These last few weeks I have been meeting up with new people and businesses where I explained what we do at Queensland Cradle Care (QCC). Our service is fairly new to Brisbane but after explaining what we do it is very clear. Most of the questions that I need to answer are . "Are you midwives, postpartum Douala's, nurses, mother craft nurses?" What I explain to them is we are all. Not all in one person but all our staff are specialised in their own area.
What makes Queensland Cradle Care (QCC) unique is we all work the same way even though we all come from a different backgrounds. What we all have in common is that we all see the need to support women who are coming home from hospital. Since it is possible now to go home four hours(!) after giving birth we see the need for care. With care I don't mean the care for the newborn, I mean the care for the newborn mother. There is no place like home to recover after giving birth. What we at QCC experience is since women are allowed to leave hospital so quickly they, or the people around them, seem to underestimate the impact giving birth has on a mother's body. In this TED talk by Alexandra Sacks you can hear about all the changes that happen when a woman becomes a mother. Alexandra talks about Matrescence a term coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the mid-'70s and brought into common use in psychology by clinical psychologist Aurelie Athan, head of the maternal psychology lab at Columbia University, describes a woman's transition into parenthood. It is surprising that this term is unknown to most new parents.
When the baby is born all the attention goes to the newborn, very understandable but the danger is mothers usually tend to focus on taking care of their baby as well and ignore their own personal needs. We do not live in a world anymore where parents, aunties, grandparents or family and friends are close. We do not live in a world anymore where it's normal that mother can recover from birth while her family is taking care of her and her baby. If you come to think of it you realise how absurd it actually is to go home 24 hours after birth without any support, guidance or care for the mother. It doesn't stop there because when mother does not care for herself or has no village to take care of her, how can she heal? How does she even have time to discover her instinct if she herself is in survival mode?
At QCC we are passionate about our work. What we have in common is that we all gave birth and most of us didn't have their village so we know from our own experience what we missed, needed and what we should have done different. We will bring you knowledge, expertise and experience and we will take care of you while you take care of your newborn.
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