Imagine this: someone comes to stay at your house. At first, they stay in your guest room. But as their stay extends from days to weeks to months, they and their stuff expand into your kitchen, your living room, the dining room, the bathroom. They never leave. Eventually, there is no part of your house that has not been affected by this guest. Finally, when you feel like you can’t take it for one more second, your houseguest abruptly makes their exit. Of course, they have become so large over the last several months that the door frame cracks on their way out. In some cases, either because your guest is particularly stubborn or because they can’t quite maneuver through the door, a wall must be removed to get them out. They take some of their shit with them, leaving a messy trail as they drag it out, but mostly they leave it for you to clean up. This, folks, is your body after childbirth.

And now your internal “house” needs to be put back in order.

I find this is a useful (if borderline ridiculous) analogy for postpartum clients who feel like they aren’t “doing” anything after they have a baby. It seems indulgent to hire me to put away the laundry and make dinner and unload the dishwasher. It seems like something one or two functional adults should be able to handle. It’s a shock that it doesn’t seem to be possible and they need help. That’s because they’ve forgotten that what the birthing person is doing is a long list of invisible, internal work:

• healing the dinner-plate-sized wound on the inside of the uterus where a placenta used to be attached
• avoiding stairs or too much walking to help heal the perineum, which tissue is (best case scenario) stretched and swollen or (more likely scenario) healing from a tear or cut
• resting the pelvic floor so their uterus doesn’t FALL OUT OF THEIR BODY
• moving internal organs back to their original locations
• ingesting the additional food and water necessary to ensure that the milk-making factory being constructed on their chest is running smoothly
• convalescing after MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY (for about a third of American births)
• maintaining a calm environment to help manage the mental, emotional, and hormonal changes after childbirth
• soaking birth-y parts in a sitz bath of warm water to aid in healing
• peeing frequently throughout the day even when they don’t feel like it because childbirth damaged the nerves in the bladder temporarily. This involves filling up a peri bottle with warm water, peeing while spraying the bottle so as to minimize stinging and then more spraying to wash off afterwards, patting dry, spraying nether regions with derma-plast, getting a new pad, lining the pad with Tucks’s wipes, pulling up those sweet mesh underwear, and then checking the toilet to make sure they didn’t pass any blood clots of a worrying size.

This internal work is incredibly important, and we must fight against the idea that it is doing “nothing”. What you did today was RECOVER. You healed. You cared for yourself. You carved out time to be still. And no one else can do that internal work but you, which means your partner, your family, your friends, your village, your postpartum doula must shoulder everything else or everything else must wait.

That’s not to mention that, back to the original analogy, your inconsiderate houseguest hasn’t gone far: they’ve moved in next door and they come over at all hours of the day and night to eat at your place. You must now either prepare food in your kitchen or procure it from the store, and the houseguest insists on eating directly outside the kitchen window with their face pressed up against the glass. It’s a good thing they’re cute.