When I look back on my first weeks as a new mother, I try to remember the beauty: quiet evenings with my husband as we cradled our new son together while he slept, the awe while watching the barely perceptible rise and fall of his gentle newborn breaths, the horrified hilarity of his first projectile poop during a diaper change.
But for a long time, my recollections were awash with tearful scenes and feelings of anger, resentment, loneliness and isolation from being trapped at home during the peak of summer. My baby journal (snippets of thoughts I wrote in my phone) was peppered with comments like:
?Wish we had more alone time.?
?So tired. Exhausted. And feeling sad, frustrated, irritable.?
?(Your daddy) gets to go out almost daily. Not fair.? ?Amazed, exhausted, emotional, dead tired, in awe, feeling like I’m just a milking cow, deliriously sleep deprived, super irritable (mostly with parents/in-laws), very happy when it?s just the three of us, stressed (again, parents/in-laws).?
?Had good cry-out session. I?ve been crying every day.?
I was blindsided by the emotional upheaval, and the memory of those feelings stayed with me for years. I now place much of the blame for my postpartum lows on the confinement I experienced during those early weeks after birth for the thousand-year-old Chinese tradition of zuo yue zi (???), which literally translates into ?sitting the month.?
There are similar variations practised across Asia and, even within Chinese culture, there are...