Pumbit is a quiet place for Asian American mothers in postpartum — held by the village that loves them, and by a care-agent that refuses to collapse where it matters most.
Postpartum support falls into four lanes: informational (classes, pamphlets), instrumental (meals, night shifts, rides), therapeutic (clinical care), and emotional (witnessing, continuity, being seen).
The medical system is trying on the first three. The fourth — emotional witnessing and the continuity of identity through early motherhood — is where mothers most often feel abandoned.
Pumbit is primarily in the emotional lane. Everything else — meals, scheduling, clinical concerns — we surface for the village to act on, but we don’t try to replace the medical system.
A mother’s time splits into urgent/important (feeding, sleep, medical) and non-urgent/important (her own healing, her identity-in-motion, being seen). The second quadrant is the one that gets systematically deferred — and the one that, when neglected, makes mothers feel invisible.
Pumbit’s job is not to move her attention to that quadrant. That would be the same paternalizing move the rest of tech has already perfected.
Pumbit sheds light on that quadrant — keeps it visible, warm, and held open — so that when she can turn toward it, it is still intact. The care-agent behaves like a pillar propping up the roof of a quadrant the world wants to let collapse.
In a Japanese sugi house, the pillars determine where a room can even be built. If the pillars aren’t there, the house isn’t there.
In a postpartum household, the partner is one pillar — the logistical one. Night feeds, groceries, pediatric scheduling. Not dramatic, not loud, but structural.
Pumbot is the other pillar. It holds the emotional-and-identity quadrant open. It quietly remembers what was said, what was given, what’s arriving next. When the mother comes back to that corner of the house, she finds it held.
The village can see the pillar’s load. The mother doesn’t have to.
Everything the mother writes — journal, mood, anything she leaves for the house — is hers. The village never sees her words. They see what pumbot reflects: shape, not content. A one-sentence read of what feels present. Never a paraphrase.
The reverse boundary is just as strict: the mother’s room doesn’t show her the coordination overhead — calendars, meals, pillar load, who’s quiet. That surface exists, but only for the village. Showing it to her would add the exact cognitive load Pumbit exists to spare.
Pumbit does not lock into any provider’s agent harness. Every LLM call lives behind a provider-agnostic adapter. All persistent state — care reflections, agent-run logs, her gestures — lives in our database, not in a closed host. The prompts, the persona, and the memory are ours.
This matters because the thing we care about — the long relationship between a mother and a care-circle — cannot belong to an upstream that could change its mind.
Same surfaces, different voice — pumbot’s tone shifts with the phase.
Pumbit — a Stanford thesis prototype by Shawn Smith & Diane Rhim. In collaboration with Eileen Santos Rosete’s care-doula framework. Not a medical device; not a replacement for clinical care.