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3. Accept All the Help You Can Get
When I moved to California from Florida, I was
happy to be independent from my family. But when
my baby was born, I missed them in a way I had
never felt before. I suddenly wanted and needed my
family around me.
Kathleen, mother of two-month-old Ella Rose
Never in history were a mother and a father expected to care
for their baby all by themselves. The idea of a nuclear family—
one mother and one father to do it all—is one of mankind’s
most recent, and riskiest, experiments, attempted only over the
last two or three generations. (That’s a mere sixty years out of

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the 60,000 years since the modern human era began.) In the
past, a couple’s family and community always pitched in to
help, and later the couple would return the favor.
Sharon, mother of Noah and Ariel, was a work-at-
home mom, a thousand miles away from her family,
with no babysitters or nanny. Sharon’s goal was to
make sure her kids were happy and healthy—even if
she was dead on her feet. She described feeling like
an old tomato plant, where the fruit looks plump and
delicious even though the plant that nourishes it looks
scraggly and anemic.
I’m always telling the parents of my patients: Get help and
don’t feel guilty about asking—or paying—for it. Enlist your
friends to bring you a frozen casserole, do some cleaning, or
watch your baby while you nap. Just as you are giving so much
of yourself to take care of your new child, lean on your support
network to help take care of you—you’ll pay it back later. The
extra pair of “hands” of a niece, neighbor, nanny, or swing is
neither an extravagance nor a sign of failure. It’s the bare
minimum that most new moms have had throughout time.