Podcast: Matresence with Guest, Zoe Blaskey
Matresence with Guest, Zoe Blaskey
Season 3, Episode 5
Matresence is the period of growth and transition in the early years in becoming a mother. Whilst turmoil and identity shifts are expected in 'adolescence', it's only recently that such shifts have been recognised and validated in our becoming of a mother too.
In this episode I am joined by Zoe Blaskey, transformational coach, founder of Motherkind and host of The Motherkind Podcast.
In this episode, Zoe and I explore:
What is matresence, what causes it and how long does it last?
What can we do to support ourselves through these enormous shifts in identity?
Is there anything that we can do in preparation, before becoming a mother?
Worth listening to whether you're pregnant and this period of your life is fast approaching, or you're right in the throes of it, with young children at home.
TRANSCRIPT
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We've been making some big shifts to my two-year-old's bedtime here this month and have been listening to the beautiful and relaxing new album from this week's sponsor, The Night Owl Sings Nursery Rhymes.
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Let's go.
Hi everybody.
Welcome back to The Birth Ed Podcast.
Today, I am delighted to be joined by Zoe Blaskey.
Zoe is a transformational coach and the founder of Motherkind.
Through Motherkind, Zoe coaches mothers of all backgrounds, from CEOs to full-time mums on how to navigate the huge challenges of modern motherhood with more clarity, confidence and connection.
Zoe hosts one of my favourite podcasts, The Motherkind Podcast, which is one of the UK's top family podcasts and speaks every week to world-leading experts on a range of topics from self-care to mental health, career, nutrition, parenting.
To date, the podcast has been downloaded, unbelievably, over 3 million times, which is absolutely incredible.
Past guests include Dr.
Becky Kennedy, Glennon Doyle, Dr.
Gabor Mate and Dr.
Rangan Chatterjee.
I would really, really, if you're enjoying the BirthEd podcast, I would really recommend as almost like your next step into motherhood, The Motherkind Podcast is absolutely brilliant as you kind of move all the way through from those very early days, right through to parenting, you know, teens, adults probably.
Zoe's been featured in Red, The Times, Psychologies, Goop, Sheer Lux and The Evening Standard.
The Telegraph celebrated the podcast as the antidote to the toxic perfectionism of modern motherhood.
Zoe was personally asked by Arianna Huffington to write on modern motherhood for her global wellbeing platform, Thrive.
And Zoe also has two daughters and lives with her husband Guy in Dorset.
So Zoe, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me.
So today, Zoe and I are gonna be chatting a little bit about something that you may or may not have heard of.
It certainly wasn't a word floating around anywhere mainstream when I first became a mum to my now eldest, who is nearly seven.
But I think it slowly seems to be kind of seeping into the language of modern motherhood.
And it is something called matresence.
So Zoe, I'm gonna hand over to you for this one.
Can you, if you can, in a nutshell, explain to us what we mean by matresence?
Yeah, well, the simplest definition, because it was just added to the dictionary in 2019.
So that is how, in a way new, but in a way not new, which I'll describe.
But the dictionary definition that was added just a few years ago is the developmental process of becoming a mother.
So if we think about adolescence, and hopefully everyone listening will know that word, it brings up feelings of change and transition and a rocky time as we go from teens into our adulthood is adolescence.
We expect those teenagers to be hormonal.
We expect them to have body changes.
We expect them to question their identity.
We expect them to just have quite bumpy time.
Hopefully, I know societally that generally, we support our teens through that, and hopefully, we have family and friends that support us through that.
Well, matresence is exactly the same process.
It's an anthropological term just like adolescence is, that means the becoming of a mother.
When I first discovered that word, matresence and understood, becoming a mother is meant to be a bumpy time.
It is meant to be a time when everything changes, when you question everything, when your identity changes, when your hormones change, your body changes, your brain actually changes.
It just made my shoulders drop about 10 inches and think, oh my gosh, thank goodness, there is nothing wrong with me.
I wasn't doing it wrong.
I was going through my matresence.
And it's just that no one told me that.
I didn't know that word.
So I feel really passionately about sharing it because every single mother that I speak to, and father actually, they go through, Patresence, when I speak to them about that, I do, it's often the same reaction, which is a deep breath out, okay, there's a word for it.
There is a word for it.
And there's nothing wrong with you and you're not doing it wrong.
It is meant to be a bumpy road.
Yeah.
And something that you just touched on there when you were explaining is that it isn't just the circumstantial change of now you have a baby.
It's not just a family change of there being another person in the family, but physical biological changes are happening within the brain itself, aren't they?
Yeah.
So there's been some amazing work done on this in very recent years.
And all these episodes are on The Motherkind Podcast, so you can dive in.
But Chelsea Conaboy is a investigative scientist journalist who did a whole book called The Mother Brain.
And she said, you know, essentially we're remade by parenthood.
It changes our brain function and it changes our physical and our mental health over the remainder of our life.
It's not that we go back.
We don't go back to our pre-motherhood self.
And actually the biggest upgrade that the brain goes through outside being a fetus is in motherhood.
So the brain changes in pregnancy and is completely rewired in the first six months.
So, you know, there's so much.
It's absolutely fascinating to really understand how much we are changed on every level by parenthood and motherhood.
And it's such a swift change, isn't it?
I think if you're listening and you're pregnant, you're like, yeah, I'm already randomly forgetting things or those kind of early months.
It's almost noticeable in yourself in how quickly those shifts happen.
Yeah, and in the hormonal changes.
So your oestrogen doubles in the first trimester, which is just unbelievable, like doubling.
And then changes again in the postnatal period.
So, you know, it's our brain changes and our hormones change.
And as you say, our life circumstances change.
You know, it's just a huge time of change, and we do not talk about that enough.
And we definitely don't support new parents and new mothers through it enough.
Absolutely, like not even, I mean, it's barely even acknowledged, isn't it?
I think the expectation is that you just carry on.
And I think sometimes we have that expectation of ourselves, you know, that there's that, that sort of, sometimes that thought of like, I'll just have a baby and I'll slot into my life as I exist right now, and there is, because we don't have these conversations, there is no understanding that actually your life is going to look completely different, not just because you have a child, but because your brain has actually changed.
So, in what ways then, I mean, probably a million different ways, but in what ways does this experience of matresence, how is this at odds with how many people in kind of modern Western culture actually experience, particularly kind of early motherhood, the first year of parenting?
Yeah, I think the dominant message has been around this bounce back idea, this bounce back culture, and, you know, it's fascinating to look at what that word actually means, to bounce back means to recover quickly from a setback and, you know, becoming a mother, whether it's for the first time or the fifth time, it doesn't matter, it is not a setback, it is not something that you have to recover from, you know, it's not like when you break your leg and you have to bounce back from breaking your leg and I need to recover from that setback, no, having a baby and becoming a mother, however you do that, you know, whether it's biologically, through surrogacy, through adoption, it doesn't matter, it is not a setback that you have to recover from.
So I, you know, I talk about growing forwards, not bouncing back, because we know that when we resist something, that is what creates a lot of the stress.
So when we resist these changes that we can't actually do anything about, by the way, you can't, you can't not make this impact you.
So when we resist the change, that is what creates all of the stress.
When we have this focus on, I just want to get back to the old me and you hear mothers talking about that.
And it would probably be more popular, right?
It would probably make, you know, chatting at the nursery and the school gates easier for me if I believed in that trope.
But I absolutely don't.
You can't go back.
What are you going back to?
You have been changed by motherhood.
You know, many women and parents have been through huge, huge challenges to get to the point of birthing that baby or having that baby in your arms.
You know, maybe multiple rounds of IVF, maybe losses, maybe, you know, huge changes in their relationships.
You know, it's it's it's does it such a disservice to think I just have to get back.
And it makes sense why, you know, for our generation of mothers, why that is so ingrained in us, because it was only 20 years ago that, you know, Victoria Beckham Posh Spice was weighed live on TV at three months postpartum to see if she had got back to her original weight.
And these were the messages that we were we were consuming.
And, you know, you'll know this from your work around birth empowerment, it's those messages that sit in our subconscious.
And if we're not aware of them, if we don't unearth, what do I think that first postpartum period, all those early years should look like?
What is going to be important to me?
If we don't ask ourselves those questions, we will be driven by all the subconscious messaging that we've absorbed from the media, from societal messaging, from films, from our own family.
And that's what will be guiding us.
And I know that when I did that exercise, the predominant messaging that I had absorbed was that I have to get back, I have to bounce back.
And that is what causes so much friction and tension because it is impossible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you're talking about people's kind of journeys to get into this point of actually meeting their baby.
And it's one of the messages that I certainly had when we, you know, when you're growing up, it was like you have sex with a boy or a man, and then you get pregnant and then you have a baby and that's it.
And that was like what you what you expected the kind of journey to motherhood to be like.
And actually, when you speak to, I would say 98% of the people that I've ever met have not had a journey where from conception to feeding, their baby, that sleep, that first six months of parenthood, where that has all been the kind of smooth ride that they've expected.
Everybody seems to hit a bit that for them, or several bits for a lot of people, is that really, really kind of difficult, difficult bit.
And that those subconscious messages, that's when we start to feel like I'm doing it wrong, something is wrong with me.
So what you mentioned something that you kind of like maybe an exercise or a kind of reflection that you did.
We will have a lot of people listening to this episode that are listening when they are currently pregnant.
So maybe expecting the first baby, maybe another.
What can you do to prepare yourself for this kind of monumental transition?
Yeah, I think the first thing is to be aware of it.
That is really, really, really key to know.
Maybe hop over to my podcast, there are so many episodes about this with the experts who are really leading the way globally with these ideas.
So that's the first thing is to educate yourself.
Education gives us choices and in some way it gives us freedom.
So the first thing is really understand a little bit more about this idea of matresence, about this idea of change and just know that it's going to happen.
And not in a scary way, you know, I found my matresence and I suspect you'll be the same, to be unbelievable.
I'm a completely different person.
I am so much more confident and empowered and compassionate and it's just unbelievable the upgrade that I have had going through my matresence.
And I speak to thousands of women who have had exactly the same experience.
So this isn't something to be feared, it's something to be embraced.
If we don't know whether it's going to happen, that is where the fear comes in.
It's like if you walk into a room with the light off and you're trying to find something, you know, you're going to stumble around and you're going to hit in things.
If you turn the light on, you educate yourself and you understand, okay, this is what it is, this is what's going to happen.
It's going to be so much easier to see.
You're going to be able to navigate so much easier.
So that's the first thing is awareness.
I love, I love just on that.
I really love that you've said that I think sometimes these conversations can make it all sound really doom gloom, terrifying.
But I felt exactly the same for me.
It was like, it was the person that I'd always been waiting to be.
And then that happened and I was like, ah, like this, this is it.
Now I feel more at home in myself than I ever had done before I'd had children.
And it wasn't the children necessarily that did it, but it was that inner change within, within kind of me.
So hopefully that's reassuring to people that yeah, it can be.
There can be bumps and there can be difficulties, but there, it can be something like a really amazing transformation for you as well.
Yeah, because I think, you know, becoming a mother, you're suddenly responsible for, you know, another human.
And so much of, of parenting is modeling.
So it makes you think, well, hang on a minute, what, what do I want to model?
What do I want to show about life?
It encourages you.
And I think if you choose to take that invite, you know, you really can make significant, exciting changes in your life.
You know, where you live, how you live, the work that you do.
And, you know, there's so much less time for bullshit in motherhood.
There's so much less time for, you know, other people messing you around, for your own behavior, for your own old patterns of people pleasing, of saying yes when you mean to say no, for perfectionism.
You know, very quickly mothers often realize, oh, my gosh, I've got to find, I've got to find a different way to do this, because my old ways of you know, maybe putting so much pressure on myself, maybe being a people pleaser, maybe being quite type A about life as in overworking and having to do it all perfectly just doesn't work.
And I think there's such a freedom in that because you can find new ways and new tools to break some of that old pattern and in it find like your true, you know, I love this word empowerment, because I think that's when we can really figure out, okay, who am I?
What is really important to me?
And motherhood is without a doubt a gateway to do that.
It's an invitation.
That bit doesn't happen automatically.
That bit we have to do a little bit of thinking on a bit of reflection on.
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This episode is brought to you in partnership with The Night Owl, lullabies and music for babies and children.
We've been making some shifts to bedtimes at our house this month for my two and a half year old, as I've decided to move away from breastfeeding him to sleep.
And the biggest barrier has been finding ways for him to chill out.
But something that has really helped is making our wind down routine much longer and incorporating the beautiful music from The Night Owl Sings Nursery Rhymes album.
You search Lullabies on Spotify and it's not long before you end up down a rabbit hole of pan pipes or squeaky cartoon voices.
Neither of which I personally find that relaxing.
So now we make sure the TV is off by dinnertime.
The Night Owl music is playing from his room once we get in the bath, low lights, relaxing music, stories and cuddles, and the gradual shift is going okay.
I only wish we had incorporated this as a sleep cue earlier on.
If for nothing else, then it helps me remain calm, gentle and responsive during sometimes quite long bedtimes.
Why not try it out for your little ones bedtime?
Just search The Night Owl Sings Nursery Rhymes on Spotify, Apple Music or your usual streaming service now.
So if you're pregnant, I would encourage you to grab a pen and paper or maybe just talk it out loud to yourself one day when you're on a walk or even just think about it.
What are my expectations for the first couple of years of motherhood?
Because when we can unearth our expectations, I call it the should syndrome.
We have so many shoulds sitting on us.
A good mother should do this.
A good mother should do this.
A good mother should breastfeed.
A good mother should not ever feel frustrated or angry.
A good mother should never question if motherhood is for them or not.
A good mother should bounce back.
A good mother should work.
A good mother should not work.
A good mother, you know, it's just constant.
So it's really important to unearth.
What are those shoulds that I'm carrying?
Because I guarantee every single person listening will have them and we can't change what we can't see.
So if you make them visible, what are those shoulds?
And then you think, are those serving me?
Are those serving me, those shoulds that you unearth?
And then you can change them into wants.
Okay, so those are the shoulds and those probably aren't serving me.
Some of them might be, but what do I want?
What is really important to me in those early years of motherhood?
Do I want to be really kind to myself and compassionate to myself about however I find this?
Do I want to use this journey of early motherhood to find a deeper compassion for myself, others?
Do I want to experience more love than I've ever experienced in my life?
Now getting really clear about those once is really, really, really important.
So I would definitely think about that.
If you are a new mother or maybe you are the new mother for the second or the third time, I would really encourage you to reflect back on your early days because, you know, the studies vary, but generally, most experts say, Matresence, this big period of sort of shift and transition lasts between seven to 10 years.
So it's really worth reflecting back because you're gonna be in this for a while.
And when we can reflect back and think, where was I too hard on myself?
Where did I need to give myself a little bit more grace and understanding what was that transition like for me?
When we can do that little bit of reflection back, what we do is we bring more awareness and when we have awareness, we can change the narrative of something.
So I've done this with so many clients and it's unbelievable how quickly you can change the narrative from I was doing it wrong, there was something wrong with me, I felt broken to actually there was nothing wrong with me.
I was doing the best I could with what I had.
I didn't have the information.
I was too hard on myself because actually I've always been too hard on myself.
So it's really important not to leave these experiences.
You know, when we try and put them, shove them away in a cupboard, it doesn't really work.
You nearly made me cry as a second time mum, just even thinking back myself to like my first, that first period transitioning into motherhood.
And I definitely, I wonder if it's something you find working with people that are going and having their second or future children.
I certainly find that a lot of people come to birth preparation, having gone, I just didn't know.
I didn't know what I didn't know first time.
And all I know is that this time I want to do it differently or I want to do it better, or I want it to feel something else to what it was first time.
And there is something like really helpful about that.
Yeah, that ability to reflect back and to look and say, well, this is what I did, but acknowledging that actually you still did the best with the information that you had at that moment in time, the people that were around you at that moment in time.
But that doesn't mean you can't shift the pattern for future.
Absolutely.
That's what growth is, isn't it?
Growth and development and becoming more and more of ourselves.
And Maya Angelou says, we do the best we can until we know better in them.
When we know better, we do better.
So that is the definition of growth.
It doesn't mean that we do everything perfectly the first time.
It means that we have the courage and it does take courage to say, I want to do this differently.
That is the most important, powerful question.
How can I do this differently?
The quality of your motherhood experience really depends on the quality of the questions that you ask yourself.
It really does.
So asking yourself that question, how could I do this differently?
I had a client once who came to me and she'd had a really challenging Matresence for lots of different reasons.
And she said, I always thought I would want a second, but I just can't put myself through that again.
I just can't.
And we talked, this was just a one 90 minute session, actually, we talked about Matresence and encouraged her to write herself a letter.
She's such a powerful way to connect with the past version of you.
And she wrote herself a letter essentially forgiving herself for that experience.
She completely reframed how she saw it.
She gave herself so much compassion and love and understanding.
She saw what she was doing, because often we focus on what we did wrong.
And when we do that, it's like we color a picture, you know, all in black, and then we can't see the bits of color coming through.
So I really encouraged her to look at all the moments, all the things that she did do, that did feel incredible because they were being really colored by some really hard experiences that she had.
And she wrote this letter and she sent me an email afterwards to say, she couldn't believe how different she felt.
It had completely changed the story that she was telling herself about that early experience.
She had deepened in love for herself, for her child, for her partner, and she's pregnant again now for the second time and is really excited.
And so it's just incredible the shifts that we can make when we have the courage to both reflect and then look forward by asking ourselves these questions.
Yeah.
Oh, that's an amazing tip for people to literally take and use practically for themselves.
Have you got any other things that people can do if they're literally like in the moment?
So yes, we thought about kind of in preparation for, but sometimes, you know, can you prepare for motherhood?
Is it always going to be like, oh, wow, like, I thought I knew what was coming and it is just heads and shoulders more than I was ever expecting.
So when you're there, when you're on the other side, even if you've set up all your support, you've done lots of kind of soul searching, digging deep, talking to people.
Once you're kind of in it, or if you haven't done that before and you're listening now and you are in it, what are the things that we can do practically, emotionally?
We've talked about kind of being kind to yourself, but actually kind of in those, particularly that first year, I would say.
Yeah, I think you can prepare.
You can never prepare for how you are going to experience matresence because it's like you have to be in it to know what's going to happen.
And you can never prepare for the type of baby that you're going to get.
You know, some people have a lot of trauma, don't they?
Birth trauma, you know, they have trauma with their children where they might end up in NICU or they might have, you know, who knows, huge life challenges that can happen, you know, death of a parent in those early months or death of a partner even or a loved one.
So you can never prepare for that.
But I think you can prepare yourself for how well you can hold yourself through the transition.
So there's a couple of things that I really, really see a problematic in terms of how people are able to enjoy and go with the experience of whatever it is.
And the first one is perfectionism.
You know, any idea that you can do this perfectly will really trip you up, particularly in early motherhood.
You know, lots of women that I work with are really high achieving and, you know, real sort of type A's.
And taking that behavior, if I can control this enough, it will be okay.
I see causing a lot of stress because you really can't control much in motherhood, particularly in those early days.
You can't control how and when your baby sleeps, you know, much as you might try to with the schedules and, you know, all those books that encourage us to control more, you know, you can try.
But my experience across working with thousands of mothers is that tends to create more stress than it creates benefit.
So it's really thinking about what's my approach going to be about that?
How much am I going to be able to lean into what unfolds without that completely, you know, freaking me out because we control because we want to feel safe.
That's, you know, the underlying reason why we try to control everything is because it helps us feel safe.
So how else can I feel safe?
And I don't mean that physically necessarily.
I mean more emotionally, psychologically safe.
And I think pressure is another really big one.
So we put ourselves under so much pressure to figure it out really quickly.
You know, I had a client come to me and she was like, I just can't figure this out.
I can't figure this out and I feel so lost.
And I said, okay, well, how old is your baby?
Six weeks, you know, and we really had to work together on taking that pressure off.
You know, we live in a world, particularly in the Western world, where putting ourselves under that pressure is so the norm.
And it really does, again, trip us up in motherhood.
So you can't prepare for what you're going to go through, but you can absolutely prepare yourself and give yourself some tools to help you feel more inflow to whatever experience you might have.
And if someone is in it, was the second part of your question, if someone is really in the thick of it, the number one thing, the number one thing that I encourage mothers to build up a capacity more for is the ability to be kinder to themselves.
Because all of us live with this inner critic, with this voice in our heads that tells us that we're not doing it right, there's something wrong with us.
You know, when we do that, it really, really blocks our ability to face those problems.
Because when we have a critic, it actually stops us trying new things, it stops us feeling good.
You know, it's really hard to feel good when you're living with a bully, essentially, in your head.
So it's really important to start to identify where that voice might be coming from, what it sounds like, what it looks like, and start to build up on the other side, more of a kind sort of inner coach, more of someone like you or me in that person's ear, in your ear saying, you are doing an incredible job.
You are not supposed to know what you're doing six months postpartum, a year postpartum, a year post, you know, two years.
However, seven years for me, I still don't know what I'm doing and that is okay.
Forgiving ourselves quickly for making mistakes, coming back to what really matters, which is love and connection and trying our best.
So that is the number one thing because if you are in a hard spot, I use this analogy that I really like, which is if you're in a dark hole, for whatever reason, you know, you might be bone achingly tired.
You might be really struggling with feeding.
You might be really struggling with going back to work and maybe those early nursery drop offs or childcare settling is just horrific.
You're in a dark hole.
What we do when we criticize ourselves, you've got it wrong, you're not doing it right, is we push ourselves further into that dark hole we think that criticizing ourselves is somehow going to help ourselves see it differently or do something differently.
It doesn't.
It just pushes us further and further into the darkness.
What does help us climb out that hole and look round at the light is being kinder to ourselves.
So that is the number one thing if someone is in a hard place right now, that's the skill to start to develop.
And again, you don't have to do it alone.
There are so many episodes from Dr.
Kristin Neff who developed the whole idea of self-compassion.
There's an episode on The Motherkind Podcast with her talking specifically how mothers can use this tool.
So listen to an episode, 45 minutes.
There are tools in there that are gonna help you make those shifts really quickly.
And I promise you would start to feel better.
Yeah, I really, really love that.
Basically everything you've just said is kind of a reflection of everything that we encourage everybody to do in preparation for birth is like control the aspects that you can, your mindset and the conditions in which you are existing, your environment, those kinds of things.
And then the rest of it is about really, really allowing yourself to kind of relinquish control over the things that are just completely out of our control.
But what certainly what I tend to see, and I imagine this is what you see when people are coming to you for kind of coaching and support, is that we do so much preparation for the birth.
We prefer for the birth, prepare for the birth.
And then we have a baby and we're like, oh, we didn't think about actually the fact that now I have this child with me forever.
And there's such a lack of preparation for that transition into parenthood.
So yeah, having those tools, those things to start thinking about even as early on as pregnancy is so, so, so, so helpful for people.
I'm just going to sort of pivot a little bit because there's something that I really wanted to chat about because I wondered if you might have some interesting insight on it.
But I wanted to talk about the idea of ritual.
So in lots of other aspects of our lives, we will experience rituals that might be weddings, that might be religious or secular ceremonies for a new baby.
And in some cultures, some religions, there are celebrations when a child enters that adolescence period.
But this just doesn't seem to exist for motherhood in modern Western culture.
We have the kind of Americanized baby shower, that sort of the sort of party that exists around entering motherhood.
But we do see in some cultures and some traditions, things like mother blessings or closing the bones ceremonies, pregnancy circles, women's circles.
What power do you think rituals hold in that transition to motherhood?
And do you think that is something that we could be like utilizing much more to kind of support ourselves and create connection and celebration and all of that?
Yeah, I love rituals because I feel like what rituals really do, and it doesn't matter, you know, how it looks.
And for some people that word might even sound a bit sort of esoteric and maybe a bit woo woo and out there.
But really what a ritual is, is it's taking a pause.
Like that is how I see ritual.
It's taking a pause to integrate a change.
So before my 40th birthday recently, I did a little ritual for myself, which was just a pause before I integrate that change of entering a new decade.
So I don't think it has to be as formal.
You know, if you want to go and do a closing the bone ceremony, incredible.
There are lots of them springing up now around the UK, which is a beautiful postpartum experience.
And I would encourage everyone to go and check it out if that feels like something they might want to do.
But it doesn't need to be that formal.
I think it can be as easy as, you know, one night maybe you get the baby down or the toddler or whatever age and stage you're at.
And you might light a candle and you might run a bath and you might just have a think about your experience so far.
You might ask yourself some questions like what have I learnt?
What's been the hardest bits?
What's been the best bits?
What do I want the next period to look like?
I do that every year that my children get a year older.
I write them a letter and I write me a letter.
Just to mark that moment because I think it's so easy.
You know, we live in a world that's never been faster.
It's never been more pressured.
We've never had more information to consume.
It's crazy, isn't it, how much the world has sped up in the last couple of hundred years.
It's so easy to just rush through these moments, to rush through them, to rush through them.
I think we miss, I think we really miss a lot of our wisdom.
Wisdom and insight only comes, you have it.
Everyone listening has wisdom and insight, but you can't access it if we're busy rushing.
You have to stop for a minute and think, okay, what have I learnt?
What have I learnt?
That is how you access your wisdom.
That's so incredible because that's what you get to pass on to your children, but you have to take that pause.
I think that's how I think of ritual.
It's like a pause, a moment to reflect, a moment to unlock some of what's been going on for you.
I think it's really important to do it.
You can't get clarity.
There's so many decisions that we have to make as mothers and parents, so many, and it's really hard to get clarity when you are just doing and rushing and going.
Clarity only comes from space and stillness, so any way that you can give yourself that.
I'm definitely not talking about a two-day retreat.
I'm talking about a 20-minute candlelit bath.
I mean, I'll take a two-day retreat.
It's making it accessible, isn't it?
Because we know that life is full and fast and frantic, so how could you do that?
And again, on the podcast, there's so many episodes that talk about how to actually do this, how to think about those moments of pause and reflection and how to access that wisdom that you would have gained, because going into motherhood, you get so much wisdom.
You learn so much about life and yourself and what matters and the people around you.
But if we don't take a minute to just think about that, you'll miss it.
We'll miss all those incredible learnings that could help you on the next bit, the next three months, the next six months.
Yeah, I think when you're listening to this now, you might be in bed, you might be driving.
It's really tempting to get to the end of this episode, switch it off and go and do the next thing.
So maybe even just at the end of this, just hit pause and just let the feelings sink in for 10 minutes.
Ask yourself a couple of the questions that Zoe's mentioned and just allow it to settle.
That's what we don't have.
We're constantly listening to something, doing something, going somewhere.
I can't remember, it may have even been on your podcast.
I think it was Glennon Doyle was saying she was talking about her teenage children and they were saying that when they get in the shower, they think the shower is like this magical place where they have all these revealing insights into life.
And she was like, no, that's not the shower.
That's just thinking.
And it's because you're constantly looking at your phone, watching TV, playing a game, talking to somebody.
And actually it's that pause.
And there's something about it.
I think it is a shower over a bath because in a shower, you can't look at your phone.
Whereas in the bath, you can read a book, you can do something.
But in the shower, that is it.
And I always say it's a great thing to use in birth as well, because there is something magical about it.
But it is that pause, that white noise, the blocking out of everything else.
It's that moment to pause.
So that's your challenge now for the end of this.
It's to actually just pause for 10 minutes and allow it all to sink in.
So I'm going to get a slightly bigger picture.
Now, what we have been talking about, everything that we've been exploring, the responsibility of navigating these transitions is so frequently put upon the person that is experiencing it, which in itself, the conversations that we are having right now in itself, is a reflection of modern motherhood in itself.
Like, what can I do?
What can I do to make this easier for myself?
What responsibility do you think, like, wider society holds in this?
And if you, you know, if you're prime minister today, what would you want to see shift in feeling and culture, whether that is emotional, systemic, like to support women, families through this period of transition?
Yeah, it's a good question.
And I think, you know, my work definitely sits on what the individual can do.
You know, we were talking about that locus of control idea.
What is in your control?
What is outside your control?
I focus on what is in your control.
And there are some incredible organizations like Pregnant Then Screwed and Five Times More, which talks about the experience of black women in birth and pregnancy and beyond.
There are some incredible organizations who are doing lots of that change work.
But I think, you know, from my vantage point, what I really see on a big macro level is just the undervaluing of caregiving, the undervaluing of parenting and motherhood.
And it's kind of wild if you think about it, that, you know, so much budget focus, you know, goes into adult mental health, goes into education.
Whereas actually, we know now that those first five years lay the foundation for the rest of someone's life.
They really do.
Doesn't mean we can't change it after the first five years.
We have neuroplasticity, which means that we can, we can change it.
But if we can get the foundations right in those first five years, there's been some incredible studies coming out recently of showing the savings that that would make later down the line in terms of health outcomes, mental health outcomes, education outcomes.
So it really doesn't make sense that we don't invest in caregiving in those first five years.
And, you know, obviously the work that Kate Middleton is doing with the Future Childhood Foundation is feeding into that.
And I think that is changing narratives.
We haven't seen any, you know, policy changes yet.
But I think, I think that really doesn't make sense.
It just doesn't make sense that we know the value of caregiving and yet it is completely undervalued.
You know, it's undervalued in really big ways in terms of maternity pay, paternity pay.
You know, there's not really maternity pay for freelancers.
We have the second most expensive childcare system in the world.
You know, we are living in a cost of living crisis, which means that lots of mothers have to go back to work that don't want to.
It means that lots of mothers that want to work can't because they can't afford the childcare.
So it doesn't really work on either side.
I think the other thing sort of coming down a level, I suppose, is how much support mothers are given and parents are given postpartum.
You know, in lots of different countries, there is extended postpartum support.
In France, you get home visits from a midwife up to a couple of months after, same in Holland and other countries.
So, you know, for us, we really left, aren't we?
And I think the experience that people have with health visitors is so varied.
You know, some incredible experiences, some awful experiences.
So I think, you know, how we can support someone in those early months is really important because we know that, you know, how someone experiences those early months and early years really does come to impact them.
There's a saying in Eastern philosophy that how you are in the first 40 days of motherhood impacts the next 40 years.
Now, I don't know if that's true, but that is a phrase for a reason, because it's really important how nourished and supported someone feels for how they're able to go on and live their lives, you know, feeling empowered and fulfilled and joyful, which is what we all want.
And it's what our children need.
Yeah, amazing.
I worked, when I was training, one of my mentors was, she trained as a midwife in India, and she came over and when I had my first baby, she said, Megan, you don't get out of bed for two weeks.
I was like, okay.
And I didn't do it so well with my first, but with my second, I genuinely didn't get out of bed for two weeks.
And just that, that like the difference that that makes in giving yourself permission to go slowly.
And I mean, demanding that support and not everybody has people to kind of ask for it.
But if it's there, I think often people are happy to help if you just tell them what you need them to do.
And there's something I certainly found second time finding that confidence to not really care if that's what they wanted to do or not.
But that's what I needed them to do.
And yeah, giving yourself grace to ask for that support and try in any way that you can to set that, set that support up for that, particularly the first few weeks and months after the birth.
Well, most people want to come and visit.
So I always talk about helpers, not visitors.
You know, don't think about someone coming to visit.
Think about how they can help.
So I as well did two weeks.
I did a week on week in bed, a week on the sofa with with both of my girls and anyone that came to visit.
I said, please don't bring a present for the baby or present for me.
Could you bring lunch?
Could you bring dinner?
Could you make that amazing lasagna that you've made for me before?
And I'm going to put it in the freezer.
Could you please help me with this little bit of admin I just can't get to?
When I had two, could you go and pick the older one up from nursery and then come and visit the baby?
I got really good at asking for help.
And most people, not everyone of course, but most people love being told directly how they can support.
It's just that we have to get confident enough to know that we're allowed to do that.
And actually I think linking back full circle to where we'd started, once we can really understand what we are going through and the huge hormonal shifts and physical shifts that are happening in those early months, once we really understand that and have a reverence for it and a reverence for ourselves and our body, it makes it easier to not be rushing around, you know, hoovering and making tea, which is what a lot of mothers do for visitors.
It makes it easier to think, actually, no, like I have been through a huge experience and what I need right now is support and help.
There's an amazing book called The First Forty Days, The Art of Nourishing the New Mother, I think it's called.
And that's an incredible book because it talks about, just to what you were talking to, you know, how in other cultures it's done differently and the impact of that.
But it's also, you know, it takes a lot of courage because you're going against the grain to some extent.
You know, there might be other mothers around you not doing that.
It might be that people say to you, oh, gosh, day two, I was up in the supermarket, you know, shopping.
And it's saying, okay, well, that's great for you.
But I know what I need is, you know, a week in bed and a week on the sofa.
And, you know, I'd love you to come and visit.
But if you're not able to help, then, you know, we're going to have to wait a few months.
It's having the courage and the worth, knowing that you are worth looking after.
You are worth supporting in that way.
And I think, you know, it's always funny, isn't it?
People say, do you want me to come around and take the baby for a while?
Do you want me to come around and take the baby?
And I always think, no, like I want to sit.
I wanted to sit with my newborns.
I wanted to be next to them when they were sleeping.
What I needed help with was everything else.
So I used to say, no, I actually don't need that.
What I really needed to do is come around, of course meet the baby.
And then can you just help me put a load of washing on?
You know, that's what I needed help with, practical help.
I didn't need help loving and holding my baby.
Yeah, amazing.
I think we've kind of looped back to the beginning in a sort of really nice, circular way there.
So we're going to wrap up.
If people want to, hopefully they will now after everything that we've talked about today, because it's such a brilliant place to kind of move on to after you've done your birth ed preparation.
If people want to find the podcast, your podcast, or they want to work with you, where are the best places for them to find you?
So Motherkind Podcast is the main way that I support.
I do have a coaching team now, so I don't work much with clients one-on-one these days, but I do have people who support me and who've worked with me for a long time.
We have a model and a method in Motherkind, so you can absolutely access them.
That's all on the website, motherkind.co.
Then if you just search Motherkind Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, it will come up, and there, there's 350 episodes with the best thinkers.
I've really worked hard to get the leaders, the people who are really at the forefront of thinking about motherhood, not just motherhood, thinking about things like how we can reduce control, how we can shed some of that perfectionism.
I've got the experts, world experts on how to set boundaries.
I've got a brilliant expert on there on how to say no, a whole episode on that.
So really anything from, gosh, anything that you might be struggling with, there will be an episode on there to support you.
So have a look, scroll back through.
It's been six years worth of resources in there.
So I would really encourage people to go and look.
And it's all free.
It's incredible.
I'll post links to everything in here.
But yeah, you're right.
Everything gets very specific.
So it's not just lots of kind of wishy-washy conversations, but like real, real focus.
That's it.
I felt like, I felt like, you know, there's enough of those.
There are enough chats with celebrities about, you know, lots.
And I really, I love those podcasts.
But with Motherkind, you get something really different.
You get absolute experts talking about something that they've lived and breathed often for decades in a really accessible way with specifically how to use that to support mothers.
So even if you've heard like Gabor Marte on lots of other podcasts, he talks specifically about motherhood on the one with Motherkind.
So it's well worth, it's well worth checking it out.
Amazing.
Thank you so much for joining me.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
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Okay.