A Mother's Prayer

I pray you'll be my eyes
And watch her where she goes
And help her to be wise
Help me to let go

--“A Mother's Prayer,” Celine Dion

Day 6 postpartum. We have postpartum cultural rituals to follow after a baby’s birth so that the mother can quickly heal. Diet is an important part of recovery: eating fresh, hot meals and staying away from leftovers and certain foods. But there are little-known, hardly-discussed rituals that involve a lot of salt. 

One postpartum care method involves roasting rock salt hot enough to pop in the pan, then placing the salt between a layer of aluminum foil, putting the foil atop cardboard on your floor, covering the foil with a towel, and lying on the entire heap belly-down. This is supposed to shrink your uterus back to size and flush out any stagnant blood.

Another postpartum care method involves cooking the rock salt in water in a tall pot, then placing that under a stool with a hole cut in it, pot lid slightly ajar so that salt steam drifts up, and sitting on the holed stool with your pants off. This is supposed to cleanse any wounds in your nether parts, like a bidet sauna.

If you are reading this with a lifted eyebrow, you were much like me when my mother-in-law came into my house and prepared these things for me to try after my first baby was born. She also taught me to cook up sticky rice, which has long heat-retention properties, wrapping fistfuls into a towel, and massaging the breasts to move stagnant milk and prevent clots. The logical part of my brain questions the rituals’ worth and necessity since obviously generations of women who don’t know to do this end up healing just fine. But for today, I slip back, without protest, to these weird but familiar methods of postpartum care. I will the salt to heal me as it’s supposed to do, to cleanse away remaining wounds and hurt, like salty tears shed to rid the heart of pain.