Check on the Mom, Not the Baby

The first time Melanie Kaplan and I ever spoke, she was in the Taco Bell drive-through. It was a video call. She was bracing for me to be offended. I thought it was one of the funniest, most honest first impressions anyone has ever made on me, and we have been sending each other photos of ourselves working from our cars ever since. That is the actual texture of building a company while raising little kids. Lunch shoved in your face in a parking lot, laptop balanced on the steering wheel, a meeting starting in four minutes.

So when Melanie came on the podcast the week she launched oPPal, I knew we were going to go somewhere real - but I did not know how far.

When her first daughter was four months old, Melanie was weaning from breastfeeding. Her doctor’s office changed her birth control at the same time. Her hormonal system crashed. She woke up one morning, sat on the kitchen floor in front of her husband, and said, “I have to leave.” She drove toward the ocean and did not return home for four nights.

Two years later she found a video she had forgotten she made during those days, at a waterfall, speaking to her infant daughter. In it she says, “I can’t take care of you if I can’t take care of myself.” She posted it. She woke up to hundreds of messages from women telling her their own stories. That morning she decided to build something. Last week, oPPal launched nationally: a peer support platform that matches new and expecting moms with experienced moms who are trained, committed, and at least one year out from their own first year.

Below is what I took from our conversation. I have three kids - I thought I knew the postpartum territory. Melanie reframed almost all of it for me when it comes to PPD.

Nobody told Melanie that weaning from breastfeeding triggers a massive hormonal drop. Nobody told me either, and I have done this three times. When her doctor finally connected the dots, including the birth control error, Melanie described the relief of it: “It normalized it for me. I felt like, okay, there’s a reason this is happening.”

That relief is a form of care. So much of postpartum suffering gets worse because a woman believes she is uniquely broken, when what is actually happening is biology plus a system that never explained itself to her. Information, delivered at the right moment, is support.

When Melanie shared what she was going through in real time, women she had not spoken to in years offered to come to her house. Friends with their own babies at home spent full days with her. And what she remembers is what they did not do: “They weren’t telling me what to do. They were just present.”

I told Melanie a story on this episode I had never told publicly. With my first, I would get up in the middle of the night to feed the baby, deep in a hormone crash I had no name for. Each night my husband would get up too, dragged a kitchen chair into the nursery, and put it next to mine. I asked what he was doing. He said, “I’m just sitting with you.” He had no idea how to fix it. He sat down anyway. I think about that often, and tearing up as I’m typing this – men have their own version of postpartum recovery too.

We are trained, especially those of us who came up through marketing and PR, to show up with a deliverable. Postpartum support asks for something harder. A chair, pulled next to hers.

This is the rule at the center of oPPal’s training, and it is the one that made me stop and reread my own behavior. Every Big oPPal (women who have been mothers for at least a year) is taught that every check-in must open with a question about the mother. Melanie put it plainly: everybody becomes hyper focused on the baby, and “the mom gets completely left behind.”

She lived it. A house full of loving family, everyone rushing to the bassinet, and Melanie standing there thinking, “hello, hi, just birthed her, can somebody care about me?” Since we recorded, I have changed how I text new moms in my life. One question, about her, before anything about the baby. It costs nothing and it lands differently than a hundred “how’s the little one!” messages.

Before building anything, Melanie surveyed hundreds of moms. Her last question asked whether they would be willing to mentor a new mom. Over 80 percent said yes or maybe. Three hundred responses in 48 hours, spread across mom group chats she never touched.

Melanie then held a brainstorming night with about 40 women in her living room. Her husband, home early from a flight, raised his hand from the staircase and asked why a mom would show up for another mom without an incentive. Melanie has video of the room turning toward him. The answer they gave him: because we just will.

She said it best herself: “Nobody else is coming to save us but ourselves. We will save each other.“ The women applying to be Bigs wrote her essays. Nobody asked what was in it for them. In twenty years of corporate life I never once saw people volunteer their expertise, their weekends, and their whiteboards for free. I have seen it constantly since starting The Breadwinners, and Melanie has seen it building oPPal. When you build the thing women actually need, the labor shows up before the business model does.

Melanie kept seeing articles claiming everybody wants a village but nobody wants to be a villager. It made her mad. Her answer: “People want to be villagers, but we don’t live in a traditional village.” So she built one you can join from anywhere.

And she defined success differently: A Big oPPal is not there to hand down advice, recommend a sleep training method, or add to the noise of five thousand apps and books. She is a compass. Success is the moment the new mom can make a decision, move on, and trust her own instincts. Melanie again: “The moment I really felt confident as a mom was when I could make a decision and move on and trust that I was making the right decision.“

That is the whole philosophy of this community in one sentence. We do not need more experts telling mothers what to do. We need women a little further down the path, reaching back.

Melanie’s three-and-a-half-year-old has an answer when you ask what her mom does all day: “Mommy helps the other mommies.“

I would take that over any title I have ever held.

Listen to the full conversation with Melanie Kaplan wherever you get your podcasts, and find oPPal at myoppal.com or @myoppal on Instagram. If you are pregnant or in your first year postpartum, you can sign up as a Little oPPal. If you are a year or more out and you remember, you can be someone’s Big oPPal.

And a note, because this episode covers real mental health struggle: if you are in it right now, Postpartum Support International is at postpartum.net. You are not broken and you are not alone. The reality, as Melanie says, is all women get through this with help from each other.

As always, thanks for being here,

Alexis

We go deep on all of it, the emotional complexity of building a life worth living, in The Breadwinners community.

Learn more: www.thebreadwinners.co

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