Nothing invites more unsolicited advice than a pregnant belly.
It's like you're walking around with a neon sign that says "tell me about how much you believe in swaddling!" Or maybe someone stuck a sign on your back: "please tell me your opinion on breastfeeding. No really! I need to know!"
A pregnant belly makes you somehow public property. Everyone feels welcome to touch it. Everyone feels like it might be their job to help you raise your baby. This comes in the form of words. And looks. And so many judgements.
Here are some of my favorites:
"Do you sleep on your left side? You know it's better for the baby, right?"
"Have you thought about whether or not you're going to sleep train?"
"You should be careful, it looks like you're gaining a lot of weight. It'll be harder than you think to lose it after the baby."
As a pregnant mama, you're bombarded with contradictory information coming from doctors, friends, family, coworkers, employers, and whatever you can't stop yourself from reading online. It's emotionally exhausting, and really fucking confusing.
As people, we used to live in little clusters where we would be able to learn from the previous generation how to do this shit. Today's lifestyle has more freedom but leaves us without a good way to tap into generational knowledge.
Luckily we have modern medicine, where the recommendations for moms and babies changes often, sometimes while your still pregnant as we get more data and better understanding. The stuff that was 'safe' when I was pregnant with my 8 year old had changed by the time I was pregnant with my 2 year old.
The fast-changing nature of the medical community leads to arguments with parents and in-laws, grandmothers and great aunts. These matriarchs had babies. They kept their babies alive with the best their modern medicine had to offer. And they dare your unexperienced ass to contradict them.
At Maia, we're always thinking about how we can support mothers. Because motherhood comes with all this bullshit going on with your body, you don't know what's normal. There's all kinds of everything new and expectations to manage, so we thought about informational support. We can share the latest advice from experts on what's normal and how to manage things that leak or hurt. Ultimately, we decided that this isn't actually helpful.
Because of the nonsense laid out above, there's so much advice pushed on new and pregnant mamas. We realized that one more voice, even if grounded in the most up-to-date medical research, is just more noise.
In fact, too much advice can be harmful.
Let me give you an example.
Imagine me, new mom with a 7 month baby, suddenly, horribly sick on mothers day and now in the emergency room. It turns out that my appendix has ruptured. I go into surgery, develop an infection and end up in and out of the hospital for a week and a half or so (fun times).
This same me has been told over and over about how important it is to breastfeed your baby for a whole year and is determined to do so. I'M GOING TO BE THE BEST MOM EVER, DAMMIT! I really feel for first time me and want to give her a hug.
So I'm pumping at the hospital this whole time with the monster hospital grade pumps, but my supply just dries right up. Something about being super sick. And when I get home, my baby doesn't even want to latch, he's been happily bottle feeding this whole time and Dad's already had to supplement with formula.
During all this, I've been talking to a well-meaning lactation consultant. For free - she's a volunteer. And we've been trying supplements to get my supply back, and we've been trying nipple attachments to try to trick my kid into latching (he was not tricked). And I'm crying and I have drainage tubes hanging out of me, and when I say I think that it's time to stop, what I get is the unsolicited advice that I should just keep trying more supplements and more gadgets and more pumping my sad-sack, empty, sore, dry boobs.
I'm still mad about this experience, because it hurt me, and because I know better now. I know, logically, that it wasn't this poor volunteer's fault. I mean I called her. She was giving me what she believed was the best information out there: breastfeed your baby. And she was trying to do what she thought was right: help me come up with ways to do that "best thing."
But that's not what first-time-mom-me needed.
What I really needed, is for someone to support me in my decision. Stopping breastfeeding at that time was what I needed to do. I shouldn't have tortured myself because of expectations.
Moms don't need more advice.
Moms don't need more opinions.
There are so many decisions that moms have to make, from what to eat while they're pregnant, how much to eat, what sleeping arrangements to make, what diapers to use, do they need a glider? And you can bet that they're hearing about it from most everyone they encounter.
Dumping more shit on moms is really unnecessary.
Moms don't need more advice. Thanks but no thanks, random stranger.
We support you mama, in all of your decisions.
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