Naomi wants you to do postpartum better.

And she'll show you how.

Naomi with her son Cormac.

I'm rarely drawn to mum content on Instagram. Most of it is unhelpful. Always selling and feeding off the vulnerabilities of sleep-deprived mothers. As you can see, I've grown to be quite cynical of the mum-sphere… is there anyone who gives a damn? That was until Naomi Chrisoulakis, or @Cocoonbynaomi as she's known, weaved her way into my algorithm. Her honesty, intelligence and charm immediately took me. Finally, I thought. Someone who wasn't all fluff and sponsored posts. Someone relatable and speaks with mothers, not at them.

Naomi is a postpartum doula and founder of Cook + Cocoon, an online community and practical postpartum prep and cooking course that will teach you exactly how to fill your freezer (recipes, shopping lists and all) and give you the guidance you need to prep for a calm, nourished postpartum – something Naomi deeply believes is vital to thrive and something that she wished existed during her own "brutal and beautiful" postpartum period with her first child, Margot. Like most of us, she went into motherhood with an I'll wing it attitude (spoiler alert; there's no winging it, I've tried). When it came time for baby number two (her son, Cormac), Naomi was determined to do things differently. She made a plan, put money aside, and stocked the freezer. In other words, she took control of what she could, and her experience was unparalleled. 

Read on as Naomi and I open up about our regrets in postpartum, the myth of intuition and cream linen motherhood, why she became a doula, and what new or expecting mothers can do to set themselves up for a positive postpartum.

JF: What I like about you, and many people also like, is how you don't gloss over anything. I find a lot of Instagram content, especially in the mum sphere, to be one big rabbit hole, and not much is helpful – do you feel this also? 

NC: Yeah. The other day, I read something like, "if you're planning for a postpartum, which resembles going into the forest and communing with baby Diaz, that's all lovely. But let's talk about the real shit that can happen in postpartum." This just made me laugh. Because there is this sort of vision, and I think I maybe had that vision for my first postpartum life – you envision yourself at home, cream linen everything and just smiling at your baby all day, but postpartum is the grittiest time ever. Even if you have everything set up and you're supported, you've done all the legwork, which most people haven't – it's still gritty, it's still going to be hard, because it's such a major transition. It's a massive thing in your life!

JF: Definitely. I've always been a realist, yet my expectations still didn't match what happened. There's always that little part of you hoping for that real ethereal, white linen experience. But then, it's just never the way it seems.

NC: No. It's hard when you're pregnant to understand how it is entirely and to explain to someone until they go through it but that's what I'm trying to do so that people don't get a massive shock by having this kind of expectation that it will be easy, breezy. I thought I'd be out having coffees and taking my sleeping baby out to dinner with us – and yeah, dude, that's not what it's like. I mean, sometimes it is. It's beautiful and brutal. 

JF: I know that with your first child, Margot, that was quite a challenging postpartum experience. I'm guessing this was the inspiration behind your postpartum course. Can you talk about that more? 

NC: Exactly. So, gosh, where do I begin? I had Margot after having an enjoyable career where I felt like I'd worked hard and achieved results. I figured I'd pretty much be able to do the same with birth and postpartum and motherhood… not that postpartum even really figured much in my calculation because I hadn't heard much about postpartum; I did quite a lot of birth prep, but basically zero prep for postpartum. I didn't know about the fourth trimester.

I had quite a difficult birth with Margot, which left me with some birth trauma. And coming out of that into immediate postpartum, I was kind of in shock, but also trying to learn how to breastfeed. I'd assumed that breastfeeding would come naturally. And, I thought, how hard could it be? And now I know it's really tough! It's a massively steep learning curve. And I think 95% of people, that's the case, and it's not talked about enough.

I then sent my husband back to work one week postpartum to finish up a contract for a week. Then he had another month off after that. Still, the combination of all of that sent me into a tailspin of postpartum anxiety, and feeling like a total failure, and that everything that I wanted, around having a little baby and a house, and that dream that I thought was what I wanted. I thought, why is this so hard, like, brutally, brutally hard. At the same time, I was massively in love with her. And I was obsessed with her. I couldn't get enough of her. And then I was terrified. I would watch the sun going down late afternoon and have this feeling of dread. A sort of horrible fear in the pit of my stomach. She was quite an unsettled baby. So she would scream, often from, like, five o'clock at night 'till midnight. So Michael would be pacing up and down the hall trying to hold her while I managed to get 40 minutes of sleep, and then he'd say I'm sorry, I can't do any more, here feed her again. I would feed her, and she would not settle. And it was just this awful cycle.

My mum would say dumb shit to me, and I would burst into tears. I didn't have the kind of support I needed, and it was the kind of support I didn't know I needed. Michael was trying his best, but we were completely uneducated about postpartum, my needs, what was going on for me, and why I might feel the way I was. It was a really rocky ride for me. I think around four months postpartum, things started to feel easier. And I thought, oh, okay, this is kind of how I imagined maternity leave and having a baby would feel like. Breastfeeding got easier after the first few weeks, but the sleep deprivation! She would not sleep until we started co-sleeping. It was challenge after challenge after challenge.

When she was around six months, I had a couple of friends who were having babies, and I saw this book come out called The First 40 Days. And I thought that looked interesting. I love to cook for people who've had a new baby. I got the book, and I read it, and it was talking about all the stuff that I had never heard about – what's actually going on for a woman with her hormones and her brain, and oh, look, here's the thing called a postpartum doula. And, look, here's food that we should be feeding new mothers to help with their iron levels and helping with brain fog. And I was just like, what the fuck, we've been so ripped off in this culture. It also made me think that maybe there's an opportunity here; I'm passionate about this. And I want to change something if I can. I want to have conversations I wish I'd heard before I had a baby, and I don't want anyone to ever feel how I felt. I wanted to do what I could to help people feel prepared and give people what I felt I needed. So I had had 10 years or something in media at that point, and I continued working in that world for a couple more years. And then, I quit my job, became a postpartum doula, and set up my business.

JF: I can relate to so much of that and agree; we do place so much importance on learning solely about birth and pregnancy, which is essential, but we seem to skip over the fourth trimester. I can also relate to the sleep deprivation and the crazy things my husband and I did to survive… I had my great husband, but he had to go to work, and I remember I would stay up until around 4:30 in the morning. Too anxious to go to sleep. Now I think that's insanity and can't believe I could do that, but I had a son with reflux which was undiagnosed at the time, and he was so unsettled, and I was anxious and under pressure and felt like if I couldn't get to him quick enough he would scream for hours, again. I did feel lucky that I had and still have family support. But we get parts of it wrong because we learn as we go, and it's hard to ask for help. It's hard to ask; can you make my meals because I'm living off coffee and muesli bars? Or can you clean my house? And we often stay silent, go it alone, and I think there's so much that I could have done better.

NC: Yeah, it's hard to ask for help. But it's also hard to receive it even when someone does offer what you need. From a very young age, we've been taught in this culture that to be strong is to be able to cope and do it on your own, and you don't need help. And that is not helpful for postpartum. Postpartum is the complete opposite, actually. That's been drummed into us under the social capitalism of the patriarchy. We're not meant to have babies like this.

JF: Yes, absolutely. I am competent and independent, I thought I won't need help, but it was a huge shock.

NC: Yeah. It is for most people. 

JF: And even if you have the 'textbook newborn'. It's still so hard because we're not in our villages anymore. 

NC: Totally. And I think that understanding the textbook newborn is screwed up. Because we're fed these messages, and there's not a lot of education and understanding of what normal infant behaviour is. And you think you're doing something wrong. There's something wrong with the baby. And then you get the people who like to prey on that and make money off that. It's a bit of a disaster… it’s no wonder we all have mental health issues. 

JF: My reason for starting Dear Dilate and writing and sharing about motherhood is similar to yours; I didn't want anyone to feel the way I did, and I wanted to normalise the rollercoaster of feelings and seasons. I love my son. I think he is incredible, and I would not change him, but if I had my time over during postpartum, I'd do it differently.

NC: Yeah, well, I had a second baby. I did get my chance over. But of course, you don't get to do it over; you get one shot. You get one shot with that baby, and the postpartum you have with baby number one can never be the same because now you'll have a toddler or a preschooler in the mix if you have any more children, so it's a bit of a different kettle of fish. But I thought, how will I do things differently this time?

JF: I've been reading Mother Brain, and it debunks the fallacy that of mother's intuition and instead proves that the more experience you have, the more your intuition grows, but for some reason, we expect to get it right from the beginning and expect we are going to know what to do. With your second child, you have experience, which breeds confidence and knowledge to make informed decisions and do what will be best for you and your baby. I think just having a course like yours the first time around (or even to help with your second) is setting that realistic expectation of this is probably what it's going to be like, and here's what you can do to prepare, removing at least some of the guessing and googling. 

NC: Yes. There's just so much crap out there. There's just so much noise out there and people trying to make a buck, and it makes it a lot harder to know what to do, and I found it quite stressful being told to trust my intuition when I had a newborn the first time around. I think I was so sleep-deprived and hormonal, I was like, I don't know, I don't know, like, I don't know what my intuition is. And that made me feel even worse.

JF: Exactly. I remember thinking I don't know. I've only known my son for 24 hours. How am I meant to know what to do?

NC: Now, what I tell everyone is, it's really about trial and error. And when you're doing that trial and error, tuning into what feels right and familiar to you, that's the intuition factor. You can only try things, see how you go, and accept that there will be errors and mistakes. And that's part of it.

JF: Did you feel much more relaxed this time around due to experience as well, as putting things in place beforehand?

NC: Definitely. The gift of doing it again is that you've been through it. So you have more perspective. During my first postpartum, I thought, "Is this my life now? Is this it? I'm going to bed-sharing and be at the mercy of someone who wants to feed off my body every hour and a half? Like, is this it? I can never go out again." I was obviously being dramatic. But the second time, I know this is the season. I had a really deep understanding of knowing I was in this season. And it might be a hard season, but it's a season, and soon it will be gone. And I'll probably look back and think, that was so beautiful. And so you have this gift of perspective, experience, and a bit more confidence. I also did a lot of work and invested a lot of time, money, and energy into setting myself up to have a positive postpartum. I started saving for my postpartum before I was pregnant because if I couldn't have those things, I'm not sure I would go through it again. It nearly broke me last time. 

There was a lot of planning before even being pregnant, like how old do I want my child to be? I really wanted a bigger gap, but that's not the right choice for everyone, but I did really plan what was best for us. 

JF: The question about the best age gap comes up a lot. People are always asking others; When's the best time to have another. What is the best, but all we can go off is our first and when we're ready. 

NC: Everyone's really different. There are pros and cons with age gaps, and it's personal. And in different circumstances, you have different levels of family support, and there are many things. But one thing that really stuck with me was that your bodies don't fully heal from birth for three years. So I wanted to go into pregnancy with good nutrient stores, and my body felt pretty good.

JF: So tell me, what did you save money for to allow yourself to have a better postpartum? 

NC: A postpartum doula and I saved to have a mobile massage in the house. I know it sounds silly but even buying myself some beautiful new linen sheets – I knew the importance of rest and staying in bed, so I wanted to make it a really cosy, comfy space. And having nice new pyjamas. Things that I knew would help me embrace it and embrace rest. Having acupuncture, having an osteopath, having enough money, just set aside for a lactation consultant, if I needed one – I didn't just want to cope, I wanted this to feel like an indulgence, and feel really nourishing and really good, and not just something I have to do to get through this and survive.

I really wanted to lean into all that postpartum can be, which in many other cultures is considered a rite of passage, a place for ceremony, a place where a woman comes through transformed, and a lot of people see it as the opportunity for personal development. I really wanted to lean into it as much as I could. 

JF: It was interesting when you said you wanted to really lean in this time. When I reflect on my postpartum, I don't think I fully leaned into it. And I think it was because it was such a state of shock. And I was dealing with the whole identity check shift and a really unsettled, reflux baby. I had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I was 'Mum' now, and at the time, I thought, "What have I done? Have I made the wrong decision?" Because it wasn't at all like I pictured it. And during an identity crisis, it can be complicated to lean in. 

NC: Yeah, and I think if there's a difference between saying, "enjoy every moment", which I think is bullshit, and surrendering to it, I think there's a lot of resistance to postpartum and a lot of resistance to what's typical in terms of your own identity shift, finding it hard, rest because of cultural pressures. We resist the rest, and we push on. We fixate on getting our bodies back and getting out and about, and people are applauded for getting out and about, and that's the worst thing for them in postpartum. It is much more manageable if you succumb to the idea that it's a season and you need a lot of rest and let it wash over you rather than fight the wave. And I definitely found that the second time around – yeah, I feel like shit, and that's because I need to rest more or yep, I'm bed sharing from day one, because I know I'll get better sleep etc. All of that made a big difference to my enjoyment factor… I didn't enjoy my first postpartum, which breaks my heart because it was this amazingly transformative time. And I was obsessed with my baby, but I didn't really enjoy the experience because I was fighting against it. I thought something was wrong because I didn't understand it.

I think that's what I'm trying to do as well in the course is teach; if you understand it, if you know what's going on if you know things like; night two of breastfeeding after the baby's born is going to be tricky because they're going to be cluster feeding and wanting to be on all the time. Maybe you won't fight against it. You go, okay, this is normal. I know this is coming. I know what to expect. And you can go with it. Or even that feeling of; I don't even know who I am anymore. What do I even like to wear now? And if you understand that this is all a normal part of matrescence, you will come out the other side, making things easier. Knowledge is power; we need more of the right knowledge around this, and it needs to be talked about more. 

JF: When you are entirely in the dark about the gritty reality of postpartum, I know I often felt guilty that I wasn't enjoying it, and it's hard not to compare your journey to others, especially with social media when you're at your most vulnerable, which for a lot of us is when we're sleep-deprived and feel way out of our depth, and unsure of when it will get easier. 

NC: Yep. How can we enjoy every moment? It's so unrealistic. It's all very unrealistic at the moment.

JF: It is. And like you, I think back, and it does still break my heart that I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I should have or could have if some things were different and I had more confidence and knowledge. And yet, people will still say, I'll miss having a newborn. And three years in, I can still say I don't miss one part of that season. I look back on photos of Freddie when he was a newborn, and I am in awe of just how beautiful he was, but I still like shudder. I don't know if I can go back to that. 

NC: I had a lot of apprehensions about doing it again. I didn't have any of the same challenges with my second baby, but it took me a long time to do it again because I'd found it so hard. And now it's all a big blur. And I had a totally different baby with a totally different personality. My eldest is six now. Although sometimes I remember the tough moments and how it felt to be in the trenches, I think it was a hell of a lot easier the second time. I had more support; even Michael, my husband, just knew what to expect. And he knew how to support me better, and we'd had those conversations, and we'd been through a lot of relationship stuff, and we were helping each other better and communicating better.

JF: How long did your husband take time off again the second time? 

NC: He was going to take a month off; that was my minimum. Then COVID happened, and he lost a contract, which was coming soon after that. So he ended up having three months off, which financially wasn't ideal, but it was the best thing! I'm convinced that every partner should have three months off, but six weeks is still good.

JF: So what else can expecting mothers do to help them make the most out of their postpartum journey that doesn't involve spending a cent? 

NC: Ask for and accept help. I asked friends to set up a meal train for us. I had a friend who organised it, and other friends joined. That was amazing! Local people were dropping off meals, but even interstate and overseas people were gifting us $50 UberEATS vouchers.

Just having boundaries around visitors. With Margot, my husband had one of his friends come over when I was 10 days postpartum. I was sitting there trying to breastfeed her under the muslin, and it was just… no. It was COVID, so it was easier to put boundaries in place, but the second time around, I made it clear that I wasn't going to be entertaining people.

Naomi has kindly given DD subscribers a 10% off code for her Cook + Cocoon Postpartum Course and her delicious cookie mix – enter DD10 at checkout.