Before you read on

If you have not slept at all and do not feel tired, if you are confused or things feel unreal, if you believe something about the baby that people around you say is not true, if you are seeing or hearing things others do not, or if you have thoughts of ending your life or of harming the baby, do not wait and do not finish this course. This can be postpartum psychosis. It is rare, it is not depression, it usually begins in the first two weeks, and it is a medical emergency. Someone should stay with you and the baby. Contact emergency services or your local crisis line now. The standard is assessment by a mental health service straight away, and in the UK the guidance names four hours.

Lesson 3 of 6

The debt you think you are carrying

A very large number of Muslim women come out of the first forty days believing they owe something. Prayers stacked up. A Ramadan half kept. A sense of having been shut out of the one thing that would have helped.

Listen to how it usually gets said. I was not allowed to pray. That is a sentence about a punishment. What actually happened was that an obligation was lifted off you by a ruling, in your favour, because of the state you were in.

This lesson is the fiqh, as plainly as it can be put. Where the scholars agree, it says so. Where they genuinely differ, it says that too and does not pick for you, because this is not a fatwa service.

The concession is a ruling, not a downgrade · Inshirah