Touch More Grace

In the last chapter we named what the body carries in early motherhood: the hormonal shift, the physical cost, and a nervous system on high alert. In this chapter we go one layer deeper, into the emotions that arrive alongside the exhaustion, the ones that surprise you and feel like they shouldn't be there.

When the Days and Nights Blur Together

"What's wrong with me? I feel so much, all at once. Just not as much joy as I expected."

Is it day or night? Your baby wants to feed again, and again, and somewhere in the middle of it you lost track of time. Cluster feeding means being available around the clock with no rhythm yet to lean on, and the exhaustion that comes with that is very real. You may be holding your baby, deeply in love, and still feel a wave of sadness move through your body. You may look in the mirror and feel unfamiliar to yourself, your face, your voice, your wants. Some days a quiet loneliness rests right beside the beauty.

And then there's the late afternoon. Have you heard of the sundown scaries? They arrive around the same time each day, whatever kind of day it has been, a wave of sadness, dread or irritability that feels larger than anything in front of you. If your baby is inconsolable at that very hour, it's no coincidence. Mothers call it the witching hour, and you're both moving through the same transition, through the same shared nervous system. When you learn to recognize the pattern, it stops catching you by surprise.

All of these feelings call for grace, not correction.

Why These Emotions Feel So Big

It makes complete sense. Dana Raphael, the anthropologist who gave us the word matrescence, compared becoming a mother to adolescence, and it's the most dramatic hormonal shift of a woman's life. Your hormones are recalibrating with an intensity like puberty. That biology used to unfold inside a village. Now many of us carry most, if not all, of the responsibility for the baby. Sleep is fragmented, your nervous system stays alert and scans for needs, and your body is touched constantly yet rarely with intention. It gives endlessly and rarely feels held.

At the same time, you may be grieving your old identity, your freedom, your routines, your autonomy, often without permission to name it, because you're trying to live up to the picture of the happy, perfect mother you drew long before you knew what motherhood held. What you're grieving is real. The culture whispers, be grateful, be happy, stay nurturing, and your nervous system tells you the truth. The truth deserves listening.

Take the Pressure Off

"I forgot I was a person before I became a mum."

You can love your baby and still miss your old life. You can long for closeness and still pull away from touch, and feel grateful while standing at the edge of exhaustion. All of it asks to be honored. When you are cared for, your baby feels it, and looking after you is part of looking after them.

So this is the time to lower what you ask of yourself. You don't need to host anyone. If people come over, they should bring the food and help with the dishes, and nobody should expect to be catered to. Your body also needs to eat well. If you're breastfeeding or pumping, your body is spending somewhere between 350 and 500 extra calories a day, which is substantial, on top of everything pregnancy already took. This isn't the time to lose weight. It's the time to nourish your baby and rebuild your own reserves, and Touch More Nourishment goes into how.

You are not alone in this. You are meant to take your time.

These rituals are not routine. They are structure for the nervous system in seasons of intensity. Repletion, not depletion. Care that feeds your skin, your nervous system, and your bond, especially on the days when everything feels too loud, too heavy, too much.

In this season, they are acts of allowing. Care that gives what you are feeling somewhere to land before it becomes something you carry alone.

Let us begin.

The Rituals

Choose the one that belongs to today. Return to your favorite tomorrow.

Grace becomes possible when your body feels safe enough to feel, and safety comes through repetition. That's the Architecture of Grace™: a structure that gives your emotions somewhere to move. Each ritual is short enough for the hardest days, sensory enough to reach your body before your thinking mind can argue, and familiar enough that your body starts to recognize safety on its own. Some of them look simple, and when your nervous system is stretched and asked to stretch even more, the simplest practices make a big difference.

The Permission Slip

1 minute

Sit somewhere quiet and cross your hands over your shoulders. Let your belly expand. Start moving your hands up and down your outer upper arms, and let your eyes close and your jaw unclench. Let your attention settle on a thought that feels familiar and good. This is called the Havening technique.

You might whisper to yourself: "I am allowed to feel everything. I am safe, at peace and calm."

Even twenty seconds of this pause interrupts the reflex to judge yourself or spiral into overthinking, and it brings you gently back into your body.

Warmth as Witness

2 minutes. Tender Skin Serum.

Put a small amount of the serum onto your palms and press your hands to your face, massaging slowly, gently, with confidence. Breathe in slowly and let your exhale last longer than your inhale. Let your touch be steady, to witness and simply be with what is here. Find a place along your sternum and begin tapping with the tips of your fingers in a slow, steady rhythm. You'll know the sweet spot as you move your fingers up and down.

You might say quietly: "This is my softness. This is my grief. I make room for both. I release what does not serve."

You can do this while your baby sleeps, or when everything feels like it's unraveling and you need to steady yourself before you steady them. A few minutes in a safe place, when you're not holding them, is perfectly fine for a baby. Sometimes a mother needs to collect herself before giving more. Structured touch regulates faster than thought.

The hands that have been tended touch differently.

Tender Skin Serum is made with vanilla bean macerated in a botanical oil blend for a full month before it ships to you, so the scent is rich and soothing and brings a sense of comfort. The warmth you sense is the ingredient itself, not a fragrance added to it. Deeply nourishing, absorbed without residue. Face, neck, and chest. Your skin will know the difference from the first drop.

Tender Skin Serum →

A Place to Belong

30 minutes.

Draw a warm bath, using a large sachet of the Calendula and Chamomile Soak, and dim the lights. Choose music that meets your mood, not to change it but to keep it company. Use your sponge slowly. Cry if you need to, sigh if you need to, or be quiet if that's what your body asks for. The bracing happens when we push down what is here, and softness begins when we allow it.

Afterward, press Tender Skin Serum into your face, slowly. The scent is warm, soft and gentle on the senses, so let your hands move with care. Then smooth Butter in Pink into your body, deliberately: arms, legs, belly, chest. This is containment, and the tears that come are movement, a way for the body to release what it has been holding.

The body that has been held can keep holding more.

The First 40 Days Ritual holds everything for this window: the Calendula and Chamomile Botanical Soak, First Touch Butter, Tender Skin Serum, a Konjac Sponge, and Butter in Pink. Everything gathered, nothing to source or decide. This is where the Architecture of Grace™ begins.

The First 40 Days Ritual →

Matrescence: The Hidden Transition

This season has a name. It's called matrescence, the becoming of a mother, and like adolescence it isn't a single moment. It's a threshold that keeps moving.

We understand adolescence. We give teenagers time, patience and the grace to be disoriented while their whole inner world reorganizes, and we rarely extend that grace to new mothers. Yet the transition is just as real, just as biological and just as profound. Your brain changes, your nervous system rewires, and your identity stretches into a shape it has never held before. This is physiology.

The vigilance that exhausts you is also what keeps your baby safe. The intensity of love that surprises you is the same wiring that makes you irreplaceable to them. The sensitivity that feels like too much is a finely tuned capacity you are growing right now, in real time. Your nervous system is learning a whole new job.

It has always been this way. Matrescence was never meant to be carried alone. Women held each other through it, the ones who had been there steadying the ones just arriving, and they understood that a new mother needed to be nourished, protected and given time before the world came calling again. Most of us don't have that now. We're expected to recover quickly, to return and to function, and we do, because we have to. That has a cost. You are becoming more of yourself in this season, and that isn't always comfortable, and it is meaningful.

Motherhood is long and this season has many layers. The Inner Circle is where I write to you each week as this season unfolds. Each letter brings research and reflection, a short practice you can use in real life, and one practical idea for the week ahead. Free to join.

Join the Inner Circle →

What the Crying Means

"I couldn't think straight when he cried. It was like my whole body went into alarm mode."

The cry is the only signal your baby has. A sensation moves through their body and they can't yet organize it, so they call out. That is all it is, a body doing exactly what it was built to do.

Your baby's nervous system is still forming, and the wiring that carries signals quickly isn't complete at birth. So when distress moves through them, nothing inside them can settle it yet. They need something outside themselves, and that is you: your heartbeat, your breath, the warmth of your body and the rhythm of how you hold them. For nine months that was everything they knew. Birth changes the shape of things and leaves what their nervous system is listening for exactly where it was.

The part of the brain that learns to manage emotion develops mostly in the first two years of life, and it develops through closeness, through attunement and through the times you return. What feels like simply holding them is building their capacity to feel safe for the rest of their life. Researchers made this visible in what became known as the Still Face Experiment. A mother was asked to go suddenly expressionless mid-interaction with her baby, and within seconds the baby showed distress. They weren't reacting to danger. They were reacting to the loss of you.

Your face, your voice and your warmth are the conditions their nervous system needs to function. Every time you return, they learn that the source of safety left and came back, and over many returns this is how trust forms in a body that has no words for trust yet. The clingy days aren't a problem. They are the nervous system doing its work, through you.

"Sometimes nothing fixes it. That was really hard to accept."

The First Year of Motherhood™ keeps a moment for you

Matrescence doesn't resolve in weeks. It unfolds across the first year of motherhood and often beyond, and each month brings a new layer: a new developmental leap in your baby, a new shift in your hormones, a new moment of losing yourself and finding yourself again. The First Year of Motherhood moves with you through each of those shifts, one month at a time, so the right botanical support, the right ritual, the right care arrives before you know you need it.

Join the Early Access Waitlist →

Final Words

Your emotions are asking to be felt, without judgment, without rush and without shame. That is grace.

Grace is the soft hand on your back when you say, "I have nothing left to give." It's a shift in atmosphere, a place where your grief is allowed to exist, where anger doesn't mean failure, and where your body no longer has to hide what it's carrying.

Let your rituals become small places of return, and let your emotions move the way weather moves across water. This season asks for steadiness, and steadiness is built one gentle ritual at a time.

For now, begin with grace.

Henrieta

Former nurse · Certified clinical aromatherapist · Somatic experiencing practitioner

Continue the Touch More Journey

Next chapter: Touch More Breath (coming soon)

Breath is the simplest signal of safety your body already knows. A lot can happen when it's invited to deepen, and even in the middle of a storm, a few slow inhales and exhales can steady you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is cluster feeding?

Cluster feeding is when a baby feeds very frequently over a few hours, often in the evening, instead of at spaced intervals. It's common and normal in the early weeks, and it can leave you feeling you're available around the clock. It passes as feeding settles into more of a rhythm.

Why do I lose track of whether it's day or night with a newborn?

Newborns feed and sleep around the clock, with no rhythm yet, so your own days and nights blur. Broken sleep and constant availability make time feel unreliable. It happens to nearly every new mother, and a rhythm gradually forms as your baby grows.

Why do I feel sad or anxious in the late afternoon?

Many mothers feel a wave of sadness, dread or irritability around the same time each day, often the same hour their baby is fussiest. Exhaustion, hormones and a shared, tired nervous system all play a part. Recognizing the pattern helps, and gentle rituals can meet it before it arrives.

Is it normal to grieve my old life after having a baby?

Yes. You can love your baby deeply and still miss your freedom, your routines and your autonomy. Matrescence, the becoming of a mother, is a real transition, and grief for what has changed is part of it. It calls for grace, not correction.

How much should I eat while breastfeeding?

Breastfeeding or pumping uses somewhere between 350 and 500 extra calories a day, on top of what pregnancy already took. Eating well is part of caring for your baby and rebuilding your reserves. Your midwife, doctor or a dietitian can tailor this to you.

Should I try to lose weight right after birth?

This usually isn't the time. Your body is nourishing your baby, if you're breastfeeding or pumping, and rebuilding what pregnancy spent. Gentle nourishment serves you better now, and your midwife or doctor can talk through what's right for you.

Do I have to host visitors after birth?

No. If people come over, they can bring the food and help with the dishes, and nobody should expect to be catered to. Ask a partner, friend or parent to keep the door until you're ready.

Why does my baby cry when I leave the room?

Your baby's nervous system is still forming, and your presence is how they feel safe. When they can't sense you close, their whole body responds. It isn't excessive. It's their body doing what it was built to do, and every return teaches them trust.

Research This Chapter Draws On

• Raphael, D. (1973). The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding. Prentice-Hall.
• Panksepp, J. (2016). The cross-mammalian neurophenomenology of primal emotional affects. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 524(8), 1549-1559.
• Schore, A. N. (2022). The interpersonal neurobiology of intersubjectivity. Annals of General Psychiatry, 21, 13.
• Montirosso, R., et al. (2015). Reviewing the Still Face Experiment and the mutual regulation model. Early Human Development, 91(1).
• Wass, S. V., et al. (2022). Physiological co-regulation between caregiver and infant during naturalistic interactions. eLife, 11, e77399.