In the summer of 2023, I gave birth to a baby girl – my third child, with a five-year gap between her and my second and eight years between her and my eldest. I was almost 34 – not a remotely unusual or advanced age to have a first child, let alone a third, but having had my older children in my 20s, I wasn’t prepared for the toll that growing, delivering and feeding my daughter would take, nor how long my recovery would drag on for. Unlike my first two births, which were largely straightforward, my daughter had a shoulder dystocia, and her delivery left me physically and emotionally battered and bruised.

I was patched up and sent home to care for both my newborn baby and my older children, as is the experience of many new mothers, and I got on with it, as we all do. Apart from the pain, those first couple of weeks weren’t dissimilar to my previous post-partum bubbles, with little sleep and a lot of feelings. 

But, as I began to emerge, I realised that something was very different indeed. With my boys, no matter how unshowered or sleep-deprived I was, I could always find myself in there somewhere. I always had some idea of what I might like to wear, what I should do that day or how to talk to people. I felt physically fit and well.

This time, I was looking for myself, and I just wasn’t there. My joints ached and my hands and feet were still so swollen that I couldn’t wear my wedding ring – or even my Birkenstocks on the loosest setting. Only my maternity clothes would fit, and finding something to drag onto my body in the summer heat was a chore that often made me feel like crying. I loved my baby to the point of near-obsession, but I pined for the person I was before. 

There is a popular, if slightly saccharine, metaphor for the process of putting yourself back together after you’ve had a child, which borrows from the idea that female flamingos turn white when they become mothers, with their pink colour gradually returning as their young grow up. Over the course of the year that followed, I would go on to try so many things in my desperate, and largely unsuccessful, search for my ‘pink’ and, as well as the emotional cost, I was astonished at the financial cost of trying to reassemble myself into something remotely resembling a functioning person. The six-week gym programme that was totally inappropriate for my recovering body. The bougie cool-mum jumpsuits and linen co-ords that made me feel like an overgrown toddler. The hormone-balancing, energy-giving supplements that were shoved, unopened, into a drawer. For the things that did help a little bit – well-fitting bras, activewear that doesn’t look like pyjamas, pilates for my broken core – the cost was hard enough to bear at a time when our expenses were already sky high and our income was lower. But for the things that didn’t, the waste was heartbreaking.

The shame that I felt about how much I was spending and how little it was working was amplified because, as a financial coach and content creator, I knew that I wasn’t practising what I preached. I wasn’t spending mindfully or sticking to my budget; I was chasing any purchase that might help. Instead of trying to hide it, though, I decided to bring it to light by tentatively asking my Instagram community if any of them had experienced the same thing, and the response, overwhelmingly, was ‘yes’.

In the comments section of a video that has been watched over 300,000 times to date, hundreds of women shared the lengths that they had gone to and the money they had spent to try to fix their body, their wardrobe, their career, their mind. Reformer pilates, the personal trainers, the hair cuts, the therapy and the endless stream of clothes that don’t fit, or don’t suit, or don’t feel right. How hard it is to justify the expense, and how their partners don’t understand the need, let alone the idea that this should actually be a joint cost associated with the child that you created together. Mothers wrote about the pressure to look a certain way upon their return to work and how much it cost to try to mask their matrescence from their colleagues.

My daughter is now 20 months old, and I have already passed a few of the milestones that are known for injecting a bit of pink back into your feathers. My body has stabilised since I stopped breastfeeding, and my wardrobe and routine have begun to stabilise in step. I’m not who I was before my daughter was born, but I’m not who I was immediately postpartum, either. The urge to buy solutions to my identity crisis has quietened, and I’ve started to sell or donate the things that I’ve outgrown or never used. I feel less guilty about the waste, but I’d recommend anyone planning a family to include a small fund specifically for this purpose when saving for new parenthood to spare yourself the guilt in the first place.

My biggest lesson in all this, though, is that it’s not possible to buy your recovery from a life event as major as having a baby. There are things that help, especially from a physical and mental health perspective, and it’s a good idea to budget for that – but the thing that really helps is not for sale. The thing that really helps, in my experience, is time. 

Clare Seal is a mum of three and a certified financial coach. Follow her on Instagram for more of her expert tips on managing money. 

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Images: Emma Croman