MOTHERHOOD AND THE MISSING FEEDBACK LOOP
Motherhood is hundreds of decisions a day - feeding, sleep, boundaries, tone, presence, absence, with almost no reliable signal about whether any of them were right. Not in any timeframe that feels useful, anyway. The feedback loop, if it exists at all, runs on a 20 to 30 year delay.
Nobody prepares you for this. Instead, you are told to trust your instincts and that you'll just know. But for those of us who have spent years building competence through iteration, where doing and assessing and adjusting is the entire methodology and being told to simply trust something you cannot verify is a particular kind of disorienting. The cycle doesn't disappear. It just becomes: do, hope, do again, hope some more.
The postpartum gap nobody talks about
I felt this most acutely in the postpartum period. You have never done this before. The clinical guidance is vague and often contradictory. The professionals who supported you through pregnancy have largely moved on. And the one thing you have been told to rely on, maternal instinct, turns out to be something you have to build over time, not something you are born with and simply activate.
What no one tells you is this: instinct is developed through repetition and feedback. It is not innate. And in postpartum, you are attempting to build it in an environment specifically designed to deprive you of sleep, social support, and the cognitive bandwidth to reflect. You are asked to develop a skill under exactly the conditions most hostile to skill development.
No one sits down with you and says: “Here is how you are doing. Here is what needs attention. Here is what you might try next.”
That not-knowing, that absence of any orienting signal, was what I found most debilitating. Not the sleeplessness, not the physical recovery, not even the identity shift. The silence where feedback was supposed to be.
It doesn't end at postpartum
I want to be honest about something that I don't think gets said enough: this feeling doesn't resolve when postpartum ends.
My son is six now. The acute fog has lifted. But the fundamental condition of motherhood, making consequential decisions in the absence of reliable feedback - this has not changed. I have simply gotten better at sitting with the uncertainty. At separating the “I don't know if I'm doing this right” from the “I am failing”. That is not the same as the problem going away. It is just the scar tissue of having survived it long enough to build some tolerance.
The question of whether you are getting it right doesn't leave. It evolves.
The question of whether you are getting it right doesn't leave. It evolves.
The community problem
Community is the one place that people point to for feedback, for advice, for acknowledgement. And it is not wrong, community helps. But it has limits that aren't always obvious.
Most of the mothers around you are also in the middle of figuring it out. You can share the weight of uncertainty, and that sharing is valuable. But collective uncertainty is still uncertainty. It can become the blind leading the blind; a group of people who are all equally lost, but at least lost together.
You might turn to older generations for perspective. But here too, there are gaps. Memory of the early years of motherhood is notoriously unreliable - the brain does something generous and softens the edges over time. And even where memory holds, the material conditions of motherhood have changed significantly: the isolation that comes from the erosion of extended family networks, the pressure of digital performance, the particular mental load of navigating a world with more choice and less structural support than previous generations had.
Their experience is valuable, but it’s not sufficient.
What might actually help
If community alone isn't the answer, the question becomes: what is?
My working hypothesis and what led me to found The Tenth Wellness is that community remains part of it, but it has to be the right community. People who are in proximity to where you actually are, not where they were ten years ago. And it needs to be combined with something more: infrastructure that acknowledges the real mental and emotional labour of this period, and - critically - access to people who actually know. Clinicians. Specialists. Researchers. People who can do for new mothers what so little else currently does: tell you, with some confidence, how you're doing, what needs attention, and what you might try next.
The feedback loop, reconstructed. Not perfect. Not 20 years delayed. Just present enough to be useful.
That is the thing I wish I'd had. That is the thing we're building at The Tenth Wellness.
By Hiba Siddiqui | Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month
May is Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month. At The Tenth Wellness, we exist because too many mothers are navigating the hardest transition of their lives without adequate support. If this resonates, we'd love you to be part of what we're building.
