The Ring of Fire

Last week, I wrote about the Disorientation stage — the quiet, high-functioning, hollow middle that so many mothers find themselves in long after the early postpartum period is supposed to be “over.”

But Disorientation does not come out of nowhere.

There is something that comes before it. Something louder. More consuming. More visible — and somehow still unnamed.

This essay is about that stage. The one that burns everything down before anything new has been built.

This is Stage 3: Initiation. The fire.

Nobody tells you about the gap.

They tell you about the love — the enormous, world-rearranging love that arrives with the baby, which is real. They tell you about the exhaustion, the sleeplessness, the blur of the early weeks. They tell you it is hard. They hand you this information like a warning and a comfort at once, as though naming the difficulty in advance will soften it when it arrives.

What they do not tell you about is the specific, disorienting experience of looking at your life — a life you chose, a baby you wanted, a love that is genuinely present — and feeling, at the same time, like you have lost something enormous and have no idea what it was.

They do not tell you that the self you walked into the hospital with may not be the self that walks out. That the blueprints you spent months building — the vision of yourself as a mother, the imagined version of how it would feel, the person you expected to remain — will be held up against the reality almost immediately, and the gap between them will be one of the most destabilizing things you have ever experienced.

They do not tell you that this is not postpartum depression. That it is not failure. That it is not a sign that you are not suited for this. That it is, in fact, the beginning of one of the most significant developmental passages in adult life.

This is the Initiation stage. The third stage on the Matrescent Path. The fire.

The Gap

Here is what women describe, again and again, in the weeks and months after a baby arrives: the gap between what they expected and what they found.

The love was expected. And the love is real. What was not expected was that love and grief could occupy the same body simultaneously — that you could look at a small face and feel complete devotion and, in the same moment, feel the acute absence of the person you were before that face existed. That ambivalence was not the same as insufficient love. That missing yourself was not the same as regretting the baby.

What also was not expected — and is almost never said aloud — is that for many women, the love does not arrive fully formed at birth. Bonding is a process, not an event. It accumulates through attention, through the repeated acts of feeding and holding and learning the particular signals of a particular infant. The woman who looks at her newborn and feels fierce protectiveness but not yet the overwhelming love she was promised is not defective. She is at the beginning of a relationship, not the middle of one. The culture’s insistence that maternal love arrives instantaneously — that it floods in with the first cry or the first skin-to-skin — sets up a specific failure for the women for whom it doesn’t happen that way. The absence of instant love is not a sign that the love will not come. It is a sign that it is, like all real things, being built.

The difficulty was expected. What was not expected was this particular texture of difficulty: not the practical difficulty of caring for a newborn, which can be learned, but the ontological difficulty of no longer being sure who is doing the caring. The competence she expected to find may not be immediately available. The instincts may not arrive on cue. The person who managed everything — the career, the household, the social calendar, the complex emotional landscape of her own interior life — may feel, in the first weeks of new motherhood, entirely inaccessible.

The transformation was expected, in a general sense — everyone says you change when you have a baby. What was not expected was the specific experience of the change: not a renovation but a demolition. Not a gradual shift but an abrupt ending, followed by a disorienting in-between in which the previous self is largely gone and the new one has not yet arrived.

This gap — between the anticipated and the real — is not a sign of unpreparedness. It is structural. The blueprints women build for motherhood are constructed from cultural images, childhood observation, social media, and the stories other mothers tell — stories that tend to emphasize the love and compress the dissolution, because the dissolution is the part that does not photograph well and cannot easily be explained to someone who has not yet been in it.

Not a renovation. A demolition. The new self has not yet arrived to fill what the old one left behind.

What gets lost is worth naming specifically, because the culture has almost no language for it. The professional self — the person who was competent and recognized and moving toward something — goes underground, sometimes for years. The sexual self, the body that belonged to itself and could be desired and desiring without also being a food source and a regulatory instrument for another person’s nervous system. The spontaneous self, the one who could decide at 7pm to go somewhere, to change the plan, to exist without logistics. The continuous interior life — the thread of private thought that a person follows through a day, that gives experience its texture and coherence — becomes fragmented, interrupted, colonized by the needs of someone who cannot yet understand that the person meeting those needs also has an interior.

These are not small losses. And they are not temporary in the way the culture implies. Some of them return. Some of them return changed. Some of them are permanently reorganized around the new identity that emerges on the other side of the passage. But in Initiation, they are simply gone, and the woman who is looking for them — who reaches for the thread of her previous self and finds it missing — is not being dramatic. She is accurately describing what has happened.

The gap is also gendered and racialized in ways that compound its weight. For many women, especially BIPOC mothers navigating medical systems that have historically underserved and misread them, the gap includes the specific experience of having one’s distress dismissed, minimized, or misinterpreted. The legacy of the Strong Black Woman archetype, the cultural expectation of maternal stoicism in many communities, the well-documented racial disparities in postpartum care — these are not external to the Initiation experience. They are part of its texture for the women inside them. The dissolution happens alongside, and is often deepened by, the experience of moving through a healthcare system that was not designed with you in mind.

For neurodivergent mothers, Initiation carries additional dimensions that the standard narrative does not name. The sensory environment of a newborn — the unpredictable sounds, the constant physical contact, the disruption of every regulatory routine — can produce a level of overwhelm that goes beyond ordinary new-parent exhaustion. Sensory processing differences, disrupted sleep’s particular impact on executive function, the effort of masking while simultaneously trying to learn an entirely new caregiving role: these compound the biological rupture in ways that deserve specific recognition, not merely accommodation.

For mothers who arrived at motherhood through loss — miscarriage, infertility, stillbirth, the long years of trying — the gap has a specific additional layer that the standard narrative does not touch. The longed-for baby arriving does not erase what preceded the arrival. The joy is real and the prior grief is also real, and they do not cancel each other. They are simultaneous. The woman who spent years mourning pregnancies that did not continue, or who held a baby who did not survive, or who watched her body fail the thing she wanted most — she enters Initiation already carrying an accumulated grief that the culture has no container for, into a passage that asks her to grieve again. That is not weakness. That is an enormous amount to hold. And it deserves to be named as such, not folded invisibly into the general category of the difficult early months.

For mothers whose own childhood was marked by loss, trauma, or the particular injury of not being adequately held — the arrival of a baby surfaces things that were buried. Becoming a mother activates the full weight of what it meant to have been someone’s child. The woman whose mother died, whose mother was absent or cruel or simply not there in the way a child needed, whose own earliest blueprints were written in loss rather than security — she enters the fire with a particular kind of raw exposure. The passage asks every woman to reckon with her attachment history. For the woman whose history is one of rupture, that reckoning is not background material. It is the foreground, arriving often without warning in the first weeks of a child’s life, when the needs are constant and the nervous system is stripped and the distance between who she needed her own mother to be and who her mother was becomes impossible to hold at arm’s length.

The Arc of the Fourth Trimester

The fourth trimester — weeks zero through twelve — does not move in a straight line. It moves in waves, each one different, none of them quite what you expected. Understanding the arc can help, even slightly, with the vertigo of being inside it.

The first two weeks are, for many women, a kind of altered state. The hormonal freefall is at its most acute. The baby blues — the weeping that arrives around day three or four as the milk comes in, the progesterone crashes, and the body’s entire hormonal landscape reshuffles — are not pathology. They are the signature of a system in transition. The timing is not coincidental: days three to five are when estrogen and progesterone hit their lowest point after birth while prolactin surges to trigger milk production. The body is managing two enormous hormonal shifts simultaneously, and the result is a kind of emotional lability that feels entirely disproportionate to its trigger — weeping over nothing, or everything, or the specific way the light is coming through the window. The waves arrive and pass, often within minutes. They are real and they are disorienting and they are, for most women, temporary. Baby blues typically resolve within ten to fourteen days as the hormones begin to find a new baseline. If the weeping does not lift — if it deepens, persists, or is accompanied by a loss of the sense that life has value — that is the signal to seek clinical support. But in those first days, the weeping is most often not depression. It is the body doing something enormous, and feeling every part of it.

Weeks three through six are, for many women, the hardest. The acute relief of having arrived — the baby is here, the birth is over — has faded. The novelty that briefly sustained visitors and partners has also faded. The support that showed up in the first days has gone back to its own life. And the sleep deprivation, which is cumulative rather than acute, is now at its most disorienting. The nervous system has not yet adapted. The body has not yet healed. The identity restructuring has begun but has no traction yet. This is the stretch where the gap between the anticipated and the real is widest, and where many women find themselves most alone inside the width of that gap.

Sleep deprivation at this scale is not simply exhaustion. It is a neurological and psychological experience that compounds everything. The prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for emotional regulation, executive function, and the capacity to tolerate ambiguity without collapsing into the worst interpretation — requires sleep to function, and it is operating under conditions of severe and chronic restriction (Walker, 2017). What this means in practice: the irritability is not character. The emotional reactivity is not a sign that she cannot handle this. The inability to complete a thought, to feel like herself, to access the parts of her interior life that previously felt solid and available — these are the cognitive and emotional signatures of a brain that is not getting the recovery it needs to maintain its regulatory capacity. The woman who cannot think straight at week four is not broken. She is sleep-deprived in a way that would compromise anyone’s functioning, in a culture that treats this as a rite of passage rather than a physiological crisis.

Breastfeeding, if it is happening, is its own dimension of Initiation entirely. It is a physical relationship unlike any the body has previously been asked to sustain — constant, demanding, often painful in the early weeks, with almost no preparation in modern culture for the specific difficulty of it. The pain of early latching. The rawness. The engorged nights when the milk has arrived and the baby is asleep and the body is simply producing, without regard for timing or comfort. The particular exhaustion of being a food source that is needed at all hours, that cannot be handed off or postponed, that requires presence and availability at a biological level that goes beyond any other demand. Breastfeeding, for women who do it, is not separate from the Initiation experience. It is one of its primary textures.

And if breastfeeding does not go as planned — if it fails, or is abandoned, or was never possible — the grief of that is also real, and also largely without a container in Western culture. The woman who could not breastfeed, or chose not to, or whose supply did not come in, or whose baby could not latch — she is navigating the same Initiation fire as every other new mother, with the additional weight of loss around something that was supposed to be natural, was supposed to be straightforward, and was not.

Weeks six through twelve bring a particular illusion: the appearance of stabilization. The baby begins to have more predictable rhythms. The initial acute crisis has visibly passed. Sleep is still fractured but slightly less catastrophic. The six-week appointment happens — the cervical exam, the depression screen, the clearance for full activity — and the implicit message from the medical system is: you are recovered. You may resume your life.

She is not recovered. The fire is still burning. What has happened is that she has adapted enough to function — to produce, externally, the evidence of adjustment — while the internal dissolution continues. This is the moment when Initiation begins to shade into Disorientation: when the acute crisis becomes invisible, when the support withdraws, when the woman’s competence is taken as evidence that she is fine.

The relationship transforms during the fourth trimester in ways that are rarely discussed before they happen. The partnership — whatever its form — is reorganized by the arrival of a third person who requires everything and contributes nothing that looks like reciprocity. The division of labor shifts, often without explicit negotiation. The dynamic of two people who chose each other becomes the dynamic of two adults in a system organized around the survival of someone who is not yet capable of knowing they are in it. Desire changes. Communication changes. The particular intimacy that existed before — with its assumptions, its rhythms, its private language — is disrupted, sometimes profoundly. And the disruption often cannot be addressed directly because both people are operating at the edges of their capacity, and there is no time, and the baby’s needs are always more immediate than the relationship’s.

What partners need to understand about the fourth trimester is that the mother is not the same person she was, and this is not something that will pass quickly or resolve with enough support, though support helps. It is a developmental reality. She is in Initiation. She is in the fire. The most useful thing a partner can offer is not the management of the baby’s needs — though that matters enormously — but the management of the container around her: ensuring she has food and sleep and physical tending and the felt sense that she is being seen, not just the baby.

The six-week appointment says: you are recovered. The fire says otherwise.

The Dissolution

In the Matrescent Path, Initiation is the dissolution stage. The forest fire phase. The goo inside the chrysalis before the chrysalis has been sealed.

What is dissolving is the previous identity structure — the way of making meaning, the sense of self, the relationship to competence and time and the interior life that organized the pre-mother woman’s experience of being alive. Motherhood burns through this structure not because it is defective or because something has gone wrong, but because the new demands are simply incompatible with the previous architecture. The previous self was not built to be a borrowed nervous system. Was not built to have no predictable relationship to sleep. Was not built to be responsible, without any break, for the survival of another person.

The fire is not just a metaphor. It is what the physiological and psychological experience of early new motherhood actually feels like from inside: a consuming of what was there before, leaving behind a territory that is unfamiliar, unstable, and does not yet have a name.

Mothers talk about the ring of fire in birth — the burning stretch as the baby crowns, the point at which the body is opening beyond what it has known before. Initiation has its own ring of fire. Not in the tissues of the body, but in the architecture of the self. The old identity cannot remain intact. Something is crowning here too. Not just the baby. The mother.

Part of what makes the fire so hard to name is that it is not always dramatic. It is also, perhaps most often, completely ordinary. It is the Tuesday at 2pm when the baby has been crying for an hour and you have not showered and there is nothing wrong — no emergency, no crisis — and yet you are standing in the kitchen with the particular feeling that this is your life now. That yesterday was this, and tomorrow will be this, and the self who used to stand in this kitchen and think about something other than feeding schedules and sleep windows is simply not available. The fire burns in the extraordinary moments. It also burns in the utterly ordinary ones. It is the gap made visible by the relentlessness of the small.

What makes this so hard to navigate is the silence around it. The cultural narrative of new motherhood is organized around the baby’s experience: the milestones, the development, the attachment. The mother’s interior experience — the dissolution happening alongside all of that — is treated as either a clinical symptom to screen for or a private matter to manage discreetly.

There is almost no public language for what it feels like to lose yourself while the world watches you hold someone else.

This silence is clinically consequential. Women who are in the dissolution and have no frame for it — no language that distinguishes developmental intensity from pathological crisis — often conclude that something is wrong with them. That they are failing at something other mothers manage. That their love is insufficient, their instincts broken, their character unequal to the demands. None of this is true. All of it is the expected experience of a self being broken down and rebuilt, happening without anyone naming the process as such.

What It Is Not

The Initiation stage is the place where the differential diagnosis between normative matrescent intensity and clinical postpartum mood disorders is most important and most difficult to make.

Postpartum depression is a primary mood disorder involving neurochemical dysregulation — not simply the difficulty of the transition, but a disruption of the systems that regulate mood, motivation, sleep, and the capacity for pleasure. It can be severe, it can be dangerous, and it requires clinical intervention. Postpartum OCD, postpartum anxiety, and postpartum psychosis are distinct conditions with distinct presentations, and postpartum psychosis in particular constitutes a psychiatric emergency. These conditions are real, they affect a significant proportion of new mothers, and they must be taken seriously.

The Matrescent Path is not an argument against this clinical care. It is an argument for precision — for the ability to distinguish between a woman who is in the expected fire of Initiation and a woman who is in a clinical crisis that requires urgent support. The distinction matters because the intervention differs, and confusing the two causes harm in both directions: over-pathologizing developmental intensity, or under-recognizing genuine clinical need.

The clinical distinction Freud made between mourning and melancholia is still useful here (Freud, 1917). In mourning, the world feels altered and strange — but the self retains its sense of worth. In melancholia, the self is what has become impoverished. A woman in the Initiation stage is almost certainly mourning. The previous self, the anticipated experience, the version of her life that existed before the baby arrived: these are real losses, and they produce real grief. But her sense of her own worth — her knowledge, however submerged, that she is still herself in some form — is generally intact.

When the self’s sense of worth is what has been lost — when the woman believes she is broken, worthless, that her child would be better off without her, that she cannot go on — that is not Initiation. That is a clinical emergency, and it requires immediate care.

There is a window problem that clinical practice has not adequately solved. The weeks immediately following birth — weeks zero through four — are the period of highest biological vulnerability and the period of least clinical oversight. PPD does not always present immediately; it often peaks between weeks two and eight. Screening tools are typically administered at the six-week appointment, which means the window of greatest instability is the window with the fewest clinical contact points. The woman who is most alone, most biologically destabilized, and most in need of support is also the woman the system is least likely to be actively watching. This is not a personal failing of individual providers. It is a structural gap in how postpartum care has been designed — and it is one of the reasons that preparation, community, and developmental framing before the fire arrives matter as much as clinical screening after it has.

Birth trauma deserves its own naming here, because it is one of the most underidentified clinical experiences in the postpartum period. A traumatic birth — emergency cesarean, obstetric violence, a delivery that bore no resemblance to what was planned, the specific terror of feeling that something was happening to your body without your consent or control — can produce PTSD symptoms that run alongside or underneath the developmental experience of Initiation. Intrusive memories, hypervigilance, avoidance, a sense of unreality, the body’s persistent alarm. The Edinburgh scale does not screen for birth trauma. Many providers do not ask about the birth experience at all beyond its clinical outcomes. And the woman who is carrying both the developmental fire of Initiation and the physiological freeze of unprocessed trauma is navigating something the standard framework has no language for — and may receive neither the developmental framing she needs nor the trauma-informed clinical care she also needs. Research estimates that childbirth-related PTSD affects between 3% and 6% of mothers, with subclinical PTSD symptoms affecting 12–13% — and up to a third of women describe their delivery as psychologically traumatic (Horsch et al., 2024). It is not rare. It deserves to be screened for, named, and treated — not assumed to resolve on its own once the physical recovery is complete.

Both can be true at once. A woman can be in the developmental fire of Initiation and also have postpartum depression. The developmental frame is not in competition with clinical care. It sits alongside it, asking the additional question: what is this woman going through developmentally, and what does that require, beyond or alongside clinical treatment?

What the Fire Requires

Traditional postpartum practices across cultures were not organized around the infant. They were organized around the mother. This is the knowledge that the modern West largely lost — and is only now recovering through the developmental and neurobiological science that explains, retroactively, why those practices worked.

The 40-day postpartum rest. The sitting the month. The omugwo (Lawal et al., 2022). The sutika paricharya (Dhiman & Divyamol, 2022). These were not customs. They were the empirically developed understanding, built over generations of direct observation, that a woman in the fire of Initiation requires three things above all else: warmth, rest, and witness.

Warmth — physical warmth, nourishing food, the literal closing of the open body — supports the physiological recovery that modern medicine’s six-week window does not adequately protect. The nervous system cannot begin to recalibrate without it. The hormonal systems cannot stabilize without adequate sleep and nutrition. The woman who is told to be back to normal at six weeks is being asked to build a new self on a foundation that is still, physiologically, in ruins.

Rest is not a luxury at this stage. It is a developmental prerequisite. The brain cannot consolidate the neurological changes of pregnancy without adequate sleep (Walker, 2017). The nervous system cannot recover its regulatory capacity without periods of low demand. The woman asking when will I feel like myself again is also, always, a woman whose body is trying to build something new on a chronically depleted foundation. The two questions are the same question.

Witness is the least tangible and perhaps the most important. The woman in Initiation needs someone to name what is happening — not to fix it, not to minimize it, not to offer a silver lining, but to receive the full reality of it and hold it steady. This is the fire. It does not last forever. What you are feeling is not failure. You are in the dissolution, and dissolution is the precondition for what comes next. You are still here, even when the previous version of here no longer exists.

That naming — offered calmly, without urgency, without the pressure to feel better — is one of the most clinically and relationally significant things a doula, a therapist, a midwife, or a partner can offer. Not because it resolves the difficulty. Because it changes what the difficulty means. And changed meaning, in developmental transitions, changes the experience itself.

The fire does not last forever. Dissolution is the precondition for what comes next.

What She Needs to Know

If you are in the Initiation stage — and you will recognize it by the specific quality of disorientation, the gap between what you expected and what you found, the sense of being in a fire that no one around you seems to be able to see — there are a few things worth saying directly.

The love and the grief are not in contradiction. You can love this baby completely and mourn the person you were before they arrived. Both are true. Both are allowed. The culture will try to tell you that the grief means something is wrong with the love. It does not. It means you are a person who had a life, and that life has changed permanently, and you are awake enough to know it.

The loss of yourself is not permanent. It is the dissolution that precedes a reformation. The self that feels inaccessible right now — the competent, contained, forward-moving person you were before — is not gone. She has been temporarily overtaken by a biological and developmental process of enormous scale. She will not return unchanged. But something will return. Something more, and different.

The instincts may not arrive on cue. This is normal. The cultural mythology of maternal instinct implies a seamless, immediate knowing — a sudden fluency in the language of your infant that arrives with the birth. For many women, it does not arrive this way. It accumulates. It is built through thousands of small moments of paying attention. The uncertainty you feel in the early weeks is not evidence of insufficient love or inadequate instinct. It is evidence that you are learning a language no one is born fluent in.

The body you are in right now is not the body you will inhabit in six months, or a year, or two years. It is a body in the middle of an enormous recalibration. Be as gentle with it as you can. What it needs most — rest, warmth, food, the absence of impossible demands — is exactly what the culture is least likely to provide. Know that the gap between what your body needs and what the culture expects is not your failure. It is the culture’s.

You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not doing it wrong.

You are in the fire. The fire is the stage, not the verdict. And you are, even here, still becoming.

Why Disorientation Arrives Unprepared

There is a direct line between what happens in Initiation and what makes Disorientation so hard to navigate. But before drawing that line, it helps to name what these two stages share.

Stages 3 and 4 together are the middle passage of the Matrescent Path. Not in the sense that they are merely difficult — all the stages carry their own weight — but in the specific developmental sense that they are the territory between who a woman was and who she is becoming. Initiation is the fire: the acute dissolution, the biological rupture, the gap between the blueprints and the real. Disorientation is the fog: the long gray middle after the fire has passed, the high function paired with low feeling, the building that happens without anyone seeing it. Two distinct experiences. One continuous passage. The fire burns the previous self down. The fog is what it feels like to live in the aftermath of that burning, before the new self has consolidated enough to be visible.

What connects them — what makes them not just sequential but causally linked — is what happens, or fails to happen, at the boundary between them.

In last week’s essay on Stage Four, we mapped the Disorientation stage: the long gray middle, the high function paired with low feeling, the flatness that arrives after the acute crisis has passed and the culture has decided the difficult part is over. What that essay did not have space to name is why so many women enter Disorientation without any framework for what they are inside.

The answer is Initiation. Or more precisely: the silence around it.

When a woman moves through the fire of Initiation without anyone naming the fire — when the dissolution is treated as a clinical symptom to screen for rather than a developmental passage to be witnessed — she learns something. She learns that what she is experiencing is not supposed to be talked about in those terms. That the gap between the anticipated and the real is her private problem. That the grief for the previous self is illegitimate. That adapting is the goal, and she should be adapting faster.

So she adapts. She produces competence. She closes the gap publicly, even when it remains privately open. And she moves into Disorientation already carrying everything that was never named in Initiation — the unmourned grief, the unnamed dissolution, the sense that she is somehow behind where she should be. She enters Disorientation not as a woman who has come through the fire and knows it, but as a woman who suspects she never quite handled the fire correctly.

This is why preparing mothers from the beginning matters. Not to prevent the difficulty — the fire is structural, it cannot be bypassed — but to give women the developmental language to know what they are in while they are in it. A woman who knows she is in Initiation moves through it differently than a woman who thinks she is failing. A woman who understands that Disorientation is the expected next stage moves into it differently than a woman who arrives there thinking the hardest part was supposed to be over.

The map does not remove the terrain. But it changes how you travel it. And women who are handed the map at the beginning — at the Threshold, before the fire, before the fog — arrive at each stage with something the culture has consistently withheld from them: the knowledge that what they are experiencing has a name, belongs to a sequence, and is not a verdict on who they are.

The fire cannot be bypassed. But a woman who knows she is in it moves through it differently than one who thinks she is failing.

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If Initiation is the fire, what follows is not relief. It is something quieter. Less visible. And often harder to name. The stage where the outside world thinks you’ve adjusted — but inside, something is still unfinished.

That stage has a name too. And it’s where many mothers are still living.

(Read: Stage 4 — The Disorientation Stage )

Next week, we leave the middle of the Matrescent Path.

But before there was a middle, there was a beginning.

We return to Stage 1: Pre-Motherhood — the self before the baby, the blueprints she carried, and the early architecture of a transformation that begins long before birth.

References

Dhiman, K., & Divyamol, M. D. (2022). Sutika paricharya — postpartum care in Ayurveda. Journal of Ayurveda and Integrated Medical Sciences, 7(3), 101–106.

Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. Standard Edition, Vol. 14, 237–258. Hogarth Press.

Horsch, A., Vial, Y., Favrod, C., Harari, M. M., Blackwell, S. E., Watson, P., Iyadurai, L., Bonsall, M. B., & Holmes, E. A. (2024). Childbirth-related posttraumatic stress disorder: definition, risk factors, pathophysiology, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 230(2), 110–141.

Lawal, S. A., Adisa, A. O., & Ige, O. M. (2022). Omugwo — preventing and managing postpartum depression. Africa Health, April 2022, 10–11.

Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.