The Storm After the Calm: 8 Lessons Learned After A Tumultuous Postpartum Experience With Rheumatoid Arthritis
I was recently honored to share my pregnancy and postpartum journey with the popular and helpful website Autoimmune Mom, and it is now housed on the American Autoimmune and Related Diseases Association site. The full story can be found here. The post details my journey from a relatively tranquil pregnancy to a postpartum “storm” due to my chronic illness issues (including rheumatoid arthritis). It includes three sections after Charlie’s birth: Survival, Mastitis and Flare-Ups (0-3 months) Feeling Like I “Almost Got This,”or Wayward Optimism (4-16 months) The New Normal: Accepting that life/parenting/my health is now in a permanent state of flux (16 months to present). The gist of the post is that therapy…
Bringing Home Baby: Tips for Meeting the Caregivers’ Basic Needs
It’s hard to put into words how simultaneously joyful, exhausting, transcendent, stressful, surreal, and miraculous the first few months home with an infant can be. Now that I’m emerging from the fog but the experience is still fresh in my mind, I’d love to share some tips and strategies that helped me adjust to parenthood* over the last five and a half months. While pregnant, I found countless resources for how to care for a newborn, from feeding to sleeping to swaddling to safety. However, there were less resources available for how to care for myself and other primary caregivers in the newborn days. Thus, I will focus on these…