Women Carrying the Motherload From Birth While Postpartum Care Is Forgotten

A former nurse on the six-week checkup, the decade it took her to recover, and why midlife women aren't breaking down. They're presenting the bill.

Good to Go? The Six-Week Checkup

Had I thought about birth control? I was good to go.

That was the six-week checkup. I had gone out of my way to find a midwife because I already knew how little postpartum care there was. I had put my name on waiting lists. My birth was lovely, all things considered. Then the midwife forgot about us, and the next real appointment was this one. Nothing appeared dangerously wrong. Had I thought about birth control? Good to go.

Good to go?

I had only recently stopped bleeding from the dinner-plate-sized wound left inside my uterus where the placenta detached. I was breastfeeding and barely sleeping. My brain, nervous system, relationships and identity were all changing at once. But "good to go" did not mean I was back to full health. It meant my husband could have sex with me again.

Women's Bodies Are Discussed for Everyone Else

Even after birth, our bodies are discussed according to what they can do for somebody else. Can we feed the baby? Can we have sex? Have we chosen birth control? Very little of that tells us whether we are well. Once the baby is safely outside our body, we become strangely peripheral to the story.

In 2024, 649 American women died of maternal causes. Canada's rate is less than half that, and unlike almost every other wealthy country, ours is rising. We can survive childbirth, leave the hospital with a newborn and receive almost no meaningful follow-up while our bodies and minds are still trying to understand what happened.

We Medicalized Birth and Forgot About Recovery

Traditional postpartum care understood that birth was not the end of the event. Across many cultures, women rested for somewhere between forty and a hundred days while others cooked, cleaned and helped with the baby. Modern medicine made birth safer, but it never replaced that care. We medicalized birth and forgot about recovery. We started treating maternity leave as a vacation.

Carrying the Motherload

I knew before my daughter was born that we would need help. I had been a nurse and had cared for children. We had no family nearby, and I told my then-husband how difficult it would be. He promised he would be there. Then he found reasons not to be there, and was rarely present when he was. He left before we were awake and came home long after work had ended. I was left with the baby, the house, the nights and the realization that the person who had promised to carry this with me did not want to.

So I carried it. Most of us do. Some marriages last longer because there is family nearby to soften the load. Some of us endure it for the sake of our children, carrying the motherload while mothering our husbands alongside our children. We keep the family together until keeping it together begins to cost us our own health.

Matrescence: The Transformation Nobody Explained

Years later, I discovered there was a word for what I was living through: matrescence. It had existed since the 1970s. I had been a nurse, and even I had never heard it. Nobody told me that motherhood would change my brain, my nervous system and my understanding of who I was. I thought I was failing when I was moving through a transformation nobody had prepared me for.

When the Problem Is Located Inside Us

When we struggle, the problem is usually located inside us. Postpartum depression, anxiety and psychosis are real, and medication can save lives. But sometimes what is happening inside us is also a completely understandable response to what is happening around us. We are depleted, barely eating, feeding another person from our body and sleeping an hour or two at a time, mothering in isolation with very little support. If we become anxious or depressed, we may be given medication and returned to exactly the same conditions that left us depleted in the first place. We are told to practise self-care by people who do not offer to hold the baby.

A prescription cannot make a partner get up with the baby. It cannot cook dinner, protect a few hours of sleep or make us feel that somebody is caring for us too.

The Lindsay Clancy Case and a Public Failure

The Lindsay Clancy case has put this failure in public view in the most horrifying way. Clancy is charged with killing her three children. Her defence says she was in postpartum psychosis; prosecutors say she planned it. But before those children died, she asked for help, repeatedly. She saw multiple providers, took multiple prescriptions and admitted herself to hospital because of intrusive thoughts and overwhelming anxiety. We constantly tell women to reach out. She did, over and over, and what came back was more pharmaceuticals. Most of us are terrified even to admit we are struggling, out of fear of losing our children.

Finding the Way Back to Ourselves

After I became a mother, I exercised, focused on my nutrition, meditated and tried different therapies. I studied aromatherapy and eventually found somatic experiencing because I needed to understand how to calm my own nervous system and feel like myself again. I had been a nurse. I knew how to research. I understood the needs of the body. I was devoted to caring for myself. It still took me more than ten years to feel that I was recovering.

I find that terrifying.

What happens to the woman who does not have the time, money, knowledge or sheer determination to investigate her way back to herself? Life does not stop while we recover. We go back to work. We raise the children. We manage the home. We become the reliable one because there is no room for us to be anything else.

Why Women's Health Is Left Out of the Investigation

And while everybody is busy with our moods, there is a much larger story unfolding in our bodies. As many as four out of five people living with autoimmune disease are women. Nearly two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer's are women. We are also the majority of people caring for those with dementia, and for everyone else. We spend our lives remembering for everyone else, then become most of the people who lose their memory and most of the people who care for them.

I am not suggesting that caregiving causes Alzheimer's or autoimmune disease. I am asking why women are so disproportionately affected, and why our lives are so often left out of the investigation. Women were not required to be included in NIH-funded clinical research until 1993. Canada's own guidance followed in 1997. Many of us were already women by then. Much of what medicine knew about bodies, symptoms and medications had been built around men, with women treated as smaller, more hormonally inconvenient versions of them. We are the bigger half of the population. How did our health become a specialty?

Perimenopause and the Breaking Point

By midlife, many of us have been functioning while depleted for decades. We raised children, built careers, managed homes, soothed everybody's emotions and began caring for aging parents. Because we kept functioning, everyone assumed we were fine.

Then we reach perimenopause, and suddenly we are the problem. We are becoming less agreeable, leaving marriages, changing careers, disappointing our families and saying no to things we once did automatically. Everybody wants to know what is wrong with us. Must be the hormones. Our husbands say we have changed. Our families worry we are making terrible mistakes. There is usually an assumption that something inside the woman has gone wrong.

Perimenopause certainly changes us. Sleep becomes difficult. Anxiety can intensify. The noise feels louder, and our capacity to absorb everybody else's needs becomes smaller. But perimenopause did not create the unequal marriage, the mental load or the years of self-sacrifice. It did not create the expectation that we would mother as though we did not work and work as though we had no other priorities. It may simply make it harder to keep pretending that any of this is reasonable.

Our sensitivity is valued when it helps us understand the baby, the child, the partner or the aging parent. But when that same nervous system says, "I cannot keep doing this," we are anxious, hormonal, dramatic or difficult.

Who Is Caring for Us?

At fifty, I am not surprised that women are leaving marriages, changing their lives and refusing to keep everyone comfortable.

I am surprised we lasted this long.

We have tried asking, explaining, becoming more efficient, working on ourselves and needing less. Eventually, there is nothing left to change except the conditions we are living in.

Women have spent generations caring for everyone.

Who is caring for us?

Henrieta Haniskova is a former nurse, certified clinical aromatherapist and somatic experiencing practitioner. She is the founder of Royal Heir Botanicals, where her work focuses on matrescence, hormonal thresholds and nervous system care for mothers. She writes about the parts of womanhood we were expected to survive without ever being taught how.