100,000 years ago, good help was not so hard to find

Folks, this is a long one. It’s an important one. It’s a key chapter in my future book (which I’m thinking of calling Frogs in the Desert: An Evolutionary Perspective on Why Modern Motherhood is So Damn Hard) and the sample chapter I intend to include in my book proposal. So I am eager to know what you think! Feel free to leave feedback or suggestions in the comments, or reply by email to me directly. Thanks, as always, for being here.

My first maternity leave

As I neared my due date for my first child, I remember thinking, let’s get this show on the road so I can go back to drinking wine and eating sushi. I’d really had enough of being pregnant. I was huge. It had become impossible to sleep comfortably, impossible to eat anything without having terrible acid reflux, impossible to put on my own shoes. I bought my first pair of Birkenstocks at that time because I could slip them on without bending over. (Spoiler alert: I never went back). I was afraid of birth - the pain, the possible complications, of not being listened to or respected by the doctors - but I was not afraid of the recovery. As soon as this baby was out, I could just go back to normal life, right?

It sounds ridiculous now, but that’s genuinely what was going on inside my head. I had my first baby before most of my friends, and I honestly had no idea what taking care of a new baby was like. 

Here’s what it’s like:

We were released from the hospital about 24 hours after my son’s birth. I had a normal, uncomplicated, vaginal delivery. This had involved a totally normal, uncomplicated 24 hours of excruciating pain: pain that would have made any prisoner at Guantanamo Bay spill anything his interrogators wanted out of him. It also involved a totally normal, uncomplicated tear from my vagina halfway to my asshole, which was stitched up in a totally normal, uncomplicated way but which made it impossible to sit comfortably, walk, or poop for weeks following the delivery. This is the kind of injury and bodily trauma which we would otherwise expect to absolve us from any kind of responsibility, no matter how minor, for weeks (maybe months) to come. Instead, they send you home with a new baby and no user manual after only 24 hours in the hospital. 

On the first night home, my new baby boy, who had slept so peacefully in the hospital, awoke in the wee-small hours of the morning and began screaming inconsolably. I remember just feeling confused. Who designed these things anyway? I wanted to go over to my son and explain to him in a calm, rational voice, “Look, I’m recovering here. I need my rest. Surely you can understand. I have a second-degree tear in my vagina and my insides feel like mush, not to mention I didn’t sleep for 36 hours during labor to get you out. You’re really asking too much now. Please go back to sleep now.”

Needless to say, that did not work. Instead, I spent hours bouncing him up and down on the yoga ball, bleeding, exhausted. 

My husband had no paternity leave because he had just switched jobs, and (as we all know) the wives of husbands-who-recently-switched-jobs do not need help with their babies. My mother, a triathlete, had qualified for the world championships in Kona taking place on literally the same day my son was born and wouldn’t be back for three weeks. My father flew from out of state and came to the house to cook dinners for us every night during the first two weeks, which was absolutely wonderful, though insufficient. 

I remember texting a friend of mine on day three after our return home, a new father, the only person close to me who had already had a baby, and asking, “When do I get to sleep through the night again? In a couple of weeks?” I had read somewhere that it got better at six weeks. I didn’t know what better meant. I could feel his hesitation through the phone, “Maybe in a year?”

That reply crushed me but at least I knew I needed help. We hadn’t budgeted for child care until my maternity leave ended, but I could not go that long without sleep. Our downstairs neighbors had a nanny from Mexico whose daughter was available part-time. She was 22, had two children of her own already in school, and didn’t speak a word of English. She was available to start the next day. She was hired instantly via text message. 

My husband asked, “Don’t you want to meet her, or to get a reference for her?” Nope. I remember thinking I didn’t care whether she had just been released from prison, as long as she knew how to swaddle a baby and stick a bottle in its mouth and, more importantly, as long as she was available to start tomorrow. This was a state of emergency. When you are outnumbered by the enemy and you desperately need to draft more troops to reinforce the front lines, you don’t ask much about their qualifications.

She turned out to be great. For the next six months she showed up at our door at 8 AM every morning and I handed her my son faster than you can pass a hot potato, went back to my bedroom, shut the door, put on an eye mask and ear plugs and slept until noon when my alarm alerted me it was time for her to go. Never once did it occur to me to do anything other than sleep, and never once did I fail to fall asleep immediately and stay asleep for the entire four hours. That’s how exhausted I was. Those four hours of daily help saved me. 

I wish every mother had that. 

After she left I would make myself a cup of hot coffee and sit down on the soft carpet in our living room with my baby. I remember thinking, “Now what? Am I supposed to read to him or something? Play him Mozart?” I tried some of these things. He obviously didn’t care. At around 4 months, when he started being able to sit up in an unstable, teetering sort of way, I would surround him with pillows to keep him in place and soften the blow if he toppled over, then set a box of objects down in front of him. He would take them out, one at a time, and look them over. I would sit next to him listening to The Daily, first about the democratic primaries, and then increasingly about this strange virus sweeping across China. It was January, 2020. 

After my body had healed somewhat and I started getting the minimal amount of sleep I needed to function, my days were filled with boredom and a crushing sense of isolation. Don’t get me wrong; it was better than the physical pain and sleep deprivation of the first weeks, but it was challenging in different ways. I remember counting the hours until my husband would get home from work, desperate for a friendly face and an extra set of hands. I had never in my life felt that time moved so slowly. Some days, if the weather was nice, I would put my son in the stroller and go out walking. I’d walk and walk until he fell asleep, then park at a cafe with outdoor tables, conscientiously spaced six feet apart, and sit and drink coffee and read The New Yorker, happy just to be in physical proximity to other adult humans. 

And then it was over. I went back to work (remotely) to a job I was totally ambivalent about but at least it involved social (virtual) contact with other adults. My son went off to a small, family daycare at 8 AM and I picked him up around 4 PM. 

Did I miss him? Kind of. I felt guilty about leaving him for so long, but the honest truth is that I liked having him out of the house. I enjoyed drinking my coffee while it was still hot, pumping breastmilk in between meetings while watching trashy television, and going for a run without the stroller when I had the time. In retrospect I felt that being a stay-at-home mom in this isolating society was the hardest job in the world, and I was happy to have a career to go back to, even if it mostly involved copy-pasting numbers from Excel into Powerpoint. 

I recognize that my situation was extraordinarily privileged. I had an uncomplicated birth and no major surgery to recover from. I had an incredibly long maternity leave, during which I was paid well enough to maintain my standard of living (even though it was not always my full salary). Because of this, we were able to afford help, and because of that help, I was able to rest and recover. Because I was able to rest and recover, I avoided postpartum depression, which affects 20% of mothers in this country. I had only one baby to care for, and no other dependent children, as so many mothers do, and as I would after the birth of my daughter less than two years later. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to return to a job within two weeks of giving birth, as one in four mothers are forced to do in this country, even after a C-section, even if it's life threatening. But the point I want to make is that, despite my relative privilege, it was still really, really hard. Harder than it should have been; possibly than it was for mothers 100,000 years ago, despite all of the alleged “progress” we have made as a society since then. 

Rewind 100,000 years

What would the first six months of my son’s life have been like for me, the mother, had I been born 100,000 years ago? As with anything this far back in the past, reconstructing a precise picture is difficult and controversial. We know that at the time Homo Sapiens were probably a lot like humans today: which is to say anatomically, socially, and emotionally modern. They were bipedal, highly intelligent and social. They had abundant tools and clothing (although, my husband would point out, definitely not as abundant as yours truly). They had not yet left Africa: the first would leave about 70,000 years ago and settle along the southern coast of Asia. Others would remain in Africa. 

We know that all humans at this time would have been living as hunter gatherers, in small, nomadic bands of about 25 people: men, women and children. We know this from archeological evidence, or perhaps, lack of archeological evidence. Agriculture and settlement leaves visible traces, and these traces do not appear in the archeological record until about 10,000 years ago. As for their social organization and culture, it’s hard to piece much together from the fossil record, and it’s here that we turn to studies of contemporary hunter gatherers. There has been much criticism of the study of contemporary hunter gatherer societies as proxies for our shared evolutionary past, and rightly so. These people are not living fossils: they have been evolving and adapting right alongside their post-industrial Western counterparts for just as long. All have had contact with colonial forces. Most of them engage in some kind of trade with agricultural or industrialized communities, and most of them have access to cigarettes, alcohol, and other products of  post-industrial society. As anthropologist and archeologist Robert Kelly puts it, “long before anthropologists arrived on the scene, hunter-gatherers had already been given diseases, shot at, traded with, employed and exploited by colonial powers or agricultural neighbors.”

Nevertheless, if you accept that Homo Sapiens lived as hunter gatherers for 99% of our existence as a species, prior to the arrival of agriculture, and you accept that certain features of hunter gatherer lifestyles are a necessary product of their environment, then we should be able to learn something from them about what life was like in our shared evolutionary past.

One of the best-studied hunter gatherer societies is that of the !Kung, or Jo/’huansi, people of Southern Africa. The !Kung lived as hunter gatherers up until the 1970s and an entire generation of anthropologists made  it their career to study the !Kung lifeways. The intense interest stemmed in part from the fact that their lifestyle was thought to be representative of the lifestyle of our shared Paleolithic ancestors. Indeed, genetic evidence suggests that the ancestors of modern Khoi-San peoples, including the !Kung, expanded from East and Central Africa to Southern Africa as early as 150,000 years ago. The idea that we can use any one hunter gatherer society as a proxy for our evolutionary past has been rightly challenged, and indeed, the diversity of hunter gatherer cultures and lifestyles is a testament to how variable and adaptable humans are as a species, but as we will see, the !Kung share many cultural practices with other hunter gatherer societies, not least of which is the collective care of babies and children. Below is an account from anthropologist Melvin Konner, who spent much of his career studying the !Kung:

“From the baby’s position on the mother’s hip they have available to them her entire social world…When the mother is standing, the infant’s face is just at eye-level of desperately maternal 10-12-year-old girls who frequently approach and initiate brief, intense, face-to-face interactions, including mutual smiling and vocalization. When not in the sling they are passed from hand to hand around a fire for similar interactions with one adult or child after another. They are kissed, sung to, bounced, entertained, encouraged, and even addressed at length in conversational tones long before they can understand words.”

This is not just an isolated account. One study of !Kung mothers and infants showed that for nearly half of the recorded incidences of infant crying, someone other than the mother responded, either together with the mother or alone. In one third of instances, the mother was not present. She was probably taking a bubble bath. 

In all seriousness, though, let us contemplate this for a moment. Half of the time when the baby cries, someone other than the mother responds. Imagine if, during the first six months of my son’s life, someone else had picked him up half the time when he cried. I can’t even begin to fathom what kind of a difference that would have made for me and for him. To be honest, when I think about it long enough, it makes me want to cry. It makes me want to cry for all that we’ve lost as mothers in post-industrial societies.

Studies of other hunter gatherer populations have reached similar conclusions. Among the Hadza, a well-studied hunter gatherer society in Tanzania, researchers report that newborns are held by someone other than the mother 85% of the time in the first days after birth. For the math-challenged among you like me, that means that the mother is holding the baby only 15% of the time. Plenty of time for a postpartum nap. The first few days are particular, however, since it's culturally important in Hadza society (and in many hunter gatherer societies) for the baby to be socialized with his campmates. After the first few days, the amount of holding by allomothers (a fancy word for people other than the mother) declines. Nevertheless, when looking at daytime minutes in the baby’s first year of life, Hadza mothers were involved in 78% of minutes, fathers and older sisters in roughly 18% each, grandmothers and older brothers in roughly 9% and all others in 29-41%. You will notice this does not add up to 100%. That’s because there is overlap. The mother is physically present and near her baby most of the time in the first year, but she is rarely alone, and not always engaged in active care. There is always a relative or friend on hand to help. 

The !Kung and the Hadza are not even considered to be particularly extreme in their levels of allomaternal care. The Efe, a hunter gatherer group living in the Ituri Rainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, take the cake when it comes to helping mom. In Efe society, allomothers account for about 40% of infants’ physical contact at 3 weeks and 60% at 8 weeks, and non-maternal nursing has also been frequently observed. In fact, babies average fourteen different caretakers in the first days of life. Fourteen! Imagine if your mom, your dad, your aunt, your uncle, your cousin, your older sister, your older sister’s husband, your teenage niece, your younger brother, and five of your closest friends all came to help out with the baby after he was born. If that sounds like a nightmare, remember, they all have their own huts and bathrooms and no one voted for Donald Trump. Some of them are even lactating and happy to stick a boob in the baby’s mouth on your behalf while you get some rest. Shared suckling has been observed in at least 87% of typical foraging societies documented in the Human Relations Area Files. 

Another well-studied hunter gatherer group, the Aka (or Bayaka) of the Central African Republic and northern Republic of the Congo, has similar infant caretaking patterns. Among the Aka, while in camp, one to four-month-olds are held by their mothers less than 40% of the time and are transferred to other caregivers an average of 7 or 8 times per hour. On average, infants have 7 different caretakers over the course of a single day. 

This is a small sampling of four of the best-studied hunter gatherer societies. If we had a complete picture of the true diversity of the hunter gatherer lifeways, there would surely be counterexamples. The human species is highly adaptable and able to develop unique strategies and cultures that support survival in variable environmental and social conditions. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence to suggest that communal child rearing was the norm in our evolutionary past and may even have been crucial to our survival as a species. Evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy has gone so far as to suggest that communal rearing of children is what accounts for our emotional intelligence as a species, and what enabled us to shorten our interbirth intervals relative to the Great Apes, our closest living relatives. We will discuss more on interbirth intervals in future chapters, but if Dr. Hrdy’s theory is true, then communal care of babies and children might be just about as salient a feature of Homo Sapiens as big brains or bipedalism. 

Not a bad frog

We began this book with a story of a rainforest frog who finds herself struggling to survive in the desert. For millions of years her body evolved dependencies on certain kinds of rainforest foods and abundant water. In the desert, she will struggle to survive and eventually dry out and die. This is an extreme and imperfect metaphor, but bear with me. 

Evolutionary anthropologists can make a strong argument for human mothers having evolved in a context with abundant communal support and shared care of babies and children. Then, over the course of a few thousand years (mere seconds on an evolutionary time scale) we stripped mothers of these tools and support systems. We put the frog in the desert. Unlike the frog, however, we gave mothers just enough to survive and just enough for their children to survive. In fact, the survival rate of mothers and babies is much higher than it would have been in our evolutionary past, thanks to an abundant food supply, clean drinking water, and modern medicine. By many measures, we are better off than the frog in the desert. In fact, many will argue that the frog is even better off in the desert. 

The truth is more complex. Most of us will survive motherhood in the post-industrial context, but most of us will suffer, and as a result, our children will suffer. In the early phases of motherhood, most of us will struggle to meet our most basic needs - sleep, food, and exercise - not to mention social time with friends and other adults. This will not kill us, but neither will it make us stronger. In many ways, the fact that we are able to survive so well in this context masks the severe toll it takes on our mental health. 

As discussed at the start of the book, some 20% of women in post-industrial societies will suffer from a perinatal mood disorder, and these numbers are on the rise. Suicide and drug overdose (“deaths of despaire,” as researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton have termed it) are now the leading cause of maternal death in these societies. What are the rates of postpartum depression in hunter gatherer and small-scale societies? We don’t know, but we do know that when we reintroduce various forms of social support for mothers into post-industrial societies, rates of perinatal mood disorders decrease. 

Loneliness in pregnant mothers and mothers of children under age five in post-industrial societies is estimated to be as high as 40%, and as high as 70% if mothers have children with a problem. It has been well-established by researchers that social isolation and loneliness are risk factors for depression for all types of people, not just mothers. The cruel irony of the situation is that we have increased social isolation for the people who need social support the most, and the more we need help and social support (as in the case of mothers of a problem child) the more we end up being isolated. 

A mother’s need for support goes beyond mere loneliness. Loneliness is part of the issue, but even more than social interaction, what mothers need is help. Research has shown that social support from other women with children does not buffer against perinatal mood disorders the same way that support from relatives without dependent children does. Your mommy-and-me group may be a great resource and source of comfort, but it’s not helping you do the dishes or take a nap when your baby is fussy. Numerous high-quality, large, longitudinal and cross-sectional studies have found that a mother’s perceived level of social support greatly reduces her chances of suffering from a perinatal mood disorder, even when controlling for other predictors like past depressive episodes, socioeconomic status, stress and partner violence. More than just about any other factor, the quality of a woman’s relationships and received support in the perinatal period will determine her risk for postnatal depression and anxiety. 

I talk a lot about postpartum depression and other clinically diagnosed disorders in this book, partly because they are important topics, but also because they are easier to measure in the context of a study. The mother has a diagnosed disorder or she does not. We can look at the variables and measure correlations. 

But the reality is not so black and white. For every mother diagnosed with a perinatal mood disorder, another goes undiagnosed, and for every mother with an undiagnosed perinatal mood disorder, another is suffering, but maybe not in ways that meet the clinical criteria for an official diagnosis. In short, the problem is much, much bigger than just the 20% of the population who receives an official diagnosis (although 20% is already staggeringly high). In short, it’s a rare mother who will not suffer from lack of social support in the post-industrial context. 

An American pipedream

When I first started reading research by anthropologists like Sarah Hrdy and Melvin Konner, it was like a lightbulb went off in my head. Suddenly there was an explanation for all of the seemingly-contradictory feelings that had characterized my first few months of motherhood. I loved my baby, but I hated the boredom and social isolation that came with caring for him at home alone. I wanted to be near him, to spend time with him throughout the day, but I also needed space and time to care for myself. My love for him felt deeply instinctual, but the daily how-to of caring for a newborn left me feeling flummoxed on a regular basis. 

After learning what motherhood was like in hunter gatherer societies, I suddenly felt that mothers in contemporary post-industrial settings have no good options. In post-industrial societies like the United States, we have to choose between staying home alone with our baby or leaving our baby in the care of a stranger and going off to work somewhere. Even this supposed choice is not really a choice for most mothers. Many mothers who would prefer to work outside the home are forced to stay home due to lack of affordable childcare options, lack of flexibility in the male-dominated workforce, or simply because they feel too guilty leaving their child in the care of another for the day. Similarly, many mothers who would prefer to stay home are forced to return to work, often within as little as two weeks of giving birth, out of economic necessity. Neither option is great. 

What if we could design a system that was in line with our evolutionary past? What would that even look like? Obviously we cannot, and probably would not wish to, return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, but we could adopt certain features of collective care in our post-industrial context. For one, all mothers should be given a long leave of absence from domestic and paid work while they recover from birth and bond with their babies. During this time, mothers should not be alone. Fathers and partners should have paid leave as well. Relatives who wish to help should be allowed to switch to flexible, remote work schedules in order to temporarily relocate and help the new mother. Any new mother knows that there is nothing like a helpful grandmother (and abundant research backs this up), but many grandmothers are themselves employed outside the home and unable to take time off. They should also have the right to take leave following the birth of a grandchild. 

Mothers should also be given a hefty stipend for paid help inside the home. This could be spent on substitutive childcare services or domestic duties. In hunter gatherer societies, young adolescent girls are often the most present and helpful allomothers. They have the energy and they benefit from learning how to mother (as discussed in chapter 5). It’s not hard to imagine some kind of federally subsidized au pair program that gives young women room, board, a stipend and access to educational opportunities or cultural enrichment in exchange for help caring for the home and baby. Au pair programs exist today, but without federal subsidies, they tend to be exploitative for young girls and expensive for families, and rely heavily on immigration from countries with less economic opportunity. 

Simple things, like home visits from a trained nurse or healthcare professional  in the first 6 months postpartum, can reduce risk and severity of postpartum depression. This is a small contribution compared to having an extra set of helping hands in the home around the clock, but it’s enough to make a difference. 

Finally, in a society where maternal isolation in single family homes is overwhelmingly common, having more communal, family-friendly spaces could go a long way in buffering against loneliness. So many of the “third spaces” (social spaces other than the home or workplace) that we rely on as young adults are overtly hostile to young children. Children are barred from bars and not well-tolerated in many cafes and restaurants. Spaces that are billed as child-friendly are often not adult-friendly (think amusement parks and playgrounds) in that they are not conducive to adult relaxation and socialization. In many cultures outside the United States, and even within certain sub-cultures in the United States, it's common for adult leisure, socialization and entertainment to exist alongside children’s play. In Europe, children often gather and play in large pedestrian plazas while parents enjoy a drink with friends in a nearby cafe. Playgrounds are often surrounded by cafes and bars so that parents can enjoy themselves while still keeping an eye on their children. In Burkina Faso, where I lived for a year, adults would gather to drink beer and dance on the weekends while children played together nearby. These kinds of child-friendly, but not child-centric, social spaces have become exceedingly rare in the United States, to the detriment of all. 

If and when mothers do choose to return to work, she should have the option of working a flexible, part-time schedule and either doing so remotely or bringing her child with her to her place of work. Workplaces that employ mothers, and that require mothers to be physically present at their place of work, should also offer on-site childcare. This is how things were in our evolutionary past. The concept of maternity leave is an artificial, post-industrial construct. In the Paleolithic, a mother’s return to “work” (by which we mean foraging work, hunting and domestic chores that are above and beyond the hard work of nursing and caring for a baby) would have been gradual. As she recovered, and as her baby required less around-the-clock care, she would have gradually ramped up her efforts to collect and process food and provide for her family. This would have been done in close proximity to her baby, especially in the first year. She would have had help, but the help, the work, and the baby would have been co-located. She would have worked when she was able and intermittently cared for her baby and herself. 

Perhaps you think what I am describing here is a total pipedream. Maybe it is, but consider that other countries have already successfully implemented much of what I have discussed above. In Sweden, parents have a leave allowance of 480 days, 390 of which are paid at 80% of their normal salary. Dads are required to use a minimum of the three months of this time, but the rest can be split however the family choses. Parents also get 120 days of leave to care for a sick child up to the age of 12 years old. Children can attend preschool from as early as six months old and it is virtually free. Sweden has also invested heavily in playgrounds and family-friendly third-spaces for parents and children to come together and relax and socialize. Breastfeeding counseling is covered by insurance and mothers receive as many home visits as needed. Recently, Sweden launched a groundbreaking new law allowing grandparents to care for their grandchildren and get paid to do so. The list goes on. Sweden is exceptional but the majority of developed countries have at least some of these measures in place, and the United States remains the only OECD country without a federal parental leave program. The fact that we have so little of these things in the United States is a reflection of our priorities and of our total disregard for mothers, their mental health, and their children.

Making the most of a bad situation

That kind of change will take time. It’s unlikely we will experience it in our lifetimes, even if we fight for it now, so what can we do in the meantime? I hesitate to even give advice here, because I know that my recommendations will be impossible for so many moms. I have a general disdain for parenting advice that fails to take into account the broader ways in which society has failed us, but I also recognize that you may have purchased this book, in part, because you expected me to offer you some kind of prescription for your pain. Well, here it is, however brief and imperfect.

First of all, try your best to let go of the guilt. Know that you are doing your best in a nearly impossible situation, that you were never meant to have to do this alone, and that if you are struggling or unhappy, it is in no way your fault. You are not a bad frog, not an ungrateful frog. You were simply not designed to live in the desert.

Second, recognize that for 99% of our existence as a species, care of babies was a shared responsibility. Human babies did not evolve in a context where constant physical contact with mom was a normal thing. They were passed around. Remember that in some hunter gatherer societies, babies have as many as 14 different caretakers over the course of a single day and are passed to as many as 7 different people over the course of a single hour. Yet there is still a widespread belief that separating moms and babies, even for brief periods, is harmful. A lot of this is rooted in misguided psychological theory. For instance, John Bowly, the father of attachment theory, grounded his arguments in evidence from observations of chimpanzee behavior. Chimpanzee mothers are in the habit of clutching their babies closely to their chests and never letting anyone else hold them, and for good reason. Adult chimpanzees are often aggressive with babies, and handing a baby off is risky. 

Humans are not chimpanzees. We evolved distinct behaviors over millions of years since separating from our common ancestor. Behaviorally, we are more closely akin to other primate species with cooperative breeding patterns, of which there are many. Despite the abundant evidence for shared care being the norm in our species, the legacy of attachment theory endures, with the result that many mothers suffer from unnecessary guilt when they choose (or are forced) to leave their children in another’s care. Defendants of modern attachment theory will argue that we have made progress since Bowlby, and I’m sure we have. I am not an expert on this subject. What I do know is that his original legacy endures in the psyche of many a guilt-ridden mother, despite the fact that evidence from the best, high-quality longitudinal studies has failed to find any noticeable, adverse effects related to time spent away from mother, either with a nanny or in a daycare, and no effect on children’s secure psychological attachment to their parents, provided the care is good and the parents are loving. 

Do you feel a little bit lighter now? I hope so. Once you’ve unburdened yourself from that hefty pack of guilt you’ve been hauling around, it’s time to work on the practical aspects of help and support.

 If you don’t get paid time off, plan and budget for unpaid time off, if at all possible. If you need the money, try to arrange for something part-time and flexible, ideally something you can do with your baby, so that you don’t have to give away the majority of your precious earnings to paid childcare. I know how hard this is to find. Like I said, this will not be useful to most mothers. 

Don’t skimp on childcare, even if you are not working. If you can afford it, even if it means temporarily foregoing savings, or dipping into your retirement savings, hire help. Don’t feel guilty for a second about using this time for rest and recovery. We have this idea that if we pay for care, we need to use that time to be productive, by either working for wages or engaging in domestic labor. Remind yourself that in hunter gatherer societies women rely on help in order to rest and relax. This was the norm for 99% of our existence as a species. Why shouldn’t it be the norm for you? If you can’t afford it, and your relatives can’t be with you physically, ask for their economic support so that you can hire help. In hunter-gatherer societies, resources flow towards families. Unfortunately, these days, resources tend to flow upwards towards retirees and away from young families and the people who need them most. Don’t feel bad about asking for money. You can always pay them back later. 

Lean on friends and neighbors for meals and other forms of support, but not the ones who already have children. We have this mistaken notion in the West that your village is your mom group. Other moms are just as tired and maxed out as you are. Lean on the people who don’t have dependents to care for. If you don’t have friends nearby, or don’t feel comfortable asking for help, invest in meal kits and delivery services or just eat scrambled eggs, avocado and toast for every meal (that’s what I did). Leave the dishes in the sink for someone else. 

Get out of the house whenever you can. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t washed your hair for a week, or if your sweatpants are covered in baby food and you have milk halos around your nipples. Go somewhere that you enjoy and exert your human right to take up space. Breastfeed your baby for all to see. Boobs are for babies, not men. If your baby cries, don’t apologize. Enjoy your time out and leave when you’re ready. 

That’s all I’ve got for you now, mama. I hope it helps a bit, but mostly, I hope we can move towards a better future, collectively.