Have you ever watched Game of Thrones, or better yet, read the ASOIAF books? One thing that has always stuck out to me is the way Martin crafts a very strong family-centric identity and motivational pattern for the noble women characters. Obviously the motives of actual people are infinitely more complex and diverse than fictional characters.

But we might think of the picture he creates of Cat and Cersei in particular as normative or prescriptive for the late Middle Ages. That "Family First" mindset is our frame of reference for understanding the lives and duties of new patrician and noble mothers.

"First" would first mean the new mother taking care of herself. For England, Barbara Harris describes a three-stage "lying-in" period that was expected (though again, actual practices would vary by case). First, the mother was literally lying, in her bed; after a period of two weeks or so, she was considered healed enough to sit upright; after another stretch of time, she could walk around but still only in the birthing/lying-in chamber. (Which she had prepared in advance to be special and awesome.)

All of this gave her body time to recover from the trauma of childbirth before resuming her regular household and court duties. And most particularly, before she was in the presence of men--especially her husband--again. (Incidentally, this is one reason that the "wet nurses so she could get pregnant again ASAP" thesis is just an excuse, NOT the whole story.)

Ideally, the newborn would be removed from the mother almost immediately and given over to the care of nurses. The point was not at all to break the emotional ties between mother and child--in fact, mothers and fathers alike were expected to be intimately emotionally involved with their children. In Jewish families (stepping away from "nobility or gentry" for a moment), for example, mothers could not participate in the circumcision ceremony for their newborn sons but provided a special clean diaper cloth for the ceremony.

Instead, the point was that any random woman could change a baby's diaper, any nursing woman could breastfeed an infant. Only the infant's mother could resume her duties at court and/or running the family and household, as swiftly as possible, thus doing far more to secure their long-term good fortune than dangling a rattle over a rocking cradle once a day.

Once women had returned to full participation in church and household, their Family First mentality pushed an expansion of their previous duties. Whether at court or traveling to visit family members and important acquaintances, mothers were to seek our potential marriage partners and wardship situations even while their offspring were toddlers.

Later on in their children's lives, Christian mothers are often attributed with or charged with taking control of securing their children an education--in the high Middle Ages, some queen mothers are even credited with teaching their princeling sons to read--but for sure, didactic literature expects mothers to teach their children Christian morality by example and in the basics of Christian devotion (the standard prayers, the Ten Commandments, &c).

Now, it's important to remember yet again that this whole picture is normative. There is some evidence, especially from Germany, that suggests more flexibility for new mothers in how much attention they paid to day-to-day details of infant care. A very, very popular devotional practice in 14C-15C was what Rosemary Hale calls imitatio Mariae: imitation of Mary.

This meant envisioning yourself swaddling Jesus in his swaddling clothes, laying him in a manger, laying him in bed, decorating his swaddling clothes, breastfeeding him. Some women even had dedicated Christ-child dolls to LARP with, assuming "LARP" was a meditative practice that was, at its heart, a prayer. The devotion was documented and encouraged through "Vitae Christi" books, lives of Christ, that were enormously popular with religious women, especially in Germany.

The point is obviously not that aristocratic women role-played nursing Christ, so they were familiar with nursing their own/each others' infants. Rather, it shows how medieval people understood that the daily tasks of motherhood created an exuberant emotional bond between people and their rec center (&c).

In some cases (Birgitta of Sweden, Katharina Tucher) we even witness aristocratic and/or wealthy mothers enacting the imitatio Mariae. They understood at an experiential level that what they were envisioning themselves doing with the Christ-child was, in fact, mothering.