just read that post about the 143 lb drop and rhabdo recovery and it hit different. not in a “i want that” way but more like “oh, recovery doesn’t have to be invisible?” i’m 6 months pp and my body still feels wrecked. not rhabdo-wrecked, but i had a whole human in me 6 months ago and now i’m back at the vet clinic carrying rosa everywhere and sleeping 4 hours a night. my shoulders hate me. the thing that gets me is that person had a nursing home, PT, someone managing meals. i have… a schedule. no “recovery phase” when you’re solo parenting. just keep going, you knew what you signed up for. some days i feel stronger. my core doesn’t completely bail when i pick rosa up. other days i’m pulling something stupid. the progress is invisible. i chose this, wanted this. but i do wonder what postpartum recovery would look like if i had actual space to focus on it, instead of just living through it alone at 3am.
the “no recovery phase when you’re solo parenting” line is the whole thing nobody accounts for. the recovery person in that post had meals managed and PT scheduled, you’ve got a toddler on your hip at 4hrs of sleep, which is its own metabolic load that just doesn’t get counted. fwiw the invisible progress is real even if it doesn’t photograph. mine showed up backwards, I didn’t notice my knees had stopped hurting on stairs until like month 4, and “my core doesn’t bail when i pick rosa up” is the same kind of signal. it counts. ymmv.
the month 4 knees are real progress, and i’m genuinely glad you noticed that shift… but when you’re on 4 hours of sleep keeping a baby alive every single day, that progress doesn’t actually feel real, does it? like you’re measuring improvement against a baseline that’s already completely broken to begin with… your knees stop hurting on stairs and yes, that absolutely counts as something, but it’s also 4 more months of your body running in the red the whole time.
maybe the actual issue isn’t that recovery is invisible, it’s that we’re treating it as acceptable for solo moms to be recovering while living like this. tbh the progress shouldn’t have to cost this much to be noticed.
edit: typo
The thing nobody’s said yet in here is that the connective tissue piece is still in play at 6 months, especially if you’re nursing. Relaxin and the general ligament laxity from pregnancy don’t just switch off the day you deliver, and breastfeeding keeps some of that hormonal environment elevated longer. So when you say you’re “pulling something stupid” some days, that’s not random and it’s not you being weak. You’re loading shoulders and a core that are working against tissue that’s still a little looser than baseline, and the margin for error on a bad-sleep day is just smaller. I read about this when I was trying to figure out why my own shoulder injury wasn’t healing the way I expected, and the laxity-plus-fatigue combination kept coming up as a real factor for postpartum injury rates. What that means practically is the invisible progress and the random tweaks are kind of the same story. Your tissue is slowly tightening back up while your load demands have gone up, not down, because Rosa keeps getting heavier and you’re the only one carrying her. So the “running in the red” framing from the other reply is fair, but I’d add that part of the red is structural and it does resolve on its own timeline, separate from sleep. fwiw the laxity piece tends to track closer to weaning than to weeks-postpartum, so if you’re still nursing the clock you’re measuring against might be longer than the calendar suggests. I can’t separate how much of my own slow shoulder recovery was the load versus the tissue versus just never sleeping, the confounders don’t resolve just because you notice them. But the part I’d push on is don’t read every tweak as a setback in your recovery. Some of it is just the cost of being the load-bearing structure for another person while your own structure is still reorganizing. The core not bailing when you lift her is the actual signal that the reorganizing is working. ymmv, and worth running past your OB or a pelvic PT if you’ve got access to one.
edit: forgot to add