The Healing Mama

Let me ask you something honestly.

It has been weeks — maybe months — since you had your baby.

And every single morning, you stand in front of that mirror and stare at a body that does not feel like yours anymore.

Your stomach still hangs. Still rounds out. Still looks like you are carrying something that already came out months ago.

"Why is it still like this?"

You are exhausted in ways you did not know a human being could be exhausted. You are breastfeeding. You are waking up at 2am, 3am, sometimes 4am. You are carrying this baby, this home, this marriage — all on a body that has not been given a single proper chance to heal.

You bought the waist trainer. You tied it so tight you could barely breathe. You wore it for two weeks and your stomach looked a little smaller... and then the moment you stopped, it bounced right back. Every single centimetre of it.

"Maybe I just need to eat less."

So you tried that too. You skipped meals. You drank hot water. You told yourself you were not hungry when you clearly were. And all you got was a body more depleted than before and a breast milk supply that started drying up.

You have Googled things you would never admit to Googling. "Why is my postpartum belly still big?" "How to lose baby weight fast Nigeria." "Postpartum belly will it ever go down."

Every article you found talked about green smoothies. Pilates. Gym routines three times a week. Cold plunge baths.

As if you have time for any of that.

And there is something else nobody talks about but you feel it deeply.

Your husband has not said anything. He is not complaining. But you notice the way things have shifted between you. The distance that was not there before. The way you quickly change before he sees you. The way intimacy feels like something that belongs to a version of you that no longer exists.

You are not lazy. You are not ungrateful. You love your baby with everything you have.

But you miss yourself.

You miss feeling like a woman and not just somebody's mother.

And the worst part is that somewhere deep in your heart, you have started to wonder — is this just how it is now? Is this my body forever?

Drop everything you are doing right now and read every single word I am about to say.

Our grandmothers never went to the gym after childbirth.

They never bought waist trainers from Instagram. They never swallowed imported supplements with names they could not pronounce. They never spent money on pharmacy products that promised everything and delivered nothing.

And yet — they snapped back.

They recovered fully. Their bodies healed. Their wombs cleansed themselves. Their energy returned. They went back to their farms, their markets, their kitchens — strong, whole, and restored.

They did it with knowledge. Ancient, proven, ancestral knowledge that was passed from woman to woman for generations... until somewhere along the line, that chain was broken. Modern life came in. Hospitals replaced traditional birth attendants. And quietly, without anyone realising what was being lost, that precious knowledge began to disappear.

My name is Glory Da-Silva.

First thing you should know about me — I am not a doctor. I am not a nutritionist. I am not a certified anything. I am just an ordinary African woman, a mother of two, who suffered through postpartum recovery the hard way... until I found the solution that nobody had bothered to tell me existed.

My second baby came into the world by caesarean section.

I was not prepared for what that would do to my body.

The first few weeks, I told myself it was normal. "You just had surgery, Glory. Give it time." My mother came to stay and took care of the baby while I rested. My husband was supportive. Things felt manageable.

Then week six came. Then week ten. Then month four.

And my stomach was still there. Rounded, soft, hanging slightly over my scar. Stubbornly, persistently, embarrassingly there.

I remember the exact moment it broke me.

I had gone to a friend's get-together — the first time I had dressed up properly since the birth. I wore a dress I loved. I stood in front of the mirror and I told myself I looked fine. I believed it for about thirty minutes... until someone at the party asked me, "Ah, Glory! Are you pregnant again?"

She meant no harm. But I smiled, excused myself, went to the bathroom, and cried silently for ten minutes before washing my face and going back out.

I came home that night and my husband held me while I cried properly. He said all the right things. He told me I was beautiful. He told me it did not matter.

But I had already started pulling away from him without realising it. Sleeping in a t-shirt I would have never worn before. Changing in the bathroom instead of the bedroom. Avoiding his eyes in moments that used to feel natural.

My aunt noticed. She is the kind of woman who notices everything and says exactly what she thinks.

She took me aside one afternoon and said something I have never forgotten:

"Glory, your body carried a life. It deserves to be healed properly, not punished. The problem is not your body. The problem is that nobody has shown you how to care for it the way it deserves to be cared for."

I started searching for solutions the way any woman with a smartphone and a desperate heart would.

I tried the waist trainer — the expensive one that the Instagram vendors swore by. I wore it faithfully for three weeks. My stomach looked reduced while it was on. The moment it came off, everything returned. My skin was irritated around my CS scar. I stopped.

I tried skipping meals and eating clean — rice out, bread out, anything enjoyable out. I lasted eleven days before I collapsed from exhaustion while breastfeeding and my husband physically sat me down and put a plate of food in front of me.

I tried a postpartum herbal mixture from a vendor on Twitter. Three bottles. N18,000. No instructions. No dosage information. No idea what was inside it. My stomach felt worse for the first week. I stopped after the second bottle.

I tried hot water with lemon every morning — because some blog told me it would "melt the belly fat." It gave me heartburn. That was all it gave me.

I tried abdominal exercises — crunches, planks, the works. Three weeks in, my physiotherapist told me I had separated my abdominal muscles during the CS and that what I was doing was making the separation worse, not better. I stopped in a panic.

Five attempts. Five failures. And thousands of naira wasted on things that were not made for my body, my recovery, or my reality.

That August, I travelled home with my mother for the August Meeting.

It was the kind of gathering that fills the entire compound — aunties, cousins, neighbours, women who had not seen each other since the previous year. There was noise and pepper soup and children running in every direction and the particular kind of joy that only exists in a Nigerian village when all the women come home at once.

I was sitting outside on the veranda late in the afternoon, a little apart from the main group, watching my baby sleep in the shade. I was still in my head about my body. Still heavy with the frustration of trying and failing and trying again.

That is when Grandma Rose sat down beside me.

She is eighty-one years old. Small in stature, quiet in movement, but carrying something in her eyes that makes you feel like she has seen and understood things most people never will. She is from Imo State — a retired traditional birth attendant who spent over five decades helping women deliver and recover before any hospital existed within thirty kilometres of her village. The women in our community speak her name with a particular kind of reverence.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked at my stomach. Then she looked at my face.

She said — and I remember every word:

"That belly is not fat, my daughter. That is a womb that has not been properly spoken to yet. Your body is still waiting. It is waiting for the knowledge that belongs to it."

I did not fully understand what she meant. But I leaned in.

She told me about the old ways. The ways that were used long before hospitals and Instagram vendors and imported supplements existed. The ancestral postpartum protocol that Imo women had been using for generations — not just to lose belly weight, but to cleanse the womb of retained blood and tissue, to restore hormonal balance, to rebuild the body's strength from the inside out.

She told me about the specific herbal preparation — how it must be correctly prepared, how much to take, for how many days, and critically — how to use it safely while breastfeeding, which almost nobody talks about.

She told me about the foods. The specific pepper soups. The particular leaf combinations. The palm kernel preparations. The things that work with a woman's postpartum body rather than fighting against it.

She told me about the binding method — not the tight painful corset wrapping that damages CS scars, but the old cloth technique that supports the uterus returning naturally to position.

I sat there for two hours listening. My mother came and sat with us. Three generations of women, talking about the body in ways I had never been taught.

Honestly? My first reaction when I got home was scepticism.

This cannot be that simple. If this really worked, why did nobody tell me before now?

But I had tried everything else. I had nothing left to lose.

I started the protocol on a Monday.

Days one, two, three — nothing dramatic. I felt a warmth internally that I could not fully describe. A feeling of something beginning to move and shift that had been stuck.

Day six — I looked in the mirror in the morning and something was different. Not dramatically different. But different enough to make me look twice. My lower belly — the stubborn pouch just above my scar — looked visibly less rounded. I pressed it gently. It felt different. Less dense. Less swollen.

"Am I imagining this?"

I continued.

By the end of week two, my husband sat across from me at dinner and put his fork down and looked at me for a moment in a way he had not looked at me in months.

He said — and this still makes me smile when I remember it:

"Glory... something is different about you. You look like yourself again."

By Day 21, I stood in front of that same mirror. I put on the same dress I had worn to that party where someone asked if I was pregnant again.

It was loose.

I am not going to tell you I had a flat stomach like I was 22. That is not what this is about. What I had was a body that had properly healed. A womb that felt clean and restored. Energy that had returned in a way I had genuinely stopped expecting. And a belly that had reduced so significantly that three women in my church asked me what I was doing differently in the same week.

I told the first woman. Then the second. Then the third. Then their friends started calling me. Then strangers were being sent my WhatsApp number.

I was explaining the same protocol over and over again every single week.

That is when I realised — this knowledge needed to be written down. Properly. Completely. In a format any woman could follow, anywhere in the world, without needing to find a Grandma Rose of her own.