The calendar on the fridge is full of other people’s health. The six-week checks, the immunisations, the dentist for the eight year old, the optometrist because someone is squinting at the whiteboard. Somewhere on that calendar, almost never, is you.
Booking everyone else in and quietly leaving yourself off the list is one of the most common habits of motherhood. It is also one of the few genuinely worth breaking. Here are the appointments that slide the furthest, and why they deserve a spot on the fridge.
The five-yearly test four in ten of us are behind on
Cervical screening replaced the old two-yearly Pap smear with a five-yearly test, and it is a better one. Yet only around 62% of eligible Australian women are up to date, and the gap matters: more than 70% of the roughly 1,000 cervical cancers diagnosed in Australia each year occur in women who were never screened or were overdue.
If you cannot remember when your last one was, that is your answer. Self-collection is now an option for most women, which removes the part many of us were quietly avoiding. Cancer Council Australia has a plain-English guide to how the renewed program works.
The skin check, in the melanoma capital of the world
Australia has the highest melanoma rates on earth, and mums are often the family’s sunscreen enforcer while never having their own skin mapped. A full skin check is quick, painless and usually bulk-billed or close to it.
Between checks, the habit that actually saves lives is knowing your own skin. SunSmart recommends checking every three months for spots that are new, changing or just look different from their neighbours.
The tiredness that deserves a blood test
Every parent of young children is exhausted, so real, treatable causes of fatigue get waved away for years. They should not be. Up to 64% of new mothers experience significant postpartum fatigue, and up to half of women in developed countries develop some degree of postpartum anaemia, with iron deficiency a direct and very fixable driver of that flattened, foggy feeling.
Thyroid changes after birth are common too, and both show up on a simple blood panel. If you are still running on empty months or years down the track, healthdirect has a useful overview of iron deficiency worth reading before you see your GP. The tiredness is not a character flaw to push through. It is a test to book.
The mental health check-in you keep deferring
Postnatal depression affects around one in seven Australian mothers, and it rarely announces itself. Far more often it hides behind I’m just tired, or I’m fine, it’s just a phase. Anxiety is even more common, and just as good at disguising itself as normal mum life.
Feeling flat, anxious, joyless or unlike yourself for weeks on end is not the price of admission to parenthood. PANDA runs a free national helpline for exactly this conversation, and your GP can do a proper mental health check in one ordinary appointment.
The pelvic floor physio nobody mentioned at the six-week check
Here is a statistic that deserves to be shouted across every mothers’ group: according to the Continence Foundation of Australia, one in three women who have had a baby experience urinary incontinence. One in three. Yet most of us were waved out of the six-week check with a pamphlet and have treated leaking when we laugh, run or sneeze as a permanent souvenir of childbirth ever since.
It is common, but it is not something you simply have to live with. Pelvic floor physiotherapy has strong evidence behind it, works years after the birth, not just months, and no longer needs a referral in most cases. Of every appointment on this list, this is the one most likely to change your daily quality of life.
The body conversation you have privately written off
Then there is the concern that has nagged for a year and never quite makes it to the top of the list, because it never feels urgent enough to bump someone else. For a lot of women, that is their body after babies.
Research following women to one year after birth found around three quarters were heavier than before pregnancy, and roughly a quarter were holding onto five kilograms or more. For most women this settles with time, sleep and movement returning. For some, it becomes a genuine and persistent health issue rather than a cosmetic one, and that distinction matters, because the medical options have widened considerably in the last few years. Medically supervised approaches, including newer prescription medicines such as Wegovy, are now a reasonable thing to raise with your GP rather than something to keep managing alone with another diet. They are not for everyone: the eligibility criteria in Australia generally require a BMI of 30 or higher, or 27 with a weight-related health condition.
The point is not that anyone needs fixing. It is that a nagging health concern deserves a professional conversation, not a permanent spot on the later list.
The dentist you keep giving away
Somehow the kids’ check-ups happen twice a year and yours have not happened since before the youngest was born. Dental problems are cheapest and least painful when they are caught early, and pregnancy itself is rough on teeth and gums. If the family budget only stretches so far, it stretches further than zero visits.
The GP who only ever sees you sick
Most mums have a GP relationship that consists entirely of crisis visits: the child’s ear infection, the script that ran out, the infection that would not shift. What almost none of us book is the appointment where nothing is wrong, the general check-up where blood pressure, screening due dates, family history and the accumulating little concerns all get looked at together.
A yearly women’s health check is the single most efficient appointment on this list, because it is where every other item gets noticed, ordered and followed up. If it has been more than a year since a doctor looked at your health as a whole rather than a symptom in isolation, that is the one to book first.
One appointment this week
None of this needs a wellness overhaul, or hours you do not have. It needs one small act of administration: putting a single appointment for yourself into the calendar the way you would for anyone else in the house.
Book the screening. Ask for the iron and thyroid panel if the tiredness will not lift. Say the honest thing to your GP about how you are actually coping. You are, in the most literal sense, the infrastructure the household runs on. Infrastructure gets maintained on schedule, not when it finally breaks.
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