THE FOURTH TRIMESTER, EXPLAINED

Pregnancy gets forty weeks of books, appointments, and countdowns. Then the baby arrives and the schedule mostly… stops. The weeks that follow — roughly the first three months — are what pediatricians and researchers call the fourth trimester: a period when your newborn is still adjusting to life outside the womb, and your own body and mind are doing some of the heaviest work they will ever do.

For the baby, the fourth trimester explains a lot of otherwise-baffling behavior. Newborns are soothed by things that feel like the womb: being held close, rocked, shushed, fed, kept warm. That isn't a bad habit forming. It's biology finishing the job.

For you, it's recovery from a major physical event — birth — layered on top of hormonal shifts larger than any other point in life, on almost no sleep. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists now recommends that postpartum care be an ongoing process rather than a single six-week visit: contact with your provider within the first three weeks, and a comprehensive visit by twelve weeks. If nobody offered you that, you're allowed to ask for it.

WHAT'S NORMAL, AND WHAT'S WORTH A CALL

• Normal: bleeding that tapers over weeks, night sweats, soreness, crying more easily, feeling like a stranger in your own schedule.
• Worth a call to your provider: heavy bleeding that soaks a pad in an hour, fever, severe headache or vision changes, pain that's getting worse instead of better, or a mood that keeps sinking past the two-week mark.
• Always: if something feels wrong to you, that is a real symptom. You are the data.