Being a mommy is one of the toughest jobs in the world, and while it has numerous intangible perks let’s face it; the benefits package sucks. No medical, no paid vacation, and no workers’ compensation if you get injured on the job.

So we’ve been talking the past few days about how to take better care of yourself. It starts during pregnancy of course, but we’ve also looked at ways to make your movements more efficient (that is, healthier!) while you take care of your little one. But there’s more to it than that.

Making sure your bio-mechanics – the way your body does something – is not enough. You need to stay on top of your body’s physical health if it’s going to perform effectively when called upon. This means strengthening, and stretching, and eating right.

In an ideal world, you spent the nine months before your baby was born staying in shape, keeping your heart strong, keeping your muscles stretched, and learning good posture for nursing, holding an infant, and so forth.

But let’s say we’re too late for preventative measures.

No, let’s be more honest than that. Let’s say you spent the nine months pre-baby working 12-hour days like a maniac, convinced you will never be a part of the paid workforce again. You ran yourself ragged finding the exact right shade of red gingham crib sheets, walking through miles of malls despite your aching back and swollen ankles. You reveled in the fact that it was the one time in your life you could gain weight and no one would think worse of you, so you stopped caring if your hamstrings were both strong and supple; who would notice under that pregnancy schmata? At the end of the day, faced with the choice of hitting the gym for 50 laps in the pool or hitting the couch for 50 re-runs of Friends, guess which one won out. When you dragged yourself home at 10 o’clock at night, the last thing you wanted to do was spend twenty minutes stretching. And Kegels? Frankly, you never could figure them out and they don’t seem to matter much since you’re peeing every 20 minutes anyway.

Stop me if this sounds familiar.

My girlfriend Abby recently went through a rough few weeks; baby Josh hit a point where he had to be walked and rocked to go to sleep, sometimes for over an hour. At four months old, Josh seemed too young to his parents for sleep training, so Abby toughed it out, carrying him around until he finally went to sleep.

Unfortunately for Abby’s back, Josh is a little sumo wrestler so it was no surprise that Abby woke up one morning immobilized with back pain. The pain quickly went from excruciating to near-unbearable and she was at a loss as to how to put one foot in front of the other, much less care for a newborn and a toddler.

Around that same time, we had Maddie sleeping in our room in a pack-n-play while her room was under construction. The change in her routine coupled with a developmental spurt ruined her night sleep patterns and she began waking several times a night, so I spent almost a week bending all the way over to the floor and dead-lifting 16 pounds up. Again – no surprise that I, too, began feeling back pain.

Mommies everywhere have to deal with a near-impossible set of circumstances: recovering from either major surgery (cesarean) or a major physical marathon (labor), dealing with hormonal surges as some hormones leave and new ones come in, learning a new physical action (nursing) and doing it over and over again, picking a baby up out of his crib and putting him down dozens of times a day, walking a teething baby, and so on and so on and so on. All this takes its toll on our bodies, which are still reeling from the “how the heck do I function with all this relaxin and 40 extra pounds!” thing. Being a mommy is an incredibly physical job; if it were any job in the workforce, we’d have hundreds of hours of training before ever being put “behind the wheel”. But it’s not, so it’s sink-or-swim, with too many mommies perilously close to drowning.

When Madeleine was a newborn, she communicated by crying. A lot. Which made me cry.

A lot.

I felt so frustrated not being able to figure out what she needed, what she wanted, and give it to her. I couldn’t wait for the day when she’d be able to let me in on what was going on in her world.

One of the first signs we got that our conversations with her weren’t a one-way street was her name recognition. When she started turning her head towards someone who said her name, I was so proud I thought I’d burst. To see the understanding in her eyes made me feel that we were having, if not a conversation, at least a moment of acknowledgement.

From there, she moved to being able to clearly communicate her desires, but in her own language. She’d arch her back to be put down, reach for the floor to crawl, lean out of your arms to get to another person. She had no interest in meeting us on our level; Maddie was interested purely in making her wants known.