Seven Sisters for Seven Days

Seven Sisters for Seven Days
The Mothers Manual for Community- Based Postpartum Care 
By Michelle Peterson / Forward by Aviva Tomm, MD  

In a culture where we hold ourselves to polished social media expectations, where there is pride on how to be successful without support,  but instead focus on the hard work and truly succeed. We find ourselves continuing to isolate from the community around us.

Seven Sisters for Seven Days offers tangible solutions to combat this is the early days of postpartum. Peterson does a thorough job on guiding you through what it looks like to ask for help, but more importantly how to receive it. A great bonus is the workpages located towards the back of the book that offers templates, worksheets and exercises to help give some direction on where to start. 

​The ultimate goal outlined in this book is that the mother is taken care of and then in turn, can care for the newborn without any other expectations placed on her. From sleep tips to feeding tips and everything in between this sweet book offers the basics on explaining the importance of postpartum care. Using a variety of referenced resources, Peterson identifies the areas that are typically in need of support in the weeks following a babies arrival, including mental health support, body awareness, nutrition, rest, other ways to self care and baby basics. 

Some families don’t have the means to hire support and struggle with asking their community to come together and care for their new family. The concept of Peterson’s book,  The Seven Sisters for seven days, helps organize family and friends who are willing to fully step into this role. Tending to the new parent’s self care needs, household demands, serving healthy, healing foods while also tending to sibling care.  It starts with assigning a “sister” who will be the lead person and can take over the schedule and back up support as needed and six other individuals who can choose one day a week to attend to the family for the first seven days. Each day a sister arrives first thing in the morning tending to the families needs for the day and rotates through the days of care, ensuring all days are covered. 

​As postpartum doulas we can’t recommend planning for the postpartum enough. With maternal mental health rates being 1 in 5 (In Canada) it has been shown that planning and setting yourself up with support can help immensely in the creation of community, something that is often very new to new parents in our current western society. The importance of surrounding oneself with a variety of tools and people is imperative to the healing, expectations and growth that new parenthood brings to one's life.

This book is a wonderful place to start for anyone who feels overwhelmed at how to start planning for their postpartum journey and will guide them through the steps to building your “Seven Sisters” to ensure your community comes together to embrace and support at a time where it is needed most.  

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Thank you Praeclarus Press for sharing this book with us, we will gladly be adding it to our client lending library. 
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Praeclarus Press, LLC is a new small press owned by Kathleen Kendall-Tackett, Ph.D., IBCLC, FAPA, a health psychologist and board certified lactation consultant. Dr. Kendall-Tackett has been an author and editor in women’s health for more than 20 years. To purchase this book, click here.