How we coped with our realities of motherhood

Motherhood Musings: Collection 1, Volume 3

Welcome to the third and final piece in the first collection of Motherhood Musings series. Here is volume one and volume two.

This piece will explore how we coped with our realities of motherhood, specifically in the early days of motherhood.

Bare with us, this is a long one with a lot of richness and truth. At the bottom of this post, you will find a poll to vote on the next Motherhood Music topic.

If you are new to Being in Motherhood, I explore mothering, healing, shifting patterns, and learning what it means to be ourselves in motherhood. I also invite other mothers to share their words and experiences, you can learn more here.

I collected this responses two months ago at this point and I find myself wondering about what I meant by some of these questions.

What does it mean to cope with our reality? Does that imply there is something wrong with the experience?

As each mother has shared…there was something (or many things) painful and uncomfortable about entering into motherhood. And I was wondering, selfishly, how did other mothers face what was hard for them.

Because I didn’t respond to early motherhood in the way I thought I would. I remember thinking I had tools and I was prepared. I thought I would rest, ask for help, take time to do things that mattered to me. But early motherhood was such a shock, so was the first year and a few months of my son’s life. The trauma I had been suppressing in my body needed to be released and it was taking every opportunity to do so.

My body would become tense when my son would not fall asleep easily (which happened often). I am not sure what words to use to describe it because lose it has many connotations. My nervous system would become disregulated, I would lose sense of time and place. I would become locked into battle with myself and I would not be able to calm down for hours.

My stomach churns writing this. It took time and therapy to realize my responses arising to different aspects of motherhood, but primarily sleep, was PTSD. It took time to accept I had PTSD. Not only from my son’s birth, but from my childhood. It took time to understand the gravity of what was happening in my body.

I wish I knew more before hand, it is hard not to be filled with regret and shame when I think about the start of motherhood. I usually try to spin it…I healed, I learned, I moved through it, everything is different now. And it is and those moments were hard on all of us.

I am not sure I could prepare any differently than I had, my body was not ready to release the trauma it stored until these moments with my son. While, I have repaired with my him around what happened when my PTSD would engulf me, it still hurts.

It is hard to accept we have caused harm to our children and I do try to focus on the positives…how I do not have PTSD episodes any more, I haven’t had one in 9 months (since I actively starting seeking help for what I was experiencing) and there are layers of shame I still need to work through.

Finding our ways to cope

It is hard for me to write this but when I read

Marika Páez Wiesen

’s words about how she coped, I knew I was held in good hands to tell the truth. I am reminded as I write this how we are doing the best we can at any moment with the tools we have. I find the mother I want to be is one who recognizes that something needs shifting and makes a change as it is needed.

I appreciated Marika honestly sharing her experience of coping…

I am going to be honest, I drank a lot when my kids were little. Every day felt stressful and most days felt demoralizing. I drank to relax. I drank to try to have a little more "fun" at the end of the day. When my son was 5, he had been especially difficult one day and I sat on the couch and told him how "disappointed" I was in his behavior. (Something I'd never say now.) I told him my energy was drained and asked him if there was anything he thought he could do to put more energy back into me. He thought for a minute and said, "I could bring you some wine, mommy." I quit drinking 2 months later.

We do what we can to cope. I am grateful to be surrounded by other women in this space who have change their behaviors and became the mother’s they knew they were capable of being.

Sarina Zoe

shared how…

I’ve been a Vedic meditator for many years and I think this kept my head just above water and saved me from depression as well as severe depletion.

Ellie Nova

wrote about these ways she coped…

Connecting with other women. Telling the truth; hearing their truths. Knowing I'm not alone in this. Women's circles - online and in person. Reading stories of motherhood where women are truthful - like A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk and Matrescence by Lucy Jones. Learning about matresence and the perfect mother myth - through podcasts like Amy Taylor Kabbaz's The Happy Mama Movement and Dr Sophie Brock's The Good Enough Mother.

Mental health support - counseling, coaching, learning about and practicing mindful self compassion. Childcare - it hasn't been an easy journey with that and I still feel like I don't have enough, but it's a lot better than having only a few hours a week as I did for the first 2 years. It's a continuing journey and I know there is still a huge amount of unexpressed grief and rage that I want to express, and so much still to make sense of, and shadow parts still to meet and learn to love.

Kaitlyn Elizabeth

wrote how she coped…

I cried, screamed, isolated, dissociated, slept when I could, eventually therapy, finding a movement practice to get me back in step with my body.

Finally,

Lauren Barber

shared with us how she coped with her reality of motherhood…

I turned to what I knew. Meditation and yoga, nutrition to sustain my energy, yoga nidra, creativity. I had spent years gathering tools and practices to support my nervous system and help me stay grounded and suddenly I could see just WHY I had been called towards them. They had been embedding themselves in my being to prepare me for motherhood. 

Nature held me over and over, I walked miles and miles with my baby in a sling on my chest. We moved into lockdown when my eldest was 6 months old and so I lost that social connection, however I did gain having my husband around a lot more than expected.

I had trusted friends around me that had been there and they held me through it all. 

I found the power in micro moments to support me throughout the day and even in the hardest days something within me know that I was in a period of becoming and that at some point I would emerge out of this and entirely rebirthed person. And that actually excited me because transformation and evolution has always fascinated me. 

I turned my attention to learning about matrescence and the rite of passage that motherhood is. I soaked up every bit of wisdom I could from those who had already walked through the fire, so I could truly understand this threshold I was crossing. That knowledge gave me confidence and courage to keep stepping forward even in the often heavy mud and it validated all that I was feeling, which made me feel less alone. 

I want to interweave how each of us coped more beautifully but I am not going to try. Because we all had different experiences, we were all trying to make sense of motherhood. We were all trying to find our footing on a new path.

I find motherhood to be the ultimate space of you don’t know until you know. You don’t know how you would do it differently until you figure out how to do it differently. There is a lot of on the ground learning and teaching. Things changes in a moment. Which is why I find it hard to look back on the past, because I am not the mother I was a year ago, I am not the person I was a year ago.

As our children we grow, not only as mothers, but also as individuals. This journey has the power to shape us it more kind, loving, present individuals if we can stay with our moment to moment experience.

Sharing our advice with other mother’s

I asked each mother to provide advice to other mother’s who were struggling to accept their reality of motherhood. Again, two months later, I am not sure what I meant by this question. It sounds straight forward and words can be comforting, but the further I go on this journey I realize motherhood is a solo experience.

I love talking to, writing with, hearing from other mothers, but if I am not ready to hear or learn something about myself or motherhood, it does not matter what another mother says. I do not say that to discount all the beautiful words I am about to share, but to remind any mother who may be struggling and unable to shift something in their experience, it is okay.

It is a hard line to walk. I hold a lot of shame about not getting help sooner for my mental health. And, I was not ready to accept and change what was happening until I was fed up. I know this is going to maybe anger people to hear and trust me, I do not even like writing it.

But as much as I wanted to change things for my son, I had to want them to change for me first. I had to find some sliver of my own importance in getting help. I had been at the helms of my trauma for years, and while my son helped so much of that arise, I was the only one who could make the changes needed. Even though it was causing my family distress, their discomfort was not enough for me to change, I had to want to change and shift.

I think this is true on many levels because lasting meaningful change happens when we do it for ourselves, and then we let others reap the benefits of that change.

That is my advice, trust you will know when it is time to make a change, for your mental health, for you baby’s soap (a recent example), for your writing, for whatever is in front of you. Whatever it is, you will know when it is time to shift something, you do not have to follow anyone else timeline. And if your experience is painful and hard, I can assure you something more beautiful is on the other side of it.

This leads me into what Sarina would say to another mother struggling to cope with their reality…

I certainly wouldn’t say ‘it will get better’ or ‘this too shall pass’ or some other dismissive, invalidating bs, which I heard so much when I was struggling.

Any mother finding it hard to accept their reality is likely, and rightly, resistant to the injustice of how under-valued and under-supported she is. 

In the early weeks after birth, I first felt the sacred rage stir, it felt so much bigger than me, it felt ‘on behalf’ of all women. I simply could not accept this being under-valued and under-supported as something to push past.

The rage still stirs in me and it has allowed me to speak up, both in my relationship and online, so for me, this difficulty in accepting my reality in motherhood has its divine role.

I believe there’s intelligence in the difficulty of accepting certain things about motherhood, an intelligence that we must not suffocate with ‘this is what I should feel as a mother’.

Where there is resistance there is always intelligence:

-Am I not enjoying this because I’m depleted and caught in a seemingly endless cycle of it?

-Do I find this so utterly exhausting that my dream of several children has changed? 

-Does it feel unsustainable because I need to pull back from something or ask for more support?

-Am I resenting motherhood because the sacrifice is so great that it simply doesn’t feel right to sacrifice THIS much?

The other thing I feel is essential to comment on is, motherhood is the biggest activator of our wounding. Unworthiness plays out in motherhood more than anywhere else.

Amid the exhaustion we can be more susceptible to other people’s influences and other people’s voices and not have the capacity to discern what our own voice is saying.

This has been one of the greatest learning curves for me, I wrote a post on it called The Voices that Highjack Our Parenting, after a recent hijack from voices that had me react harshly to my child.

I have found shadow work in motherhood such a paradox, like, ‘Fuck I have to dig into my weary crevices and shine a light there when I can barely catch a breath’, while unearthing and alchemising more and more unworthiness has been exhilarating and infinitely liberating.

The ways in which I have been most challenged in motherhood have offered the greatest opportunity to lovingly look inside.

So, I think what I would say to other mothers who are struggling to accept their reality, please do not judge anything you are finding difficult, there’s something that wants your attention.

If you are finding something difficult, it is your difficult. Everyone’s journey with what is hardest in motherhood for them is different and unique. Whatever is hard for you wants your attention. It is normal to assume it is easier for others but usually it is not and regardless, it does not matter.

I find the more I focus on my experience of mothering, listening to my own voice, my child’s voice, the more ease I find in my life, with myself, with him, and within our family.

Marika’s advice echos all of what I am trying to articulate…

It's a really big and really long transition, becoming a mother. It takes years. If life as a mom feels hard, suffocating, uncomfortable or intolerable, it's completely normal. But it really and truly won't always feel this way. If you let it, motherhood can break you completely open and heal parts of you that you’d long forgotten were wounded… It can feel like a trap sometimes, but it can also unlock a freer, more wholehearted version of you than you ever thought possible.

I wrote about letting motherhood break you open, it can be such a beautiful and painful gift to let motherhood change you. But what is the other option? I cannot help but think about my own mother (which if you are newer here, I have a complicated relationship with).

I find a thread of compassion for her. Because it makes me wonder what dark, painful trauma was locked in her body, and even after birthing two children, it did not help her soften, but only drove her more into her trauma responses. How tightly her body must have been wound to not be able to face what motherhood was asking of her in its own unique way.

This idea has helped me cement this truth into my body: it was never about me.

It was never about me being unworthy, or not mattering, or unlovable. I had to make sense of those things because I could not see how flawed my mother was. Her inability to let motherhood change her, soften her, face her past, help her grow, had everything to do with how unworthy she thought she was. It had everything to do with her own trauma and nothing to do with how lovable I was.

So, the other option to not letting motherhood change you, is to stay hard, to hold on, to not change. Motherhood has to move you, it has to open you heart. The other way is not a path I want to take.

Because as Kaitlyn shared in her advice to another mother…

Their job is to mother themselves first and foremost. I remember reading somewhere that the “result” of parenthood is the parent not the child and I find that to be very true.

The result of parenthood is the parent, not the child. I also find this to be true, because I find I am on a journey of healing and becoming since I became a mother.

Finally, Lauren’s advice made me rethink this question all together…

I would actually say very little to another mother. I would listen, I would hold her, I would provide a loving container to witness all that she was feeling and experiencing. I would let her know that I see her… that she isn’t lost forever or broken and that her needs really do matter. I would want her to know that she might feel lonely but that she isn’t alone… she has threads connecting her to other Mothers even in the darkest nights and longest days. 

The loneliness has been unbearable at times but we are not alone as mothers, there are other mothers out there moving through motherhood in their own way. I am grateful we have this space to talk about the hard parts of it and to hold each other as we navigate this journey.

A few extra things I couldn’t quite weave in…

These bits were too beautiful, true, and honest to leave out. Sarina wrote…

I had no idea how motherhood would challenge my vanity! My butt became flat AF from all the sitting and breastfeeding not to mention lack of Vinyasa practice, and post-breastfeeding I lost the collagen-type plumpness in my face, along with 2.5 years of extreme sleep deprivation, I aged about a hundred years! 

I’m finally back in the swing of my beauty and fitness routine, now that Gia is a little older and I have time to gua sha, floss my teeth, and exercise more - never thought I’d say that, but it’s a bloody great relief!

Seriously, the space I now have to TRY to keep up with my dental hygiene is barely there but I am getting closer to being where Sarina is.

Marika shared with us…

I wish I’d known that “becoming a mother” takes a long time. It will shape and change every part of you. You will not feel or be done even when they’re 2 or 3. Maybe somewhere around 4.5, or 6. The change process can be painful and scary. The pain and the fear are NORMAL. I’m sure caterpillars in their cocoons are completely freaking out.

People will tell you-don’t give all of yourself. Have some “me” time. But in my experience, no time feels like “me” time anymore. Not that I’m never alone or doing something fun for me, but the “me” that the time is for has changed, and is now attached to these other people, and it’s folly to think you’ll just magically “unattach” to go have brunch with your friends…

In the end, I think there’s no way to convey to someone who doesn’t have a kid yet how incredibly beautiful, in that very messy human way, the experience can be. If you let it, it can break you completely open and heal parts of you that you’d long forgotten were wounded… It can feel like a trap sometimes, but it can also unlock a freer, more wholehearted version of you than you ever thought possible..

There is nothing I do nowadays where I feel free of being a mother, it is part of who I am now and I quite enjoy that truth.

Yes, Marika to letting motherhood unlock a freer, more wholehearted version of ourselves. Lauren similarly wrote..

Every season of Motherhood feels like the most challenging when you are in it, and then a new cycle begins and you quickly forget what went before and move into the next phase.

I’ve never leaned on ‘this too shall pass’ more… and yet it’s also the most frustrating thing to hear when you are deep in it.

The biggest thing I have learned, and one of the greatest gifts, is truly to have as few expectations as possible, because Motherhood is wild and unpredictable and the less grip you have on what it is supposed to look like, the more you can meet what rises in each moment. 

It teaches you, if you let it, about pure devotional presence. 

Thank you all for being here and sharing this space with us.

What did your coping strategies look like in early motherhood? What would you say or offer to another mother who is struggling in this season or any season of motherhood?

Share with us in the comments.

Thank you to the women who contribute to this series and this first collection as a whole, I am honored to hold space for your words and wisdoms. It has been healing to write along side your experiences of motherhood.

I invite you to share this post with other mothers who may find healing in these words and experiences.

If you have any topics you want to see discussed in the future, send me a message and I can them to my ever growing list!