When a baby is born, that being is helpless and needs millions of care to survive for many years. He needs help for all activities and acquires more and more learning until he becomes independent of care. The newborn has a lap, has shelter, has the patience of everyone around him to teach him how to live. But what about the mother? The new mother who has just given birth and finds herself with breasts full of milk, sore, exhausted, recognizing herself once again in her own body… Who teaches the new mother about this new world she has entered?
This is a delicate question to be answered, since the puerperium is a very intimate phase for a woman with her child and her own body. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but overall it really is an adventure.
First, let's think about mothers who have the support of their partner and family at this time. The new routine at home with the baby, the challenges of dividing the time of mothering and being the partner, the care of the house, the attention to the family, which now only has eyes for the baby, and vanity. Many women get lost in the puerperium because they find themselves run over by the new routine and there is no time to look at themselves with love and affection. Nothing else is the same. This woman will never be the same again. She will not be the same woman, the same wife, the same daughter, the same friend, the same professional. Now it's time to find yourself again and reinvent yourself. It's that moment when she will look at her wardrobe and think, "Nothing suits me anymore!" and she will want to change everything.
The wardrobe part happens to most moms after their first child, but looking at single moms, moms raising their kids without a dad's help, the challenges of finding yourself are much greater. It's time to stop and think: Who gives this mother a lap? The sexist society in which we live already reduces women and the act of mothering to the simple (and unhappy) comment: “She doesn't do anything, she's just a mother!”. Being a mother is never just about being a mother, it's being too much, especially when you're a single mother.
Few people stop to understand that the single mother assumes a much greater burden of responsibility than the mother who has her partner's full participation in the routine - and this does not diminish either of them in any way, but the single mother has to deal with it. the child and with his/her life, his/her return to the job market or to studies, his/her home and his/her leisure time, which is almost impossible without a structured routine and a support network.
mother's mental health
Is the mother who leaves her child at school to work wrong? Of course not, because they both need it. Is the mother who leaves her child with someone from her support network to have fun and have a moment of leisure away from the child's routine wrong? Neither. The mental health of the single mother also needs to be up to date to handle everything in a lighter and more pleasant way.
As if the difficulties of replacing women in the labor market after becoming mothers were not enough, imagine for single mothers. This difficult scenario ends up getting worse and worse, as companies want less and less human and more robotic employees, who work hard and have few problems with their personal lives. And this also happens in other aspects of life, like finding a new partner, as, for some reason, men seem to believe that women with children are more fertile than others. Seriously? What does this have to do? So is it so? Became a mother is a worse professional, a worse woman, a worse girlfriend? How horrible! There is no mental health that can handle this, only therapy and meditation to calm the heart.
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Finally, if you are a mother, solo or not, know that being a mother is living blaming yourself for something you shouldn't blame yourself for, for things that society says but that we know are not true. Don't give up on your dreams, don't stop smiling, accept this new routine and adapt to whatever comes ahead to overcome the challenges. And never let anyone tell you what's best for your child, because only you know that. Namaste!
