Is This Luxury Retreat The Future Of Postpartum Care?

Pregnant people in Canada know the drill: ultrasounds, doctors appointments and check-ups fill the calendar, meticulously scheduled at regular intervals with your family doctor, ob-gyn or midwife. When you finish one appointment, your next is booked—a tight, regimented routine aimed at providing intense care for your unborn babe.  

But once that baby is born, it’s crickets—at least when it comes to maternal health. If you saw a family doctor or an ob-gyn during your pregnancy, the next appointment may be six weeks after you give birth. And a lot can happen in six weeks.

“The doctors basically say, ‘Here’s your baby, okay bye, good luck!’” says Ashley Thomassen, a new mom in Etobicoke, Ont. “You’re very much on your own.”

Thomassen had heard the “horror stories” of early motherhood—trying to keep a new human alive on little sleep, little food and high anxiety—and wanted something better. “What was giving me the most anxiety was not having baby expertise,” she says. “My mom is wonderful, but she hadn’t taken care of a baby in 35 years.” With a planned C-section ahead of her, she started googling and saw a confusing hodgepodge of resources and services: lactation consultants, doulas, night nannies. 

“I felt like this would be so much organizing for me to do, having just had a baby,” she says. “It just felt overwhelming.”

Instead, Thomassen opted for two weeks at Alma Care, a new postpartum retreat.

The first of its kind in the country, the retreat consists of 10 rooms, a nursery and a parent lounge located within a hotel in midtown Toronto and opened last November promising a “comfortable and completely outfitted accommodation for you to focus on recovery.” At a staggering $900 a night, two weeks at Alma Care was financially trying for Thomassen. But she says she prioritized her recovery and made compromises in order to afford it (she opted not to have a babymoon, and sourced all of her baby gear second-hand). 

To anyone who has given birth and experienced the common postpartum feelings of anxiety, loneliness and confusion, the offerings at Alma Care sound like a dream: Text a postnatal nurse or lactation consultant and they’ll be at your door. Finish a feed and, if you want, a nurse will take the baby so you can nap. Enjoy a homemade frittata with fresh fruit while baby sleeps. Use hospital-grade breast pumps at your bedside and don’t fret about sterilizing parts or bottle clean-up—it’s all taken care of.  

“I just remember shuffling through the lobby, barely able to move from my C-section, and then we got to the room," Thomassen recalls. “And the care provider started showing me all of these postpartum products set up just for me—this is your fridge for milk storage, these are all of your diapers, and here is your top of the line skincare. The skincare made me just burst into tears.”

With all of her wants and needs at her fingertips, Thomassen describes her first days and weeks of motherhood as something most new moms don’t experience: “I was rested, I was supported. Each day was the best day of my life.”  

While little research has been done on the experience of postpartum Canadian women, a 2021 study of Maritime mothers found one in five new moms were unsatisfied with their care, citing challenges in booking timely appointments, experiencing gaps in follow-up visits and having unsatisfactory assessments for their own recovery. And in a national public health survey seeking to understand Canadian maternal experiences—which was published in 2009, and then never repeated—42.3 percent of new moms reported having “a great deal of a problem” with at least one postpartum health issue during the first three months after birth.

Intense maternal rest and support after birth is a concept largely unheard of in Canada, but common in Eastern cultures. Hana McConville, Alma Care’s co-founder, was inspired to create the retreat after “sitting the month”—a cultural norm in her Chinese family, where new mothers rest and recover for around 30 days postpartum, hiring a “confinement nanny” to take care of her following the births of both her babies. 

“All day long she would be cooking for me, and then also bringing me various broths and teas, depending on what I needed,” McConville says. “She would look at my milk, or if my baby was gassy, she would do a different broth or a different tea for me.”

McConville says finding this sort of support, common in generational homes and postpartum retreats in China, was difficult in Toronto, but it was “so important” for her success as a mom. “Mothers get told that you’ll be fine, your intuition will take over,” she says.“Then you get sent home with your baby and feel like a bad mom when you don’t know what to do intuitively.” 

But why set the cost of receiving excellent, 24/7 care for moms so high and out of reach for so many? 

“We’re not making big bucks,” McConville says bluntly about her new business, despite the hefty price tag. She adds that the price to stay is largely just what it costs to provide top-notch care for everything a mom truly needs after birth. 

Perhaps the cost emphasizes the disconnect between the dream world of Alma Care and the reality of most new moms in Canada: If the physical and mental work of giving birth is worthy of intense support, why don’t we provide it as an integral part of our subsidized health care?   

Maybe we need to look to the Netherlands, where a kraamzorg, a government-provided maternity caregiver, visits daily during the week after birth to help with everything from breastfeeding to laundry and meal preparation. Or to South Korea, where 80 percent of new moms check in to sanhujoris, postpartum retreats that run a gamut of services from private luxury to 19 publicly funded centres across the country.  

Meanwhile in Canada, the federal government offers no standardized, structured postpartum care, despite releasing guidelines last year on postpartum health that not-so-helpfully advises new mothers to “eat well, get enough rest, take breaks and do something fun or relaxing.” 

“There’s a whole societal shift that needs to happen about women’s health,” says McConville. “It’s not recognized that birth is a trauma,” adding that a postpartum retreat should be looked at as a form of rehabilitation. Alma is now adding in-home services—where Alma’s doulas or postpartum nurses will visit for $45 per hour in a 20-hour package. She hopes one day postpartum care will be a standard health benefit, or even covered by government healthcare. 

For Thomassen, the extreme cost was not ideal, but worth every penny. Her seven-week-old, Lena, is thriving. “And to be quite honest, I’m thriving—I attribute that to the early days, and the choice I made in my postpartum care.”