The care stops on a Tuesday
Think about how it actually goes. Your obstetrician or your Midwife sees you all the way through pregnancy — every few weeks, then every week, questions answered, hands on your belly, someone who knows your history. You give birth. The hospital Midwives are with you for a few days, and they are wonderful.
Then, on a Tuesday, you are discharged. There might be a home visit or two. There is a maternal and child health appointment, then another one a few weeks later. Your obstetrician will see you again at six weeks, for twenty minutes, when it is nearly over.
And somewhere in between all of that, at two in the morning on day nine, with cracked nipples and a baby who will not settle and a body you do not recognise, there is nobody. That is the gap.
What falls into the gap
It is not the dramatic things. Emergencies have systems; someone will always help you with an emergency. What falls into the gap is everything else — and everything else is most of it.
Is this normal. Is she getting enough. Why does it hurt like this. Why does she scream from four until eight. Is my bleeding too heavy. Should this wound look like that. Why can I not stop crying. Am I doing this wrong. Is it meant to feel like this.
These questions do not fit into a twenty-minute appointment in three weeks' time. They need answering tonight, by someone who knows you, in your own home, without you having to justify asking.
Postnatal is not the same as matrescence
Here is the distinction I have come to care about most. Postnatal care, as the system defines it, is about clinical checks: the wound, the uterus, the weight, the jaundice. Necessary, and finite. It ends.
Matrescence is the whole other thing happening at the same time — the becoming. Hormonal, physical, emotional, relational, a complete reorganisation of who you are. We have a word for adolescence and we make room for it: years of it, patience for it, understanding that the person is being remade. Matrescence is the same order of change, and it is expected to happen quietly, in a fortnight, between visitors.
Postnatal care ends around week six. Matrescence is only just getting started. Nobody hands that over to anybody.
What I know about those weeks
I know that most of what frightens women in the fourth trimester is normal, and that being told so — clearly, by someone qualified, while they watch your actual baby — changes everything.
I know that a woman with one trusted person to call makes different decisions than a woman with a search engine and conflicting advice from six well-meaning people.
And I know how quickly confidence builds when somebody sits beside you, unhurried, and shows you rather than tells you. I have watched it happen in a single ninety-minute visit more times than I can count.
So this is what I built
With You Midwifery is not a clinic and it is not a hotline. It is one Midwife, in your home, for the first six weeks — the same face every visit, unlimited calls and texts in between, feeding and sleep and behaviour and your own body and your own head, all treated as one thing, because they are.
It is deliberately small. I cannot be a hundred women's trusted person; I can be yours. That is the whole point of it.
You do not need to have it all figured out. You just need one trusted person in your corner — and I would be honoured for that to be me.
— Penny