UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript is provided in its raw, unedited form and may contain errors. We have not proofread this transcript, so it may include typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this rough transcript as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode, my guest is Erica Djossa. Let me tell you a little bit about Erica. She’s the founder of Momwell and a psychotherapist who specializes in maternal mental health. She founded Momwell to set a standard of care for providers and to ensure mom-centered specialized mental health support at any stage of motherhood. She’s the mother of three young boys, ages five, seven, and nine, and she’s written a new book with Sounds True. It’s called Releasing the Mother Load: How to Carry Less and Enjoy Motherhood More. Erica, welcome.
Erica Djossa: Thank you so much for having me.
TS: Pleasure. Our conversation, yes, it’s for mothers and we’re going to be talking about this notion of releasing the mother load, but I found in reading your new book that it’s really for all of us to understand how, as a society, we’ve colluded and are participating and putting an undue burden on mothers and mothering. And I wonder if we could just start there. When you think of this notion of releasing the mother load, the responsibility that we have, those of us who aren’t mothers for understanding this phenomenon.
ED: We can really perpetuate norms, whether those are gender norms or how we envision mothers should be and should behave or should perform in their role. And as aunts, as mother-in-laws, as friends, we can serve to surveil and police those in our lives back into those roles by the things that we say to them.
And this can come in the form of, “Oh, your husband worked such a hard day. They shouldn’t have to come home and cook their own dinner.” Or comment about our child’s weight and how they must be eating. Or all kinds of different ways that we unintentionally, and I’m sure not maliciously, surveil and like I said, police or nudge people back into what we think or we have internalized a good mom should be.
TS: What’s your definition of a good mom?
ED: Ooh, I haven’t been asked that before. It’s really tethered to my values, and I guess that makes sense. That’s what we go through in the book. And to me it is being a safe place, being a dependable, reliable place. It also, there’s that I’ve attuned to and prioritized my relationship with my boys today. And that’s not to be mistaken for I have been zoned in and zoomed in on them all day long and have felt the need to be on all the time, quantity. It’s that I’ve made a really intentional effort to have a connected moment with them today.
I mean, we all want our kids to be good citizens. And I also think about them a lot in their partnership role, whoever they choose to partner with, that they’re not going to look to, if it is a woman, look to the woman in the house to be their keeper, to be the keeper of the house, to be the keeper of the children, should they have any.
And that’s something that’s really important to me is teaching them that they have an equal responsibility to domestic and care work just as their dad does, just as we share responsibility in the home. So those are, I guess a few things spoken like a true therapist and somebody who’s passionate about this space.
TS: Well, it’s interesting because you immediately started by leaning into your values and are you leading your life from your values? And you make this interesting distinction in the book between values-centered mothering and what you call intensive mothering. I’d never heard that term before, but that this focus that we have in our culture on intensive mothering is part of what creates the mother load. So for people who are hearing that term for the first time, what is intensive mothering?
ED: So it’s a term that sociologists use and research and it’s used to name the construct or the norms in which we are mothering. Sociologists have deemed this the era of intensive mothering. And there are a few core myths or beliefs associated with what that means and they’re very prevalent in our society.
So that means that we feel the need to be it all and do it all for our children. That mothers are best biologically suited to be the caregivers for their child and they should be the one main caregiver. That mothering should be all-consuming of our time, our energy, our resources, and we should take joy in putting our kids’ needs before our own.
And then there’s this other part of this message that is we should be wholly and completely satisfied in doing that. So to want something outside of motherhood or to long for something for yourself is considered selfish or seen counter what it means to be a good mom. Which is very confusing for those of us who have been raised in a society that tells us as women, “You can be it all, shatter glass ceilings, go after your goals and the things that you want.”
And then I stepped into motherhood and it was actually like, “But you should want to actually be at home with your kids and taking care of the house because that’s what you should enjoy doing.” So those are some of the norms that really feed into why we continue to carry this invisible load that is so heavy, heavy to carry.
TS: Now this notion that a mother is the person who is best biologically suited to care for the child, I can certainly see how this has become an accepted viewpoint. I mean beginning with birthing the child and then nursing the child, yes, you are biologically the most suited person on the planet to care for this child. So tell me how is that not true?
ED: I open the book with a little inventory of whether you see domestic labor and caregiving labor as gendered or not. And as you mentioned, there are few tasks in caregiving that are suited to our biology like giving birth or breastfeeding, but pretty much every other task that we evaluate and look at is not gendered in our parenting roles.
And so just because I am the one that has the breasts to feed my three boys, which I did exclusively breastfeed them, which in retrospect I may not have. Knowing what I know now, I would’ve combo fed and spared my mental health a little bit. But just because I’m the one that has the milk to feed doesn’t mean that I have to be the one getting up and changing the diaper and burping and resettling them.
So my partner would actually get up, bring my son in to me to nurse in the bed, then take them back, change their diaper, burp them, settle them, because sometimes in those early days, those wake-ups could be an hour and a half, two hours long. So to protect some sleep, he can do all the other associated labor around the task that is actually dependent on me and we can share in this feeding journey together.
But what happens when we think that I’m best biologically suited to feed and to get up and to soothe and to nurture and to take care of, then we start to slowly build this cage for ourselves in these patterns of invisible labor and physical, very visible labor as well, that are so difficult to break out of. And we don’t realize until we’re drowning in plain sight that this is entirely unsustainable, which was what led to my breakdown turn breakthrough that I talk about in the book where I’m burning myself out. This is not a sustainable way to parent and a sustainable way to mother.
TS: Now you mentioned that in retrospect you might not have breastfed your three boys in totality. You might have alternated between. And I could hear someone saying, “It’s much better to breastfeed your children.”
ED: Oh yeah.
TS: It means you must. Like, “What? You would compromise that, really?” And then they’re immediately hitting the I’m out of here button. I’m sure you hear all of these different views. And the notion of values-based parenting, if I understand it correctly, for someone maybe that is their value. Maybe that means you’re bringing something else forward. So help us understand that because you can get into all of these arguments about what is the right way, the right, capital R-I-G-H-T way.
ED: Yeah. Well, when we really begin to unpack that, well, of course you should do everything you possibly can to exclusively breastfeed. What I’m hearing is yes, you should martyr and sacrifice every single bit of yourself, even if it’s to your detriment, excuse me, even if it’s to your detriment.
I work with a lot of mom clients who are sleep-deprived and sleep is a cornerstone of our mental health. When we are sleep-deprived, some scary bad things can happen. And we hold so tightly and rigidly onto an expectation that we set for ourselves before we ever spent a day in the role of being a parent who’s actually caregiving for a new infant. So I step into this role and now I want to prove I’m a good mom and I can do this and I was built for this and I was made for this, and I’m absolutely destroying my mental health in the process.
And we know that when a mom is well, a baby is well. And I’m lucky that I had a very supportive partner, but when I say in retrospect I would’ve done it differently, it’s not that I wouldn’t have persisted to breastfeed my children. Some can’t breastfeed, some don’t even have breasts because they’ve been removed from surgeries. And I have people reach out to me saying they’re made to feel guilty that they can’t feed and they don’t even have breasts. This goes really deep in the mom community.
I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have done that, I’m saying that I would’ve been flexible. I would have taken the new evidence in the situation and used that to make my decision. So I would’ve seen, you know what? I am sleep-deprived and I’m not functioning. I’m not functioning well right now. I need a protected chunk of sleep. I’m going to either pump and give a bottle or I’m going to just supplement with some formula for a night feed so that I can restore some sleep and some wellness so that I can actually maybe run this marathon of feeding that I’m trying to commit to.
So there’s a rigidity that can come with holding so true to these expectations for ourselves that can be really maladaptive in the long run.
TS: It’s interesting, you used this phrase, the martyr, mother as martyr, and it seems like part of what you’re doing in Releasing the Mother Load is you are trying to say uh-uh, uh-uh. How do you relate to that undoing this notion of being a martyr?
ED: It is to say that being a mother is the most amazing privilege and I would never undo it, though, let’s be real. There are days where you question all your life’s decisions parenting three children, but I wouldn’t undo it. But it’s also to free ourselves in a way to say we can also want things other for ourself. And what happens when we are consumed with the mother load or the domestic labor and the caregiving work is our time is already monopolized and spoken for. So there is no capacity to dream or to want or to desire for ourselves outside of motherhood because we are already beyond consumed with our role.
And so I really see this as an act where learning to care for ourselves and centering mom, not only is proven according to research to help children, but also empowers us to have some freedom that just feels so fulfilling and that we are deserving of. And that doesn’t get spoken about a lot because the narrative and the culture is to put everybody’s needs before our own.
TS: You write about how intensive mothering wasn’t always put on the altar in our culture, that this is something that evolved and developed in the middle of the 20th century. Can you talk more about that? How did intensive mothering come to be what we all say, “Oh, that’s historically,” and now people like you are rewriting that narrative?
ED: It’s really a bit of a perfect storm. We’ve got millennials who are the generation that’s really spanning the childbearing years right now, and they’re a digitally native generation going into mothering for the first time. And so we’ve got this over-informed, over-educated, overwhelmed group of parents. And then we also have this generation where in 1950, 25% of mothers worked outside of the home and now less than 75 years later, 87% of mothers work outside of the home and yet the majority are still responsible and own the responsibility of the caregiving and household tasks.
So now we’ve also got this pressure cooker. We’ve got all this additional expectation from social media and the way that information is distilled down to us. And then we also have two full-time roles that we are carrying in a way that generations have never had to before. So it’s a pressure cooker of a situation that sets us up to fail and feel like we are drowning and not good enough or not built for this role, not maternal enough.
And one of the things that I actually see is rather than stepping back and seeing this big motherhood system that we’re talking about, the air that we are breathing or the water we’re swimming in, instead we look around and compare ourselves to others and see that it appears as though they are doing it all and they’re carrying it all. So it must be me, I must be the problem. I must be failing or not good enough or not cut out for this role.
And when we’re not open and talking about it and realizing that we’re all just drowning in plain sight, we stay siloed and there is no resistance or there is no permission to break out of this pattern because we feel like it’s a me, I’m flawed problem.
TS: What do you say, Erica, when people say, “Fathers also aren’t getting enough sleep and are tremendously burdened with young children and all of the responsibilities that come with that”? Aren’t you over emphasizing the mother load in your analysis? What about the father load?
ED: I have a very contributing and willing partner. So I’ve always had a very neutral set of eyes on what the invisible load of fatherhood looks like, what pressures and norms they face in their own unique role that are different from what mothers might face. And the pressure and the socialization for them to step into things like being the provider or feeling the need to advance in their career, all of those are very real and really do come online when they step into parenthood. That’s why there’s a lot of talk about readiness, readiness to have children because there’s this additional pressure and weight financially that is our responsibility.
But when it comes to the caregiving and the household tasks, what I actually see a lot of is, well, I have to do the wake-ups because my partner has to get up and go to work tomorrow. And there is a valuing of our partner’s time because their time is exchanged for money that it is protected and valued more than a mother’s time. So mothers will get up in the nighttime and do the night wakings and shoulder all of the additional labor because their caregiving work is not seen as work.
And so that’s the pattern that I tend to see. But our fathers of this generation are more involved, and I hear this a lot where it’s like, “This is the most involved generation or the most contributing group of fathers that spend more time with their children per minute, per hour than any other generation.” And that is true, they do a lot more around the house or contribute in a different way.
But what we are actually talking about is ownership and responsibility over domains and departments of the home. So how did the distribution of labor land the way that it did in the house? Was it a conscious conversation because we both feel equally responsible, that we both are responsible for keeping house and caregiving, that we discussed who was going to take what? Or was it auto-assigned and auto-assumed that it was going to be mom because she is the female, the woman in the house who’s stepping into this more socialized or traditional role? 95% of the time when I speak to people, there was not a conscious conversation. It was an autopilot falling into these patterns and norms.
TS: One of the eye-opening stories that you tell is about the pile of laundry and the distribution of the laundry tasks in your family and how you were able to really, I would say, deconstruct that to have quite some insight into something that you call cognitive labor that goes into the care-taking of our homes. And I’d never thought about this before, so I wonder if you could share the story and then the insight?
ED: I still wrestle with how a pile of laundry can create an epiphany of sorts that led me on this journey. It’s just kind of silly to me, but I call it my aha moment. One of the things about cognitive labor and invisible labor is that they are so invisible and abstract that you feel the weight of carrying it, but you can’t really articulate or put your finger on what it is that feels so heavy because it’s a million little tasks, it’s not one big task.
So as a family of five, I was postpartum with my third son, he was maybe eight or 10 weeks old at the time. And anyone knows a family of five and little babies and poop blowouts and burp cloths and sheets being spit up on. And I had this mountain of laundry that was building up and my husband was responsible for washing, switching it over to the dryer because my ADHD brain would leave it for like 48 hours before I’d remember to turn it over. And so he had this system ironed out and my job was to fold it and put it away.
And pile after pile after pile started to build up. And I would walk by it every day and be like, “What kind of capable adult cannot just fold laundry and put it away? I know I’m a capable human being, I’ve done a lot. There are things that I’m really good at. How come I’m being taken down by this pile of laundry?” And one day I was like, “Why am I so resistant?”
I became curious about what I was avoiding or pushing away from or having such a hard time with. And when I really unpacked it, it was a changeover in season. I had to rotate all the kids’ dressers in seasonal clothing but also in size, make sure that all the right sizes were moved. I had to make a list of what I had to go and purchase. I had to store all the previous season away and figure out where I was going to put that. There were things that had to go to donation. And before I knew it, there was four to six hours of additional physical labor involved in just folding and putting that laundry away.
And that was my aha moment, that’s when I saw it for the first time that, oh, this isn’t just laundry. It’s not just a laundry problem, there is a volume. If you think of the iceberg, there is a whole bottom to this iceberg that is usually invisible to the eye that I had to see in order to even validate my own feelings and resistance to what this task was.
TS: I was reading Releasing the Mother Load, and as I was reading it, my wife said to me, we’re out of town right now and she said, “Can you please call the vet and order more of this pain medicine that the dog sitter needs?” And I was like, “Yeah, I can do that. OK. OK.” And I called the vet and the vet says, “Well, we can’t get you that medicine until your dog comes in for its annual checkup.” And I thought to myself, “Annual checkup? I didn’t even know the dog, our dog Raspberry, needed to have an annual checkup.”
And I was thinking about this whole notion of cognitive labor and how my wife keeps track of all of the appointments and all the medication and everything that’s going on. It’s not just this one act of calling, there’s a whole structure that she’s tracking that I’m not tracking. And I saw that that was what you’re pointing to. It’s like these whole areas of responsibility, not just an action to take. I plug in and I do an action, but that’s not the same as owning a whole structural part of our shared life together.
ED: Well, and if you think about it like writing a research paper in university or something along those lines, you’ve got to go and we’ll figure out the topic. You’ve got to source the articles, you’ve got to read them, you’ve got to research and piece together in your mind what your outline is going to be before you even sit down to physically put anything on paper. And that cognitive labor and that planning and that anticipating and researching is often the vast majority of the job. But the reason why it’s particularly tricky is because it is pervasive and boundary-less.
Physical tasks, like if I go and book a massage for myself, I can lay on the massage table and the garbage probably isn’t going to haunt me because I can’t do anything about it right now anyways. But all of that cognitive, oh, I really need to call the vet or I really need to book this appointment. Or, I’ve been putting off making eye appointments for myself and my son for, I don’t even want to admit how long it’s been, probably over 12 months. It’s been ridiculous. I can’t just make this phone call.
And these are the things that just intrude every bit of leisure time we have, every bit of self-care time that we have. And that’s why they can feel so smothering and heavy to carry. There is no box or boundary we can put them in and we carry them with us everywhere.
TS: You’re right. We have to become aware of what we’re carrying so we can redistribute it. And we have someone here who’s written in and said, “My husband and I have taken on the gender norms that you talk about. We both want an even need to break this down and we want to even the playing field of our parenting responsibilities. But where do we start? Are there one or two first steps you can recommend?”
ED: I love that we’re acknowledging that the partner is willing here. This is so much my experience is that we have a willing partner. There are partners out there that are not willing. But we have a willing partner, it’s like where do we even begin? Well, one, making that invisible visible. We can’t redistribute what we can’t name and see.
And this is labor in itself, so I’ve gone ahead in the book and made what I call load maps for you, where I tried to think about all of those invisible pieces and lay them out. You can also download the PDF as a free resource where these lists are made for you as a starting point for these conversations. So that I’ve mapped out what the bottom of that iceberg really is.
And there’s a blank one for you to fill in anything that may have been left out so that you then can sit with the whole picture and say, “OK, this is what goes into feeding the house. It’s actually all of these volume of tasks. Does one person want to own this? Are we going to divide and conquer certain pieces?” But until we can name it and see it, it’s like we’re just taking shots in the dark trying to figure out how to redistribute it.
TS: Your very first sentence in Releasing the Mother Load, here we go, “The day my volcano of mom rage erupted was the day that changed my entire approach to motherhood.” And I thought, “‘Mom rage.’ I’ve never heard that term. I’ve never heard it.” And then I went to your Momwell website and was looking around and I saw that you focus the therapeutic support in different areas for people who are suffering from postpartum anxiety, postpartum depression, mom rage was one of the top five areas. And I thought, “Oh, this is a thing. I need to understand more about mom rage.”
ED: Yeah, it’s interesting I get pushback, again like, “Why mom rage? It doesn’t get called dad rage. Dads are angry too and stuff,” which is all true. But what is really unique about anger in motherhood is that mothers, as we’re talking about this construct and these norms, are expected to be all loving, all patient, all kind, all nurturing and warm. And so to be angry or to be rage-filled is the opposite of what it means to be a good mom.
So anger and rage and negative emotions towards our role are really tricky in motherhood because there’s a lot of shame associated with them. But I put mom rage in, I’m going to say three buckets, one being resentment. So we have postpartum rage, which is linked to our biology and our adjustment to motherhood, postpartum rage being the most common overlooked symptom of postpartum depression and anxiety. So anger and irritability postpartum, not always, doesn’t have to be, but often is a symptom of depression or anxiety and is often overlooked.
So if you are postpartum, which to me is up to 12 years after baby is… 12 months not years. 12 months after baby is born, if you are feeling uncharacteristically angry, irritable, lashing out, losing your cool in a way that is just so unlike you, as a therapist, if you were coming to me, that would be a red flag for something really more biologically going on for us.
And then we’ve got more what I would put in a maternal anger bucket, which is this righteous anger and frustration towards why am I the one, why me, the way that the system is so stacked against us and all the things that we have to carry. I don’t know if you heard, I think it was Minna Dubin writing about in the New York Times, all the moms that went to scream in the field in the pandemic because of all the things that they were carrying.
There is an anger when we start to see the truth about how mothers are not valued, they are not cared for, they are not supported in any systemic or political way, of course that makes us infuriated. And then there’s also a piece of that that we have to learn how to cope with that because that will just destroy us and eat us alive.
And then there’s resentment, which is that piece of how unfair this is directed at our partner. Maybe we see them as the enemy or we see them as the one doing wrong to us because they are not contributing or seeing us in the way that we need them to. And resentment is also something that I would put in the anger bucket.
So there’s a few different flavors or ways that this appears, but ultimately having the conversation about anger in motherhood is so important because we often go underground with it.
TS: What did you discover was the root system underneath your mom rage?
ED: I was having the uncharacteristic, irritable, like irritable from the time I opened my eyes in the morning already felt like I was at capacity and just had no patience or tolerance for any minor disruption that would happen in my day. And I was about 10 to 12 weeks postpartum with my third at the time, and my rage was very much rooted in postpartum depression. It was a wake-up call on my meltdown on my driveway when I’m heaving and throwing up that I am not OK. This is not me. This feels uncharacteristic. I also should be able to cope with this better than I am. There’s something going on here.
And I actually started medication for postpartum depression and anxiety that day, and the entire sky parted. The clouds went away, the sun came out. And all of that irritability and that rage that I felt towards my kids, that I felt towards my partner and even myself, slowly started to lift and I started to feel like myself again.
TS: If a mom’s listening to this and is recognizing that their rage has the flavor of resentment, and let’s just say the labor here is not equitably distributed, it’s not, and I haven’t spoken up, I haven’t spoken up for my needs, one of the things you write about is you quote research from the Gottmans that the way we start a difficult discussion has everything to do with the outcome. And that 92%, something like that, of all difficult conversations, you can predict the outcome by the way the conversation begins, by the tone, the language.
So what would you recommend to a woman who’s ready to have a conversation with their partner about things need to change, like I want to do one of these Mother Load worksheets together, and they’re not sure how receptive their partner will be to this?
ED: There’s two pieces. There’s a very practical piece, but the first piece is that we need to shift our perspective from seeing our partner as the problem. When we see either ourself as the problem because we are flawed and we’re not doing a good enough job and we’re just not meant for this role, then what is the solution to a flawed human being? There’s no creative problem solving that we can engage because we are broken.
And when we see the patterns in our home playing out as our partner’s problem and their incompetence or their lack of, we are personalizing it and it feels like a slight towards us, we are going to carry that energy into these conversations with a real strong tone of you need to change and this is a you problem.
While some of that is true, this is a me and my partner against the norms and ways we’ve observed parents to do this before. This is a, we need to work as a team, call out these patterns and norms for what they really are, and realize our partner was socialized into their role just as much as we were and it’s not like they’ve intentionally shouldered us with this burden. So that is some work that we’ve got to do within ourselves to have some constructive conversations.
And then when we’re ready to sit down with a load map or to have a conversation, there’s a few really practical pieces. One, try your best to do it at a time when the kids are not around or won’t interrupt you. So if I’m frustrated and I’m cooking dinner and I think it’s time, because I’m pissed, to strike up a conversation, but I’m being interrupted every five seconds, and there’s things boiling on the stove and I haven’t eaten yet, so I’m hungry, and there are all of these unmet needs going on, unlikely to be the time to have a productive conversation.
So I go through in the book some red light and green light times to think through an intentional approach to the conversation. And those are, I feel like they are very common sense, but they weren’t things that I employed all the time because usually we want to bring it up in the heat of the moment when we’re ticked about it. And it’s really hard sometimes to bite our tongue, walk away, process it a bit, and then choose an intentional time to approach it.
TS: I want to read this quote, Erica, from the book. You write, “The truth is that our feet are never put to the fire like they are in motherhood. Motherhood brought up a lot that I wasn’t expecting, childhood wounds that I thought were long resolved and buried, pain as I grieved what I hadn’t had, postpartum depression that I didn’t recognize until my breakdown, breakthrough, and much to my surprise, an absolute inability to continue with my path of perfectionism.”
And I wanted to hear you speak to this last point and how resolved for you this perfectionism has become and how you got there.
ED: It’s really common, I will say, for us to feel like we are straddling our past again. I just want to put that out there for anybody who might feel that. When we step into parenthood, it’s like we put one foot in our past while we’re also straddling our future trying to raise these healthy children. It does a very strange thing to the wounds you thought you’ve healed. You start to question what kind of parent does this, because you look at this helpless little child and you’re like, “I would never want to hurt them in this way.” So that’s a very common thing to happen when you enter into parenthood. So I just want to leave that out there for anybody who has felt that.
But perfectionism is something that I wore armor and to be perfect or to achieve or to try to please everybody was really a coping skill for myself. And I would say that I didn’t intentionally let it go. I feel like I was brought to a breaking point where I was forced into acceptance that I can’t do it all or be perfect. That meltdown on the driveway, heaving and gagging to the point of throwing up, realizing I am not OK, was the tearing of the veil to say, “OK, how can I do this sustainably? Something needs to change.”
And that was the first acceptance of it’s OK to be human. It’s OK to not get it right. It’s OK to not be able to carry it all. And it was really the beginning of a journey to self-compassion, to validating how hard it was. Whereas before, I was just so intent on proving that I could do it right or that I could do it perfectly. But there was an acceptance piece that came I would say that really started that journey off.
TS: At Momwell, you focus on linking people to psychotherapists who are specialists in the area of maternal mental health. And quite honestly, I didn’t know that was an area of specialization. I think I thought any therapist could help. What do people who specialize in maternal mental health, what do they know? What skills and capacities and training do they have that maybe a general therapist might not have?
ED: So when it comes to that re-parenting yourself while you’re parenting your children healing part that comes up in that matrescence and adjustment to motherhood, they are aware of that, that shift in identity, the grief and the loss that can come with what you didn’t have and how you reconcile that.
They’re also trained in understanding how your hormones impact your mental health because women’s emotions or mood can be a major factor for some. So some are more sensitive to the fluctuations in hormones and it can contribute to postpartum depression and anxiety, which is why women are at most high risk for onset of mental health challenges during puberty, their menstrual cycle each month, like PMDD, when they are pregnant/postpartum, and when they are perimenopausal and menopausal. That’s when we start to see most mental health challenges onset or rear their heads.
So they have a better understanding of the biology and how it impacts our mental health. And then they’re also sensitive to some of what we’ve been talking about today, the pressures and the societal messages and shoulds that moms face, as well as things like safety and intrusive thoughts.
So for example, I’ve heard of moms who are working with a general therapist and maybe they tell them about some really scary and intrusive thoughts that they’ve had about harming their baby. And it is the most terrifying, disturbing thing that they’ve ever experienced, and they have zero intention of ever… They will go out of their way to even avoid having the thought, let alone acting on it.
And being able to go through and understand what is an intrusive thought versus what is postpartum psychosis or something that’s actually a safety concern is some of the nuanced training that they also have. So that moms can come, seek help and seek support without fearing that they’re going to be reported, that they’re going to be told that they are not fit to mother.
When I poll my audience about what their biggest fears are in seeking therapy and seeking support is that they will be reported or told that they aren’t fit to mother their own child. And so that stands in the way of them getting the care that they need. But maternal mental health therapists have additional training in all of those areas to provide a really safe and non-judgmental environment for moms to process their transition to motherhood.
TS: The last section of Releasing the Mother Load is focused on managing your mental health. And you look at five different assumptions that we need to question, and I thought this was really brilliant and I’m going to go through them with you here. The first one that mental well-being is a destination. I think many of us think mental well-being is some elusive destination, but one we want to get to.
ED: I especially felt that when it came to healing from my upbringing, which I think is why it was so surprising that I had this whole new wave of resentment and anger towards my parents surface when I stepped into motherhood. Healing is not a destination and there are different vantage points and things that come up that can bring on these new waves of emotion. And so learning the skills to be able to process and take care of our well-being in this sustainable way, so important.
TS: As a mom, I should automatically know what to do in high stakes moments.
ED: There is a lot of powerlessness that moms can feel in moments when they think maternal instincts should kick in and they don’t seem to. It’s like, “Did that gene skip me? Do I not know? Am I not cut out for this?” And there’s a lot of second guessing that can go on. Yeah.
TS: The third assumption struggling with my mental health means I’m failing as a mom.
ED: I think that this is really the most disempowering belief because if I won’t redistribute any of this labor, I won’t ask for help, I won’t lean on any of the support systems that I have that are available to me if I think that to ask for their support means I’m admitting that I can’t do it. So being able to shift into a mindset of what is being asked of me is unrealistic for any one person to shoulder and carry. When we can see beyond internalizing it and being hard on ourselves and see that it is actually just entirely unrealistic, then it can actually be very empowering to ask for support and for help.
TS: What I heard also in your own story, when you identified that your mom rage was connected to the postpartum experience you were undergoing and you sought and received medication, that choosing to receive medication, having that vulnerability to say I’m struggling, that that can be a really important way to actually manage your mental health.
ED: And allowed me to enjoy my role. We don’t talk enough about how resentful we can feel, not towards our children, maybe, sometimes, but more towards the role and the responsibilities that we carry, or how sometimes we may even regret the choices that we’ve made. But in getting the right help and the right support, I could actually lean in and enjoy my role in a way that I probably hadn’t really up until that point.
TS: As a headline to this whole section, you write, “The best thing you can do for your child is to take care of your own mental health.” And I thought that’s probably the best thing we could do for anyone, all of us could do is to take care of our own mental health. OK, the fourth assumption, I’ve moved on from my past, it’s all water under the bridge.
ED: Yep, that comes back to that healing piece I think, and well, lots of other things from our past can reemerge because we are living our past out in our present in a way that is so bizarre it’s hard to explain. But your past has never been more ever present than when you are trying to break out of cycles. And when we are trying to learn skills like regulating mom rage while also teaching our children to regulate their own anger, there is no more challenging or weird place to be where I’m trying to teach you, with confidence, a skill that I’ve barely learned myself. It’s a tricky balance. It’s a tricky balance.
TS: When it comes to quote, unquote, “regulating mom rage,” what do you recommend to people when they start to see the anger is starting to rise? They’re not at the rage point, but they’re seeing it starting, what to do at that point so that it doesn’t lift all the way to the rage level?
ED: What I actually find is that most moms don’t realize the little incline. It’s not until they are at more of a 4 or 5 out of 10 where we’re about to erupt, that we are flagged down and pay attention. And so it’s kind of like if you think about driving a car and the check engine light comes on and it’s like, “Hey, pay attention. You might want to get an oil change. You might want to take care of yourself.”
And it’s a subtle but not so subtle sign, it’s there. But we’re often pushing through until the car is on fire on the side of the road before we’re like, “Maybe I should tend to this. Maybe I should eat or shower or do something for myself.” So I think the first step is even catching those in-betweens and not waiting until we’re at that 4 or 5 out of 5.
TS: You mentioned taking care of ourselves and you write about really what self-care means beyond of course people think the bubble bath, the candle. And not that there’s anything wrong with bubble baths and candles, but what’s your definition and framing of self-care for moms?
ED: I actually got this from Dr. Pooja Lakshmin. She writes about true self-care and she was on my podcast and has really contributed to how I frame this for myself. But it’s really a commitment to my own needs and being able to advocate for myself and make sure that those needs get met. And that’s not advocate in a vocal or angry way, but that is me recognizing and realizing that I am the one radically responsible for my needs and ensuring that they have a voice and ensuring that they get met.
And when we are mothering in the era of self-martyrdom, that is so against the grain of what it feels like we should be doing that it can be really uncomfortable. And I hear a lot of people say, “Oh, you should put your needs first.” And then this, that you put your oxygen mask on before you put your kid’s mask on. And while that is true, what I find is it’s too much of a leap from being so far behind in terms of priority that to go to the front feels like, “Ooh.” It makes us really uncomfy.
So I try to paint this picture of, can our needs just have a seat at the table on equal playing field as the rest of our family? So if it’s time for my children to eat so that their tummies are full, can I feed myself and have a full tummy? If I’m going to prioritize putting my children in an enriching social activity because it’s good for their mental health and their development, can I also consider my own mental health and social development? So it’s being able to see what is good for them is also good for us, and how do we assert and insert ourself into that equation on equal ground.
TS: I wonder, Erica, could you share an example to me of how you and your husband and your family resolved a situation where you could tell there was not shared, equitable, everybody’s needs are getting met? You felt, my needs aren’t really getting met in the same way, how did you work through it? Maybe give us an actual example with your family.
ED: Let me think about this. One of the ones that comes to mind goes back to when we were really in the throes of little kids, little, little kids. And my partner was very stepping into fulfilling his duty and role of being the provider and advancing in his career and was doing a lot of certifications and classes and things to advance his career.
And one, my career is on pause, no bitterness over here, feeling like I’ve got to sacrifice everything I’ve worked for to care-give. But then also, he didn’t realize that when he took on these additional certifications that required reading and paper writing and study time and prep time, that it impacted me as well, like how we are tethered together. And when you have less capacity, I then have less capacity. Or I feel the need to protect your time, and therefore feel like you are not a support or accessible to me. And I’ve got an eight-week-old infant and I have mastitis and a fever. This is a problem.
And so it was really hard for me to even validate that experience for myself to be able to say, there’s no more schooling happening, wrap this certification up. We need a break because I need to feel as though you are accessible to support me in this caregiving role. And that’s a conversation that has resurfaced.
And then there’s been times when I’ve been committed to projects at work and I’m less accessible in the home environment. And he’s also had the same conversation with me to say, “I’ve been picking up a lot of the slack or the pickups and drop-offs around here. I know that this is for a season, but it’s going to have to level out at some point because this is too far in my direction.”
TS: Erica, you talk to a lot of people through Momwell and through all of your interactions with new mothers. Where do you think we’re at right now in terms of culture change and moving out of this intensive mothering pattern?
ED: I think that from the conversations I’m having, so many moms are so focused or trapped in thinking that they are the reason they can’t juggle it all, that they can’t even lift their head up to see the bigger picture. And that’s a really discouraging thing to see. And I think that that is so at the core of why I wrote this book, if for nothing else, if for nothing else than to know you most certainly are not the problem.
We won’t challenge motherhood or even think it’s possible to do it differently if we are stuck in our own loop of feeling like we’re failing, recommitting to do it better tomorrow, and then inevitably not being able to carry it all, and then feeling like, again, I’m failing and I’ve got to do this whole cycle again. We can’t see what is going on around us when we are stuck in that.
And so my hope is that we begin to lift our heads up more, be open and honest with these conversations, and give others permission to also do so, so that we can start to chip away at some of these social norms and expectations.
TS: And what would you say to someone who’s listening who says, “Look, I know I need to honor my own needs as much as I honor the needs of the other members of my family, but I just find it so uncomfortable to do that, so uncomfortable. My habit pattern is so much everyone else comes first, everybody. How can I possibly shift this?”
ED: I would say to start small. When we think about making change, we often think about going for the pendulum swing of change, again to this whole put myself first, from the bottom to first. And really it’s like, what is one teeny, tiny, tolerable way that I can prioritize my needs today? My kids now know this rule. When I wake up, it is a half an hour of mommy’s latte time. And they will come over and peer into my coffee cup to see what level the coffee is at before they’re going to ask me to join in an activity with them.
Because one thing I just felt like I needed is to wean myself into the morning and not start off full throttle. And so it can be such little ways that you begin practicing to put yourself first, that it doesn’t have to be flooding and feel so overwhelming. Just start with something doable and tangible.
TS: Talking to Erica Djossa, the founder of Momwell and the author of this gorgeous, really comprehensive—it’s a workbook. You get into it and there’s so much here that you can engage in. It’s called Releasing the Mother Load: How to Carry Less and Enjoy Motherhood More. And really, you’re an activist, Erica, in such a powerful way and I bow to you. Thank you for your good work.
ED: Thank you so much for this talk today. I appreciate it.
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