The Postpartum Crisis Nobody Is Talking About with Esther Park

After my first pregnancy, I followed Taiwanese postpartum confinement practices for 40 days — herbs, cooked meals, no leaving the house, a night nurse living with us. My milk came in immediately. I stopped bleeding in three weeks. I felt held. After my second pregnancy, I had none of that. COVID meant no in-person support, no family, no village. I took no maternity leave. Six months later, I got shingles. At 30-something. All over my hand. Studies now show it takes up to a year for a mother to fully recover from birth. American mothers get six weeks of leave — if they're lucky. This week on Mirror Mirror, I sit down with Esther Park, founder of Amma and Co. — a postpartum care retreat based at the Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach in Orange County, modeled after the Korean postpartum retreat centers where 85% of Korean mothers spend one to two months after giving birth. Esther grew up in Seoul, competed on Korea's version of American Idol at 18, worked at L'Oréal, and went to business school during COVID before founding the first postpartum retreat on the West Coast. We talk about why Eastern cultures treat postpartum as a sacred recovery period while Western culture tells women to bounce back, what the research actually says about how long recovery takes, and what it looks like when a mother is truly supported from the start.