Edited by Eugenio Ciuccetti, Obstetrician
Often the experience of pregnancy is presented and described in watertight compartments, in an exclusively idealized and romantic way. A sort of fantastic event, decontextualized and uncontaminated, isolated in time and space, which lasts nine months, which begins with conception and ends and ends with childbirth and the birth of a new life.
Thus, once the birth has taken place, that the baby is born, the party can begin. You can breathe a sigh of relief. If the mother and baby are doing well there is no reason to worry. Relatives and friends rush to the hospital, huddling at the bed of the mother with cameras, flowers, chocolates and advice on how to dress, look after and feed the new arrival. The most seems done. From now on, many think, it will be a joyous walk.
The media in this sense play a fundamental role today. The image of newly born and already clean, serene, smiling and combed children dominates the commercials and stands out on billboards. Fair and satisfied mothers are interviewed already a week after the birth, showing off a line and an even better shape than the one that characterized them before pregnancy. Everything looks beautiful. Everything looks easy.
In reality, things are not always like this. For many women and for many couples the difficult is coming right now. Just when they don't expect it. Indeed, when everyone "demands" only enthusiasm and happiness from them.
In reality the birth of a child - an event that is extraordinary in itself and full of hope - also involves a series of profound and delicate physical, psychological and social upheavals.
Above all it means the beginning of a new life not only for the person concerned but also for the mother, the couple, and more generally for the whole family. A life that naturally will bring with it joys and satisfactions, but inevitably also obstacles and difficulties to manage and overcome.
This intrinsic complexity of every life will have developed for nine months together with the fetus and will manifest itself immediately after its birth. From the first moment. From the first breath. From the moment in which that imaginary child who was idealized by his parents for nine months takes shape, he acquires a face, becoming flesh and bone. Turning into something autonomous and independent. A body, an identity, tangible, with measures, proportions and features.
The newborn occupies a space, physical and emotional; it manifests itself with a cry and a smile; brings with it needs, therefore requests. Requests for attention, affection, nourishment, reassurance and warming. Comfort requests. Accompanying requests. Requests that, in different forms depending on the different phases of life, will continue over time.
Faced with this novelty - embodied in the "real" child, who finally came into the world, and in its multiple meanings - it is obviously the parents who must respond first. They are the ones who are suddenly called to redefine themselves. And this both in personal terms, father and mother as individuals, and as a couple. And of course as a triad, or rather as a family. It's a fascinating task. A wonderful challenge destined to complete them as women and as men. But it certainly isn't a gentle linear walk as it often appears in newspapers and on the small screen.
From the first hours of life of the newborn, doubts and uncertainties, said and unspoken, ancestral fears, are mixed with joy, euphoria and contentment, in the mind and heart of the vast majority of new parents. Physical and hormonal factors, psychological and emotional, social and cultural, intersect forming a labyrinth of small-large traps and pitfalls from which one can eventually emerge stronger and more enriched but also deeply confused and wounded.
And it is precisely in this context, after the first few hours after the birth - that they generally see the tired woman, physically tried, but euphoric and satisfied by the awareness of "having made her" - mixed feelings can take over in her, like a bolt from the blue, mixed feelings of anxiety and melancholy (we speak of "baby-blues"), if not even authentic puerperal psychoses, up to states of real depression with feelings of love-hate towards the newborn.
The secondment - and therefore the expulsion of the placenta - determines a rapid collapse in the production of hormones such as estrogen and progesterone. The result is an almost automatic decline in mood which often, even in non-pathological cases, results in sleep disorders, intolerance and apparently unmotivated and sudden crying.
