you’re feeling especially bad. Then they can be prepared to be extra compassionate. You might plan for your partner to handle the logistics of other people’s involvement in your care (asking for help and setting it up). Your partner might help by communicating and holding boundaries with family members or friends. Setting these boundaries in a postpartum plan is also a really important thing to do! You might love to have visitors, or you might not. In that case, you might communicate something like, “Thank you so much for bringing us a meal. In the first couple of weeks, we plan to lay low and recover and minimize visits, so please drop it on the front porch and send a quick text. We’ll follow up with you soon so you can meet the baby!”
• Resources: This last section of a postpartum plan is where you put all the phone numbers and information for resources you think you might need. I love to recommend having a lactation consultant’s phone number readily available in case you need some help with breastfeeding. Breastfeeding Success has a 24/7 hotline that you can use for some quick help or to schedule an appointment! 512-808-0237. You might have some names and phone numbers for a therapist, the pediatrician, your acupuncturist, a postpartum doula, neighbors, etc.

Self-care for You

First, I encourage you to lower your expectations related to self-care. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t do anything, just change what you expect to do and how much. You’re not likely going to want to take vacations or go to a spa or lots of your favorite fitness classes. You might not be going to happy hours with friends or co-workers for a while. You might not even get to church or take nice long walks or baths. If these sorts of things were part of your self-care routine before, it’s ok to let those go temporarily. Or you might even find that some of those things can change forever! You are not “giving up” when you modify your life to work better as a new parent.

Second, it’s important to have some self-compassion. It will help you to learn to be OK with doing “less”. The fact is that it might look like doing less, but you’re actually doing as much or more. It just looks different. When you are recovering from pregnancy and birth, your body is making a heroic effort to heal. Your uterus needs to shrink and move back into its proper position. Your other organs need to shift back into place. Muscles, ligaments, and tendons need to shorten and heal. Your skin and bones need to readjust, and your hormones will need time to rebalance. On top of all of that, you’re learning how to do something huge… parenting. A newborn is a very special little human with high needs and a high level of dependency on YOU. It might look like doing “less” when you’re lying in bed holding your baby skin-to-skin, but you’re actually encouraging your milk supply to stabilize, your uterus to shrink, bleeding to lessen, hormones to rebalance, and your baby to adjust their bodily functions like body temperature and blood sugar levels, to being outside the womb. When you can put it that way to yourself, you might recognize that you’re doing pretty big things “just lying there”. When you’re able to be compassionate with yourself, you will likely feel better and heal better. Remind yourself that “productivity” will look different temporarily, and when you can allow this time to fully heal, you’ll be better off in the long run.

Here are some good examples of postpartum self-care, but this might look a little different for every person. Just do what works for you. Whatever you choose, integrate the practices into your daily routines so they become automatic, and you don’t forget or skip it.

• Check in with how you’re feeling. You might do this each time you feed your baby, or after every diaper change. You might also set recurring alarms on your phone to do this every 2-3 hours. Do you need to use the bathroom? Are you hungry? Then make sure to meet those needs!
• Make yourself a cup of tea or a special drink before you sit down to feed your baby.
• Rinse your face and put on some lotion after you feed your baby.
• Do a few simple stretches or some diaphragmatic breathing exercises at every diaper change.
• Eat really nutritious but delicious meals. This is best when you can let other people make them for you! And don’t skip meals.
• Take 10 minutes to lie down and listen to some alpha and theta frequency binaural sounds for relaxation.
• Take 10 minutes to lie down and meditate or pray.
• Try to accept help with your baby so you can sleep. Listen to your body and take the opportunity to do this whenever it feels like you might be able to fall asleep.
• Have a conversation with your partner or support person about setting up a regular time each day for you to have a break from baby care. It might be just 30 minutes or an hour. Use that time to do something that supports your mental health. You might read a book, take a short walk (if you’re at that point in your healing), take a bath, have a cup of coffee with your neighbor, etc.
• It’s also OK to ask someone else to take care of your baby for a little while because you really want to fold a basket of laundry or do some dishes. If that makes you feel good, that’s ok! When I was recovering, I had helpers to do those things, and I let them most of the time. But every once in a while, I just wanted to do a simple household chore. It made me feel a little more grounded. As long as you’re not doing so much of this to be holding up your recovery, that can be self-care too.

Final Takeaway

In the recorded interview, Amy makes sure to emphasize something really important for ALL parents. She reminds us that EVERYONE has to learn to be a parent. I’ll even add to that and say that we have to learn how to be a parent again for every child we have. It might not be as much of a struggle, but every child is different. Every new child is a learning experience. It WILL feel like a struggle and an adjustment at times. This is absolutely normal. No one has this all figured out when they become a parent. We are all learning at all times along the way.