Equipped with a screaming 5-week-old baby and an apprehensive husband, I found myself 11 floors above a Wegmans in the Dulles-ward direction of Washington, D.C.’s suburbs in an upper midtier hotel looming over the sort of miniature golf course they market to single adults. I was here for a “postpartum retreat,” a program designed to aid the recovery of new mothers and fathers and, if you have them, dogs, located in the sinister mall town of Tysons Corner, Virginia. 

By now, I had almost entirely written off the stay as a waste of time. My baby was 5 weeks old, and my husband and I, we felt, had already mastered parenting and spent the first few weeks smugly asking each other, “What, this is supposed to be hard?” Our baby slept soundly and only woke up to eat or have her diaper changed. Then, as if she knew she was going to a nearly thousand-dollar-a-night baby retreat and wanted to get the most bang for her buck, 12 hours before check-in, she woke up and screamed, purple-faced, for 12 straight hours. 

After some coordination beforehand regarding what we wanted for dinner and what type of massages we wanted, Julia Kim, the founder and CEO of SANU, met the three of us and showed us to our suite. By now, my daughter, Daphne, was asleep, worn out from her marathon crying session and perhaps wanting to make a good first impression on the team of doulas ready to wait on her tiny hand and tiny foot. I was shown to a lounge chair, and my socks were removed, and my feet were submerged in a lavender bath. Julia began massaging them, looking for any signs of postpartum swelling. The majority of SANU’s clientele come to the retreat straight from giving birth, exiting the fluorescent hue of hospital lights and being poked and prodded, and walking straight into a spa.

SANU is still in its infancy, having opened its doors in January 2024, but it feels seamless. “The idea took about 2 1/2 years of development,” Julia told me, after she came up with it after going back to college, at Georgetown, during the pandemic. There, she realized there was a need, and a business case, for giving American women something she had lacked but not found when she’d had a baby. “There was a moment when I was in the hospital after labor and delivery, when I was wheeled up to the hospital room that I was to remain in until it was time to be discharged, that I found that I was alone with my new baby but had no idea what to do with him. The lack of hands-on experience and learning in caring for my baby and myself, coupled with unexpected pain and a sudden shift of focus solely to the baby, left me feeling isolated and inadequate.” 

So, after a couple of years of brainstorming, Julia came up with SANU. The name is a derivation of the word for postpartum in Korean, “sanhu.” “When saying the word in Korean, you barely pronounce the ‘h,’” Julia tells me. “Our name is meant to pay respect to the tradition of sanhu-joriwon, and I have heard some of my Korean friends use the word like a verb, ‘Where are you going to sanhu?’” 

Around the world, this level of postpartum care is expected. Parents often enter sanhu straight from the hospital and stay for up to one month. Even in Britain, where I’m from, after giving birth, you are assigned a health worker who comes to your house to check on the baby, aside from pediatrician care, and teach you what to do. In the first days of infancy, it’s daily visits, and this support continues until the child’s fifth birthday. Here, this level of involvement and postpartum care is seen as luxurious, excessive, or maybe invasive. Why expect help when you can just about struggle through it? And while you’re at it, you count down how many weeks it is until you’re back in the office. 

While SANU is one of just a few of its kind in this country, the experience is similar to that of its Korean counterparts. You are expected — encouraged — to ask for help, day or night, and anything else that will aid your physical and mental recovery. Bowls of Korean porridge (and American food, too, but the Korean porridge was the best) and herbal tea were brought to us on trays, with the option not to leave our bed. Doulas would text me, asking if I wanted to put my baby in the nursery overnight to get a full night’s sleep. A mental health screening and postpartum OB-GYN visit were set up for me weeks beforehand, and a date night was organized for my husband and me to eat Wagyu steak. One night when Daphne went into the nursery, still screaming — she was now on a 48-hour streak — specialists were called in to try to work out what was wrong with her, and a house call pediatrician visit and infant chiropractor was set up for the next morning. In the meantime, doulas sang songs and rocked her throughout the night while us parents had our first full night of sleep in six weeks. 

The level of luxury at postpartum retreats makes Americans uncomfortable. Most new mothers, particularly ones who are active online, remark that they could never hand their baby off to strangers. They see their struggles as admirable, often competing with each other about just how much they suffered as if it were a point of pride. My British friends would offer advice about how to make the first three months of the newborn trenches bearable, saying things such as, “The most important thing is to have happy parents, even if it means leaving the baby crying for a few minutes to take a minute for yourselves.” My American friends, on the other hand, would remark on how they didn’t leave the house for months on end for fear they would upset their baby’s routine. When it came to breastfeeding and how I opted not to do it, they would say things such as, “What, you didn’t even try?” 

SANU’s philosophy is no judgment. When I told one of the doulas that I had barely bathed my 6-week-old, upon the advice of older mothers and my midwives, the only reply was, “Would you like us to show you how?” There were no remarks or eye rolls at the thousand questions we would ask at the classes we attended, such as “Infant CPR” and “Baby’s first illness.” When they didn’t have a perfect answer or solution (for example, to a question about infant car seat safety), they followed up after the visit to let us know they’d found one, and now, they have a class on that, too. 

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We had, to be honest, come for the free Wagyu and the massages and the week of nights with no wakeups. (Maybe it makes me a bad mother to use little Daphne, and a job as a magazine writer, as a ticket that way. That writers review things just for the ticket is one of the dirty and halfway open secrets of journalism anyway, so you might as well be in on it.) My husband and I both left, however, genuinely surprised by how strongly we felt that SANU was not a mere indulgence that only someone getting a free ride, or someone with stupid amounts of money, should think about going to. 

As I write this, it’s over a month later, and we’re still talking about SANU, but it’s not the (very firm) massages we’re bringing up. It’s the diagnosis of “silent reflux” we got dealt with weeks before we might have, and the sleep training habits we built successfully because we had even a few days of support. Infancy is like a rocket, I think, in that little changes to the direction it takes off in can leave it millions of miles off course later on, so there’s a short window when little things matter a lot. If you invest in happy, capable parents who feel good and confident in how to solve the problems they’re facing as they set off into the unknown, you’re going to see big payoffs. Which is all to say that at the exquisitely thoughtfully run SANU, this cynic stopped scoffing at the cost, the word “doula,” and the idea that new parents don’t need more than you think and probably more than they think, and she became an earnest postpartum retreat believer.

Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.