Brilliantly honest Oscars-reject video takes the filter off postpartum mum life
A TV ad in the US has recently been rejected from some high-profile Oscars advertising slots likely because it features a new mum wearing mesh undies, going to the toilet, changing her maternity pads and treating her tender postpartum perineum and surrounds with medicated spray.
This is postpartum
While the folk who transmit the Oscars coverage might shy away from these realities, we certainly don’t.
It’s amazing to see all this on screen and this ad is doing a brilliant service for expectant couples who may have no idea of what’s to come when they bring their baby home.
And let’s face it, who does?!
It’s impossible to fathom what those early days will be like and we don’t really talk about how difficult the recovery can be for women. We hardly speak of the healing women need to do after a vaginal birth.
Vaginal birth recovery is very different from the healing involved after a c-section delivery (which of course is major surgery and sidelines new mums for weeks and weeks). But women who have a vaginal delivery will usually be nursing very sore nether regions. They’re possibly contending with tears, stitches, scratches and bruising.
Peeing with an injured vagina is something else. As is doing a poo with bruised or battered bits. You’d be hard-pressed to find a vaginal-delivering mum who has not recoiled as she’s gone to the bathroom in those early days.
And let’s not forget the bleeding, because there’s quite a lot of that happening too as the uterus resets itself after growing a baby AND a placenta. Also? The mental health challenges all deliveries and new parent life bring. It’s a LOT.
Taking the filter off postpartum life
This ad gives us a glimpse of all of this and more.
It’s groundbreaking and hopefully a sign of what’s to come. No. It’s not filtered through rose-coloured lens, but it’s the sort of truth-telling new parents need to better understand what happens in those amazing and confounding days after birth.
As inroads are finally being made into how the advertising industry depicts periods, it looks like it’s time for the new mum recovery experience to get an overhaul too.
Oscars Schmoscars
Sure this ad was rejected from being shown during the Oscars last week, but who watches that ceremony anyway?! It’s being shared far and wide regardless and give lots of parents-to-be a fresh new perspective on what new mum life can look like.
Much better to put this ad into the hands of the clever cookies who can set it free virally. And those cookies are you and me. Share this story and help a new mum-to-be be better prepared for what lies ahead.
Excellent work, Fridamom! You champs!
