Practical Gifts for Postpartum (or Soon-to-be) Postpartum Mothers
A Non-Holiday Guide for Caring
Dear reader,
Despite enjoying the occasional creative gift guide, I never actually intended to compose one. However, in the process of re-working a bundle of handouts for future clients, I realized I had inadvertently written a gift guide in the form of a page about practical offerings of care for mothers approaching or already entered into the early postpartum season. So here we are. May the inspiration you derive from these suggestions be abundant as you tend those who are yours to tend!
PLEASE NOTE: These are oriented towards postpartum mothers (including those who have recently experienced early pregnancy loss). However, this list of practical suggestions also applies to individuals and families experiencing illness, injury, death, and transition. At the bottom of this article is a print-friendly pdf version of the letter, available to save and use for future reference!
❦ Hot meals. For ease (especially if she has toddlers) include paper plates, napkins, & cups. If you’re uncertain about what to make, opt for slow-cooked dairy-free stews or soups with low spice levels and crusty sourdough breads. Nicole Parker has a wonderful recipe e-book available here, or you could try a recipe from Heng Ou’s The First Forty Days. Take Them A Meal also has helpful category-based recipe collections available with a quick search.
❦ Pantry and freezer meals. This is where pressure-canned soups and freezer recipes really shine. Pour-and-heat pantry meals and savory freezer casseroles are a lifesaver in seasons of rest, recovery, and rapidly shifting family dynamics. And canned fruits and jellies/jams make for an extra special treat to add to yogurts, cereals, and sandwiches. For our family, canned soups and freezer meals have been an unparalleled blessing during seasons of death, birth, and moving house (whether they came from our foresighted preparation or from the generous hands of the many people who have undertaken feeding us).
❦ Meal train coordination. Handling this task, including ensuring the slots are filled for the duration of the meal train and necessary information is provided to participants, is a gift that goes far beyond a single meal delivery. Here again I’ve found Take Them A Meal to be particularly helpful for ease and accessibility.
❦ Basket of nutritious snack foods. Postpartum nourishment often ends up being more of a challenge than women anticipate when approaching birth. A well curated snack basket, easy to keep close at hand and full of ready-made foods, might include jars of ready-to-heat drinking broths, tender and mildly seasoned jerky, dried and fresh fruits, fruit leather, morning glory muffins, homemade gelatin gummies, single serving coconut waters, and granola balls.
❦ A home-baked cake. After reading Kat Farrell-Davis’s soul-stirring reflections on ritual cake-making, it seems impossible not to include fresh-baked cake in this guide to care. Right now I’m especially fond of two particular recipes for incredibly satisfying and durable cakes: this toasted fennel and honey cake from Rachel at Hearthside Rhythms, and my mother’s carob sheet cake recipe (see below).
❦ A massage certificate / money earmarked for bodywork (with recommended numbers for bodyworkers in the area). Therapeutic touch is one of the foundational elements in postpartum care across cultures, and one of the elements I often see completely neglected when women and their families are planning for postpartum care. Often it ends up being viewed as a luxury item, instead of as the healing modality it truly is.
❦ Warm woolen socks & tallow lotion, magnesium lotion, or herbally infused body oils. Good quality wool socks or slippers are a beautiful way to support warmth, another oft-neglected foundational element of postpartum healing. Adding lotion or body oil weaves warmth with the nourishment of pleasurable touch during a time which asks much of a mother’s skin. Lou’s Lotion, Flora Numina, and Cloude Skincare all offer balms and lotions I enjoy using. And though I have yet to experience them myself, I have also heard good things about Mythic Medicine’s herbal oils.
❦ Herbal teas. Mother’s milk blends are wonderful for nursing mamas. Organic nettle leaf or alfalfa leaf tea is also amazing for any postpartum mother’s tea cupboard, as well as marshmallow root tea. Avoid any tea blend with high amounts of red raspberry leaf or peppermint, since these herbs can reduce milk supply for some mothers. (Note: If you’re gifting loose leaf tea and are not sure the recipient has a tea ball or tea strainer, include one. Also, two dear women in my life have gifted me Yeti thermoses, and I can tell you from experience that they reliably keep beverages hot for hours.)
❦ A meaningful letter in a beautiful card. The art of written communication seems to be succumbing to the ever-available text or DM. This makes handwritten letters—filled with encouragement, anecdotes, quotes, and kind words—all the more of a gift, and one that can be touched and held and revisited time and again even after a mama’s immediate postpartum is long past.
❦ A mini Polaroid camera with packs of film OR an Instax printer. For any mother who struggles to keep a phone camera handy, having one of these close to where she spends much of her time may be the doorway to a small collection of precious, tangible-world images of those most fleeting early weeks and months.
❦ Wild Mothering by Tami Lynn Kent. There are hundreds of wonderful books dealing with the outer-world challenges mothers face. Wild Mothering deals with laying the resilient and living internal foundations which enable healthy responses to those inevitable outer-world challenges. This is easily among the top three most impactful books I’ve read in the past several years, and one I would gladly give both a mother who just birthed her very first babe and a mother who just birthed her fifth.
❦ Registration to INNATE Traditions’ Physiologic Baby Care course (held annually). If you’ve been a long-time subscriber to The Mother Letters, you’ve more than likely seen me enthuse repeatedly over Rachelle Seliga’s teaching. This particular offering, taught through Zoom as a live six-week class, is a rich immersion in wisdom around lifelong wellbeing and how that wellbeing begins through laying foundations for thriving baby- and toddler-hood. Recordings and a vibrant online discussion community are provided.
❦ Registration for one of Nicole Parker’s online containers for mothers. Nicole is a devoted mother of four sons, and a queen of holding space for women to tend to their internal and external spaces. Every time I have the chance to sit in one of her virtually-hosted workshops or participate in an ongoing program, I’m impressed deeply by how down-to-earth her presence and insights are and how refreshed I feel just by taking the time to be present with her and the women she calls into her space. (You can find her Instagram account here, and links to her available offerings here.)
❦ Contributing towards postpartum doula care (if needed, mothers can check INNATE Postpartum Practitioners or Birth Belongs To Women for contacts, or reach out to local midwives for recommendations). Ideally, postpartum care is rejuvenating, intimate, and intensive, giving a mother the capacity to quite literally remain in a state of rest for a minimum of one month post-birth. In scenarios where a baby spent time in the NICU, that one month minimum should START not at the birth but when the baby comes home. While such care would traditionally be given by family and local community, the current state of modern culture asks us to exercise creativity in meeting those needs for care, and putting funds towards engaging a quality postpartum doula to collaborate with a mother and her family is a great place to begin.
And that, my dear readers, is a wrap. Or better yet, a starting place. I would love to hear what you might add to this list, whether specifically for postpartum mamas or for anyone in a season which calls for others to lean in and care.
With much love and a full heart,
Jan
All great suggestions Jan! I concur entirely on the need for bodywork postpartum, we paid for me to go for several osteopath sessions after my second daughter was born and it was so restorative even though her birth was “easy” and not traumatic in any way.
A friend is a postnatal doula and she told me once about going to a new mum's house, in which there was a living room full of flowers and no food in the fridge.
I committed then to always bringing a food gift to new parents I know. Love this article!