The Good Enough Mother

In putting together this week’s podcast I reflected on the extent to which our lives and the information that surrounds us at the moment is shaped by this worldwide pandemic. It almost seems as though anything worth discussing needs to relate to the context of the virus. But then I am also mindful of the type of fatigue that we are likely to experience in terms of information overload and feeling like we’re being saturated. With these two aspects in mind, this week I’m sharing what my experience of what self-isolation has been like in mothering my 2 year old without any available social support. I know this is or will be the position of many and so I felt it may be useful to share my experience as an ‘ordinary’ albeit privileged person, within our current context. Sometimes it can feel we’re lost within a sea of statistics and predictions, and it’s through individual stories that we can find anchoring and connection. I hope as a listener you are well and are weathering this storm and holding onto hope.

We generally go through a number of points in our lives where we come to question our identity and who we are: we experience a shift in how we see ourselves, how we experience the world, and what our values are. This episode journeys on a philosophical exploration around what it means to reflect on ‘who we are’ as women and mothers. How we think about ourselves and our lives – both in our memories, the present, and in the future -involves the creation of stories. I explain how this process of story-ing works and why the process of story-making and story-telling is so important in our own lives and the lives of our children. Part of this story-making integrates processes of ‘letting go’ that we move through in mothering, relationships, our working lives, and in grieving and loss. I talk about the meaning and construction of ‘family’, critique advice of ‘everything happens for a reason’, and reflect on the ways we can alchemize our pain, fear, and struggle to lead richer and more engaged lives.

I talk about the process and practice of conscious mothering through The Good Enough Mother, but what does that paradigm look like when applied to birth? This episode is with Leisa Masters of Earthside Birth Services who is an online pregnancy and birth mentor. She works with women who wish to uncover what they want for their births and their lives, and holds the vision that women know themselves best. In this episode we break down what conscious preparation for birth actually means. We confront and raise difficult questions about how women deal with systems and often-oppressive structures, to arrive at what it actually is that they want for their births, their motherhood, and their lives. The way our conversation unfolds reflects the interwoven nature of birth, consciousness, feminism, patriarchal motherhood, individualisation, shaming, lack of choice, silencing, re-claiming, and the power we have in modelling for our children. The journey of birth preparation – and mothering – is ultimately about how we find and ‘be with’ who we authentically are.

What does dealing with aggressive behaviour in your child look like when you're a conscious parent? In the first part of this episode I dive into what it means to parent from a place of consciousness and reflexivity. Why it is that so often our children – including the ways they behave – call us into doing the work of self reflection in coming to know ourselves more deeply, where our limits are, and who we can become. The struggle we have around our children’s behaviour has so much to do with our yearning for ‘control’ and the constant releasing of control that motherhood often entails and requires. I talk about the power of surrender, and speak frankly about the ways we can unfairly hold our children responsible for our happiness and wholeness. The second half of the episode reveals how these foundational understandings impact on how we can respond to our children’s aggression. I talk about coregulation and dysregulation, why our children lash out aggressively, and how you can respond. Part of this involves releasing the judgements you hold over yourself and embracing a practice of ‘good enough mothering’ in order to connect with your child in the ways they’re calling out for.

What is it like to grieve the lost opportunity of motherhood? This week’s conversation is with Sarah Roberts who is a grief teacher and counsellor with over 25 years experience. After travelling her own journey of infertility for 10 years and living with the grief of involuntary childlessness, she now works to support women who are experiencing motherhood loss. We talk about Sarah’s work and journey, and grapple with what ‘motherhood’ really means in our society today. We discuss the value placed on motherhood and how our current models of ‘the family’ rob mothers, children, non-mothers, and the broader community of support and enrichment. Living through fertility treatments and involuntary childlessness brings with it a complex tapestry of grief, and we explore the ways that this grief can be exacerbated by isolation. We offer ways of having conversations as both involuntary childless women, and as mothers, so that we can create spaces to talk about these difficult topics. It is through grappling with discomfort and pain that we realize our shared humanity and open the possibilities for deep connection and growth.

Sociologists pull back the veil on lived experience and connect this experience with the broader social and cultural context that we live within. Diving into analysis and coming up with theories that speak to individuals’ experiences, we can give broader meaning to them, and this analysis can ultimately be used to provoke and propel social and cultural change. With this in mind, this episode dives into some of the research I’ve conducted with mothers of children with disabilities. I want to give you an insight into these women’s experiences, because I believe mothers of children with disabilities are at the intersection of everything that is empowering about mothering, AND everything that is disempowering about motherhood. The work these women put into their mothering is unparalleled, and it’s not just through choice: it’s often through necessity. But the struggle and isolation they endure is mostly unrecognized, and often unnecessary. We need social, cultural, and institutional change to value the work these women do – and the work that all mothers do. We need to value unpaid care work. Despite living within a patriarchal model of motherhood, I argue these women’s stories show us how we can reconstruct our own experiences as mothers to experience our power and potency, despite the deep complexity and perhaps ambivalence that will always be inherent in the experience of mothering.

Current notions of ‘self care’ are letting mothers down. Part of the ‘perfect mother myth’ is that mothers are self sacrificial saints who have responsibility for the physical and emotional needs of the family. Yet, they are also expected to prioritize their ‘self care’ in order to continue meeting the needs of everybody else. In our individualistic culture we ask mothers to advocate for their own self care when they are already drowning in the care needs of everyone else. Considering the interplay between society and the individual, perhaps there are deeper reasons behind our ‘need’ for self-care in terms of our sense of worthiness, and living out the gendered narrative we’ve been programmed with since we were little girls. I want to flip how we think about self-care in the context of motherhood and argue that it can be a way to push back against the rhetoric of the perfect mother and patriarchal motherhood. We do this through rejecting the individualized, commercialized idea of self-care, while embracing ourselves as good enough mothers.

This episode offers insight into what the research says on sleep training practices and frames the struggle with baby sleep as a structural and cultural one, rather than a purely individual one. I try and move the debate away from the divisiveness it can cause within motherhood, towards fostering compassion for parents while calling sleep training marketing tactics to account. I detail 7 ‘myth busters’ of infant sleep assumptions that include information on infant feeding, sleep spaces, ‘sleeping through’, and self-soothing. I argue for a move away from the either/or approach of prioritizing the caregiver OR baby’s wellbeing. We need to maintain the importance of attachment and responsiveness for babies, as well as support, rest, and empathy for mothers. I advocate for a cultural adjustment of expectations around baby sleep and a shift in where we focus our support and inquiry.

Sleep is one of the most loaded and controversial topics you can discuss within motherhood. There is judgement regardless of whether you sleep train or not, and I firmly believe all mothers are doing the best with the information and support they have available to them at the time. I know that not getting quality sleep can have severe impacts on our health and quality of life, but I want to shift the conversation away from the ‘either/or’ paradigm about putting baby or Mum ‘first’. We need another way. This episode is part 1 in a two part series, and this part shares the sleep journey I’ve been on with my daughter. I speak the unspoken parts of sleep training and critique sleep training industry and culture for an exploitation of tired and vulnerable parents, approaching this from a place of compassion and empathy for mothers. We navigated through 18 months of frequent and distressed waking before finding answers that helped my daughter’s sleep. But this journey taught me surprising (and sometimes challenging) lessons about myself as a mother and woman, and has instilled in me a passion for education about biologically normal patterns of baby and toddler sleep. I think we need an overhaul of our current social and cultural model when it comes to the topic of motherhood and sleep! Stay tuned for part 2 where I dig into the research and the core of my argument, taking you through 7 myths of infant sleep that I believe need calling out and changing. Mentions: Sophie Acott from Sleep, Play, Love. Nourishing The Mother.

In this episode I delve into research and evidence behind why the way we parent is so important – from a neurobiological perspective. I talk about polyvagal theory and why it’s important to understand as a parent, and the scientific benefits of holding our babies. I share research that gives insight into the interplay between genes and environment in our children’s development, and the power of touch and connection. I acknowledge the challenges involved in this way of mothering as a caregiver and delve into the topics of rage and anger as a mother. I bring our focus back to the body and on accepting the inevitability of ‘ruptures’ in our connection with our children, but on the enduring and restorative function of ‘repairing’ these connections.