No, you are not wrong for feeling irritated. You are five weeks into recovery from childbirth, feeding and pumping around the clock, and being asked all day about a pooja by people not offering to do any part of it. Irritation is the reasonable response.
The festival itself can almost always be marked at a fraction of its full scale — by someone else's hands, with you there for a few minutes, or with you not there at all. What your family cannot settle for you is which parts of your own tradition are genuinely required. Your elders or your priest can answer that, and the answer is usually smaller than everyone assumes.
Not medical advice — consult your obstetrician or your baby's paediatrician about your own recovery or your baby's health.
Five Weeks In, You Are Still Recovering
WHO, launching its first global postnatal care guidelines, describes the first six weeks after birth as a critical time for the mother's overall mental and physical recovery and wellbeing. You are inside that window. The festival is landing in the middle of a recognised recovery period, not in a gap in your calendar.
Nobody in the house has slept, and that is not a scheduling failure. The NHS notes that it is normal for new babies to only sleep for 2 to 3 hours at a time through the night, as well as during the day. Five weeks of that is cumulative — which is why the same question, asked a sixth time in a day, lands like an accusation.
Your baby wanting to be held constantly is not a fault either, hers or yours. The American Academy of Pediatrics says the best way to handle crying is to respond promptly during the first few months, and that you cannot spoil a young baby with attention. The crib is not a test you are failing.
The Irritation Is Fair
The AAP also acknowledges that crying can be tough to handle, especially if you are physically tired and mentally exhausted, and that it is normal to feel upset, frustrated, or even angry. That is your baseline before anyone picks up a phone.
Here is my own read, owned as judgement rather than finding: the question "has the pooja been done" is, most of the time, a request for someone else to do work. It is rarely a theological audit. The person asking is checking that the household's observance is intact, and assuming — without ever having thought about it — that you are the hands it runs through. That assumption is the changeable part.
The stakes are not only emotional. A 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis of 38 Indian studies, published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, found a pooled postpartum depression prevalence of 22% among Indian mothers, with lack of support from the husband and from the wider family network among the most commonly reported risk factors.
What Is Immovable, and What Is Habit
I am not a religious authority and will not tell you what your tradition requires. What I will say is that families tend to present the full production — cooking, cleaning, new clothes, guest list, timing, photographs — as one indivisible block, when it is really a bundle of separable things the same family already assembles differently from year to year.
So the useful question is not whether to mark the festival. It is which element of it actually needs your body in the room. Ask the person in your family with real standing — an elder, or the pandit your family calls — and ask it narrowly: can this be performed on our behalf, and does my presence form part of it. What comes back is often smaller than what the family group chat implied.
| The request | What it actually needs | Who can carry it instead of you |
|---|---|---|
| "Has the pooja been done?" | Someone to arrange it and be present | Your husband, your mother-in-law, an aunt, the pandit |
| "The festive meal must be at home" | Food, not your cooking | Ordered in, or cooked by the person asking |
| "You have to do the rituals yourself" | One narrow question to your elder or priest | Often someone can perform it in your name |
| "Everyone wants to see the baby that day" | A short visit and a photograph | A ten-minute window of your choosing |
Keep the Festival, Shed the Performance
Scaling down is not skipping, and wanting to mark the festival is not weakness. The versions that survive a newborn:
- Ten minutes, not the whole evening. Light the diya, stand for the aarti, take the prasad, and go back to your room before the photographs start. Ten minutes of real participation beats three hours of resentment.
- Let it be done in your name. Ask whether someone can perform your part on your behalf this year — the single most useful question to put to your elder or priest.
- Hand over the cooking entirely. Order the festive meal in, or let the relative pressing hardest cook it. Food is the easiest part of the bundle to outsource and the heaviest to carry.
- Set the visiting window yourself. Pick the slot in the day when your baby is at her easiest, name it, and hold everyone to it.
One part of this is not negotiable, and it helps to say so out loud rather than apologise for it. AAP guidance on respiratory illness in infants advises limiting your baby's exposure to crowds, other children and anyone with colds, and calling the doctor for a fever with a rectal temperature of 100.4°F or higher in a baby younger than 3 months. The AAP's guidance on cocooning a newborn explains why: newborns have higher chances of getting sick from viruses and bacteria than older children and adults, and relatives up to date on recommended vaccines are less likely to pass something on. A full house on festival day is exactly the crowd that guidance is about, and asking for a short, small, well-washed visit is a medical point rather than a social one.
What to Actually Send
Short, warm and final beats long and reasoned. Four messages you can send as they are:
To the relative asking repeatedly: "We're absolutely doing the pooja — Rahul is organising it this year. I'll be there for the aarti with the baby. I'm five weeks post-delivery and barely sleeping, so I'm not handling the arrangements. Thank you for understanding."
To the wider family group, once: "Quick update — the pooja is at home on Thursday evening, Mummy ji and Rahul are arranging everything, and we'd love you to come between 6 and 7. I'll be in and out: the baby feeds every couple of hours and I'm still recovering."
To your husband, when he says "couldn't you spare five minutes": "It isn't the five minutes. It's the twenty messages a day, the deciding, the remembering, and being the one everyone looks at if something's missing. Take the whole thing off my plate — decide it, arrange it, field the questions — and I'll walk in for five minutes and mean it."
To someone insisting you do it personally: "I want to get this right, so I've asked Papa ji and our pandit whether it can be done in my name this year. Whatever they say, we'll follow. Till then please take it up with them rather than with me."
None of these argue about whether the festival matters, because that is not the argument you are having. Each one names a person and hands them the task.
Your Mother-in-Law, Without Relitigating the Pregnancy
The absence through your pregnancy was real, and the brief appearance at thirty-nine weeks followed by frequent visits now is a pattern you are right to have noticed. This part is only my opinion: raising it in these particular weeks will cost you more than it returns, and it will land as an accusation whatever words you pick.
What is worth doing now is deciding what her visits are for. A visit that arrives with hands — holding the baby while you sleep, taking the kitchen for a day, running the festival — is worth a yes; a visit that arrives with commentary is worth shortening. The NHS advises that you could ask a relative or friend to come round and look after your baby while you have a nap, which is a perfectly legitimate use of a visiting mother-in-law. And if she wants a role in the festival, give her the pooja — it turns your obligation into her contribution.
When It Is More Than Tiredness
The NHS says that feeling down, anxious or irritable for a few days after your baby is born is very common — the baby blues — and that it usually goes away within 2 weeks of the birth, but if it continues, gets worse or you are struggling to cope, it is important to get help. NHS guidance on the 6-week postnatal check adds that looking after a baby can sometimes feel overwhelming, and that you need not struggle alone or put on a brave face — it is not a sign that you are a bad parent.
This is common rather than rare. WHO reports that worldwide about 13% of women who have just given birth experience a mental disorder, primarily depression, and that low social support generally increases the risk. For a route to help in India, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, in a 2025 Press Information Bureau update, states that the National Tele Mental Health Programme runs a toll-free number, 14416, offering free 24x7 tele-mental health counselling in 20 languages. Your obstetrician is a reasonable first conversation too.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it wrong to skip the pooja completely this year?
That is between you and your own conscience, and it is a far smaller transgression than your family is implying. If marking it matters to you, the scaled-down version lets you keep it.
My in-laws say the baby has to be present for the aarti. Is that true?
I cannot rule on that, and nor can the internet. Put it to your family's elder or your pandit narrowly, then follow what they say. In practice, families accommodate a sleeping newborn, a two-minute appearance, or a blessing given later far more readily than the first conversation suggests.
How do I stop the constant messages without a fight?
Answer once, in the family group, with the plan and the name of the person running it — then stop replying individually. One clear announcement removes the reason for twenty separate enquiries, and going quiet after it is not rudeness.
My husband says we should just do it to keep the peace.
Keeping the peace is a legitimate goal — the question is at whose cost it gets kept. Agree to the festival, and in the same breath hand him the whole job of producing it.
