The arrival of a baby is traditionally treated as the culmination of a woman’s journey. The congratulations begin, the celebrations follow and attention naturally shifts towards the newborn. Yet for the woman who has just given birth, an entirely different journey has begun.

It is a journey that can be physically exhausting, emotionally confusing and psychologically overwhelming. And yet postpartum is still frequently dismissed as a minor subject that women have given unnecessary prominence.

Men, in particular, can be dismissive of the experience, sometimes labelling women as dramatic when they express mixed feelings about childbirth and motherhood. More troubling is the tendency to compare women with their mothers, particularly mothers who bore several children without apparently complaining.

The comparison is not only unfair. It fails to acknowledge how profoundly society has changed.

Earlier generations lived within family structures that were vastly different from those of today. Nuclear families were far less common in many communities. Women often lived within extended or joint family structures, surrounded by mothers, mothers-in -law, sisters, aunts and other relatives who could provide practical assistance after childbirth.

The newborn did not necessarily become the sole responsibility of the mother. There were people around her.

Someone could hold the baby while she slept. Someone could prepare food. Someone could help with household chores. Someone could bathe the baby or simply sit beside a woman who had spent hours in labour and needed time to recover.

Today, that support system has disappeared from the lives of many families. Women are working, building careers, running households and raising children, often within nuclear family structures with little or no extended family support. The expectations placed upon them have multiplied even as the traditional support systems surrounding motherhood have diminished.

It is therefore simplistic to compare the experience of a woman giving birth today with that of her mother or grandmother several decades ago. There is another part of the historical narrative that deserves scrutiny.

Earlier generations of women were raised and conditioned to accept childbirth as a natural and organic phase of life. They were expected to endure its effects without proclaiming them as something worthy of recognition or commendation.

Their feelings and emotions were often muted by conditioning and societal expectations. Pain was part of motherhood. Exhaustion was part of motherhood. Sacrifice was part of motherhood. There was little room to question any of it.

This does not mean that women of earlier generations did not experience emotional turmoil, physical exhaustion or postpartum difficulties. It means that many of them had neither the language nor the social permission to articulate those experiences.

They endured because they had been taught to endure. Many also had several children. By the time their bodies had begun recovering from one pregnancy, another pregnancy could already be underway. Motherhood became an almost continuous cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, recovery and caregiving.

The circumstances of contemporary motherhood are markedly different. Women today have greater awareness of their physical and emotional wellbeing. They are more informed about conception, pregnancy, childbirth and recovery. They question what previous generations were expected to accept without discussion.

Postpartum has consequently become a major part of that conversation. And perhaps it should. A woman who has given birth is not simply recovering from an event. She is adjusting to an entirely different existence.

Her body has changed. Her routines have changed. Her sleep has changed. Her responsibilities have multiplied. Her identity is undergoing a transition that can be difficult to comprehend, even for the woman experiencing it.

There can be immense happiness alongside exhaustion. Gratitude can coexist with fear. Love can exist alongside frustration, uncertainty and a longing for the person she was before motherhood.

The contradictory nature of these emotions does not make a woman ungrateful or dramatic. It makes postpartum a complex human experience.

The modern woman is also having fewer children, for reasons that extend beyond religious inclinations. Lifestyle, economic realities, careers, personal choices and the demands of contemporary family life have altered the landscape of parenthood. For many women, one or two children constitute the family they consciously choose and are realistically able to manage.

That makes recovery relevant.

When childbirth is no longer one event in a long succession of pregnancies and children, the physical and emotional wellbeing of the mother assumes greater significance.

Women want to feel better. They want to recover. They want to be emotionally present and physically capable of caring for their babies. They want their transition into motherhood to be acknowledged rather than dismissed.

There is nothing unreasonable about that. The narrative around motherhood has changed because women’s lives have changed.

What must change alongside it is the tendency to romanticize the suffering of previous generations and use it as a weapon against women today. A mother who endured silently should not become the measure by which another woman is expected to suffer.

The answer is not to diminish the women of the past or glorify the women of the present. It is to recognise that both lived within different circumstances.

Postpartum is not a fashionable complaint. It is not an excuse. It is not a minuscule topic inflated by women who have suddenly become too sensitive.

It is a significant phase of a woman’s life that deserves to be understood with the same seriousness with which pregnancy and childbirth are discussed.

The child may be welcomed into the world on one particular day. The woman who gives birth, however, can spend months discovering how to inhabit the person she has become. That transformation deserves to be part of the conversation.