Blue is a Color in the Rainbow

You may feel a rainbow of emotions during the days following your baby’s birth, sometimes in bewildering succession, sometimes several conflicting emotions at the same time.

As magical as the journey of parenthood is, it often begins with a period of feeling blue. Women’s bodies are the scene of a powerful changing tide of hormones in the days and weeks after a baby is born. The rising hormone levels that gradually produced the incredible changes in your body during the time you were carrying your baby have now precipitously dropped.

Most new mothers (perhaps as many as ninety percent) will have periods of weepiness, mood swings, anxiety, unhappiness, and regret. Usually this lasts for a few days or less and is quickly forgotten. It’s not unusual, however, for the blue period to come and go for six weeks. For some moms, the blues don’t begin until the baby stops nursing (another time of major hormonal shifts). Hormones, however, are not the entire story… Join Dr. Greene on Wednesday for more on Postpartum Blues.

This is an excerpt from: From First Kicks to First Steps: Nurturing Your Babys Development from Pregnancy Through the First Year of Life, McGraw-Hill, 2004, Pp. 198-202