Let's celebrate Mothers Day

Its been a while since I was out and about the chatrooms and talking to the listeners and members on 1-1 chats. You might have noticed my absence in the forums and feed as well. The reason is I was managing a life changing event.

About 2 months ago, I was blessed with a cute little baby boy. The delivery came with challenges and the baby arrived a month early. My family was not scheduled to arrived until 10 days later. We didn't have a bassinet or a stroller. I didn't even have my hospital bag packed! I wasn't prepared to become a mother. It was a very challenging time, both physically and emotionally.

Thankfully, friends and extended family stepped in and helped us a lot. I am very thankful to the 7 Cups team, who adjusted to my absence immediately. Being a small team, it is not easy to fill in resource gaps so quickly. But every single person in the team took over my responsibilities seamlessly.

I am thankful to the community, to the people who I was regularly in touch with, for understanding that I was absent for a good reason and being accommodative of my delayed responses.

I got back to work a couple of weeks ago. Being a new mother, I am now a part of the parenting support and perinatal experiences group as well. I want to encourage all parents, especially mothers, to talk. To discuss their feelings, challenges, experiences with parenting, with going back to work, with breastfeeding and dealing with lack of sleep. Before I became a mother, everyone told me that delivering a baby is hard. No one ever told me that bringing that baby up to speed with sleeping and feeding is even harder.

I invite a dialogue here, from all the mothers. We need to talk and share our problems so that we can learn from each other's experiences. With the amount of expectations that we shoulder, it is hard not to have breakdowns or bouts of depression.

With this forum post, I open the door to you all to speak up. Mother's day is around the corner and lets celebrate it by letting the world know that having a baby is not easy, its not a bed of roses, it's challenging, we are working hard, we do not deserve any judgments or stigma, we are all doing the best for our babies in our own context. Perinatal depression is real, breastfeeding challenges and agony is real and needs to be talked about. The key is to share and speak up!