Going through the birth process and those early days with a newborn can feel so isolating, foreign, and lonely. Honestly — it feels lonely even months or years later, thinking back to those memories. The late nights. The early days of learning to breastfeed. The strangeness that comes with processing what your body and mind just went through to get this baby earthside.
When we came home — to my well-loved, well-lived-in home — I walked through the door and felt like a stranger in it. The same couch. The same kitchen. The same husband who loved me more than ever. But I was someone the house hadn't met yet. Someone he hadn't met yet. Not because anything between us had broken. Because I had changed in a way the hospital room doesn't prepare you for and language doesn't quite cover. The delivery, what my body and mind had just gone through — it had made me new. And new people don't always recognize their own homes.
I stood there, in the place I knew best in the world, with the people who know me best in the world, and felt oddly foreign to myself.
When I went through those first days in the hospital, my amazing husband was right there next to me. The word I use most often to describe my feelings for Andrew is "obsessed". In the best way possible. But I didn't feel that he could really understand what I had just gone through. The pain. The mental strain. He was there — completely there — and still, there was a distance that had nothing to do with love, and everything to do with the fact that this had happened inside my body, and not his.
I carried that cold hospital room with me longer than I expected. And then I found Chief Moms.
I started recapping and revisiting it — reading other people's stories, sitting with what I'd been through. And something shifted. Chief Moms brought those memories forward — not to make them painful again, but to revisit them in a less lonely way. Because you're revisiting those moments with a community that makes you feel less alone this time.
I go back now to those memories of the cold hospital room — and I can reframe it. Transform the vision to warmth. I picture myself surrounded by moms in that hospital room, even though they weren't there then. In a way, they're there now. ❤️
That's what this place did for me. It took the lonely early days of motherhood and made them feel, finally, like something I was facing with support — for the first time
I've shared mine.
Now I pass it to you.
peace is in you