EP 151 Bringing Awareness v. Normalizing: The Critical Line Between Motherhood Realities

Here's the things with normalizing the struggles of modern motherhood.

In our attempt to create awareness about the challenges that we go through in motherhood, we've inadvertently normalized aspects that aren't the essence of true motherhood and really shouldn't be happening in the first place.

In this episode, we're sharing:

• Aspects of motherhood that have been labeled as "normal" such as severe mental health concerns and restrictive sleep training techniques and who is actually benefitting from the "normalization" of these struggles.
• My own personal experience with going against the mainstream advice of newborn care and how it benefitted my mental health immensely.
• What we can do instead of continuing to accept things "as they are."

  Let's have a conversation about the parts of motherhood you've been told to accept as "normal" and where you're pushing back against that norm.
Join us to chat about it in the Facebook group! 

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Chapters

• 0:02 Redefining Postpartum Care and Normalization
• 8:33 Reimagining Motherhood

Transcript

Depression, anxiety, and autoimmune symptoms after birth is not how it's supposed to be. There is a much better way, and I'm here to show you how to do just that. Hey, my friend, I'm Maranda Bower, a mother to four kids and a biology student turned scientist obsessed with changing the world through postpartum care. Join us as we talk to mothers and the providers who serve them and getting evidence-based information that actually supports the mind, body, and soul in the years after birth.

Hey everyone, I am thrilled to have this conversation with you. This is the absolute biggest thing that I am so deeply passionate about and I am just going to jump right into it. We all know motherhood is a journey. It is this odyssey. It's filled with triumphs and tribulations.

Yet in our attempt to create awareness about the challenges that we always go through in motherhood, what we've done is we've inadvertently normalized aspects that aren't the essence of true motherhood.

We can look around and see current organizations and support places that are doing really amazing work for people in postpartum.

I'm not saying it hasn't been amazing work, it certainly has. Let's look at postpartum support international or PSI, for example.

They are leading the way in bringing awareness to others about maternal mental health. They're cultivating community support groups.

They're training providers who have no formal other training. It just doesn't exist.

If you're a professional in the field, even if you're a psychologist or a therapist or a counselor, you're not going to get that education in regard to perinatal mental health in your degree program. It doesn't exist. You have to go to a separate facility. You go to PSI, for example.

They are reaching women, families, care providers, and communities and educating them on maternal mental health.

But in that process of their work, they have also normalized postpartum depression and anxiety. They state over and over how it's normal, how we are all here suffering in motherhood, and inadvertently put a label over motherhood saying, "This is just how it goes."

Support and community have always been at the forefront of PSI and their work and it still is.

But now there is this push for therapy and pharmaceutical medications because, well, it's all normal, that's just how it goes. A lot of this goes into science as well, the lack thereof, of science, I should say, and the simplicity of these are the changes that take place in the brain during motherhood.

Well, that's fine and dandy. There are even studies looking at the cultural lens and saying things like see, perinatal mental health issues happen everywhere.

Well, all of that is true, but why isn't anyone investigating why or how do we prevent it?

One of my biggest pushbacks from people trained through PSI is that perinatal mental health conditions like postpartum depression and anxiety cannot be prevented. Again, it's normal. Can't stop it from happening, expect it, and nothing can be further from this truth. That is not the truth.

When you get stuck in the dogma of bringing awareness to a situation or something that you believe in, it becomes really easy to cross the lines and to inappropriately normalize what isn't true.

PSI, if you want to finally talk about Malaysian postpartum or postpartum nutrition or the myriad of other healing and preventative methods, a major group of professionals and I would love to chat with you.

For those of you listening, we've tried to open the conversation many times and we're ignored or banned from their groups and so on.

This isn't just about normalizing perinatal mental health issues either. It's the same for normalizing your infant sleeping away from you, normalizing commercial formula, major postpartum hair loss, and autoimmune disease after birth.

We say all of these things, all that's normal. Your thyroid is not working? Well, you just had a baby. You can expect it. Your hormones are out of balance? Well, of course, you're a female. The list goes on. Yes, these may be a part of our journey. There should be zero shaming on that. Zero shaming on that. These aren't wrong things. They just aren't biologically normal. It isn't what we're designed as humans to do or experience. But that doesn't mean certain situations require something else, like formula, medications, or anything else that helps with whatever it is that you need.

No one should have to explain their choices to anyone. You do you. But we can simultaneously recognize that these things aren't necessarily normal, that they only exist because we're lacking as mothers.

And what are we lacking? We're lacking support.

We are expected to do all of this on our own, to navigate breastfeeding, to navigate our changing bodies, on top of how in the world you care for a new baby.

Many women aren't even given the opportunity to hold a baby until their baby is born. It's their first time. We're not exposed to that. We're not exposed to breastfeeding. We're not exposed to the trials and tribulations in navigating, the early stages of motherhood.

It's usually done in the dark, behind closed doors, and we're often not invited until we're already in the throes of that experience, and by then it's too late.

Often we're scrambling, we don't know who to call.

Where do we get help?

Is this normal?

Should I be bleeding this much?

What does this look like?

Why is my baby crying? I don't understand.

All of these things happen and your brain is shifting during this time. And here's the other thing.

We're lacking education. We know our bodies are changing, but not a single soul out there is telling us how it's changing, how our brain is shifting, how the way we birth our babies into the world, and how we experience those early weeks and postpartum are literally shaping our brains and the way that we connect with our babies and also the other people in our life, like our partners, our other children, everything.

We're not talking about how the body changes and the digestion and the nervous system and all of these things. We're not taught how to heal our bodies.

We're not taught how to heal our bodies.

Hey, I'm going to be 100% straight with you. The postpartum world is changing right now and I know you feel it. It's in the politics, our community spaces. There is an urgent need to implement a different approach to postpartum health. If you're an alternative provider or postpartum advocate, you need to be with us in the postpartum university membership. Get the method, the tools, the handouts, the advanced trainings and so much more to not only help your clients and your business grow but to help you grow too. Marketwatch says that the after birth services and nutrition and support is set for extraordinary growth by 2030. Don't miss your opportunity to help women and families who desperately need your holistic support. Go to www.postpartumu.com/membership We're accepting registrations right now and we can't wait to see you there. 

Providers are not taught how to help us heal our bodies or to give us the education we need. We're left in the dark and we're also lacking resources. We're lacking the tools, the care systems. We're lacking the money. How many of us would have loved to have been able to stay home with our babies?

We never got the time off to do it. We were forced to go back to work or we couldn't hire out for the care that we knew we needed, and we don't have a government system who's handing this out, as they do in some cultures around the world, where pelvic floor physical therapy and counseling and your baby's first six weeks of needs and nursing care coming to your home to give you what you need and to help reassure you is not there, as it is in other places.

We don't have education, we don't have support, we don't have the resources, and none of that is our fault. That's the fault of a society that hasn't given us what we need, and instead, they create false narratives of what is normal, so that you become a consumer and buy the thing that fixes it, which often creates so much unnecessary additional stress.

Take sleep training, for example. This is a favorite and one that I had and just a really terrible experience with and I know I'm not the only one because I worked in this industry for 15 years. Sleep training is a multi-billion dollar industry geared toward helping moms babies and families get better sleep, which we all know we desperately need, and in the birth of my first, I didn't really truly understand what sleep deprivation was until you actually experience it after having my first baby.

He was high needs, always needed to be with me, and I was told he needed to sleep in a crib. The pediatricians told me this, my mom had told me this, my grandmother had told me this, and my friends had told me this. He's got to figure it out. He's got to learn. You got to sleep train him, nurse him this way, do it like this, then set him down like this, only after this amount of time.

There were so many rules in which to train my child, my infant, my newborn, how to sleep in his crib without me, and it didn't work.

I will tell you, I pushed for it for so long and I fell apart. I had extreme postpartum depression. A lot of it stemmed from the exhaustion I felt and the anxiety I felt as well from not getting the sleep I needed, but also from trying to figure out all of the rules.

And you know, oh, this thing worked and he did fine on that. So what was that? One little thing that I can repeat over and over right, we get stuck trying to figure out that process of what worked and what didn't and what did I do wrong and how should I do it this way, and I fell apart. I absolutely fell apart.

I remember when my son was six months old, we went on an extended family trip, and the place where we ended up staying didn't have a crib. My son had to sleep with me and I was like, oh my gosh, this is going to be awful, all the work that we have done, which was significant but has led to nowhere because obviously, I was still struggling. My son was still not sleeping and I was still not sleeping and, despite all of the sleep training books and everything that I have invested in as a single mom, I should say, with very little money to my name to try and get my son to sleep, just wasn't working.

We're on this trip and he had to sleep with me in my bed, and I had never slept so well in my entire life. And it revolutionized how I looked at this and I thought, wow, wait a second, not only is my son sleeping and not only am I sleeping, but we feel really good about this too.

I just felt like everybody was just happier, obviously because we're probably getting more sleep, but also there was a connection, there was a bond, there was an understanding that goes well beyond that and I recognized it for what it was.

And here I am investing in this multimillion-dollar business of sleep training and not recognizing that the actual biological normal for my baby and for me was to sleep together, that there was a healthy rewiring of our brains, a healthy bond that was being created, that it was regulating my nervous system, it was regulating my hormones.

It was supporting his growth and development, not just for his body but also for his brain. It's mind-boggling the benefits of sleeping together and co-sleeping, and how little we do that as a society. We have pinned it as something dangerous, as something wrong.

If I just listened to my body and had what I needed, I would have never have been in the predicament in the first place, which caused so much more pain that needed healing, that I needed to invest in the normalization of motherhood challenges in this world of zero support and education and resources are the very trademarks of a system and a business that keeps us all from ever feeling good in motherhood.

Now the critical question why are we all experiencing motherhood this way? Well, hopefully, you see the answer that it isn't you.

It's a system that wants you to believe that this is normal motherhood, and in day-to-day existence, I know that doesn't help much, right?

We're still faced with exhaustion, burnout, touched out, overwhelmed, overstimulated, depleted. Did I mention exhaustion? Right?

We can still embrace the commonality of all of this without surrendering to a system that isn't supportive.

Now it's time for a change, a collective shift in this perspective, and that's only going to happen when we rise up and say enough is enough when we begin to accept the biological normal of sleeping with our babies, of nourishing our bodies, of fresh air, of better birth outcomes, of using herbs as tools and really having the postpartum support.

Imagine getting really creative with how we care for each other, going back to cooking parties and cleaning gatherings and community circles and family activities and creative expression outlets. Oh my gosh, it sounds so divine saying that.

I'm getting goosebumps. THAT is normal. That is also possible, but it's going to take you to stand up and make it happen.

I'm not gonna lie, that's the hardest part and that's why postpartum university exists, why we have a membership to help you, help yourself and your community. I got you.

I am so grateful you turned into the Postpartum University podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode enough to leave us a quick review and, more importantly, I hope more than ever that you take what you've learned here, apply it to your own life, and consider joining us in the Postpartum University membership. It's a private space where mothers and providers learn the real truth and the real tools needed to heal in the years to come and the real tools needed to heal in the years Postpartum. You can learn more at www.postpartumu. That's the letter U.com. We'll see you next week.