Time to match our expectation of motherhood to our reality

In this episode I discuss the gap between the expectations and realities of motherhood. I  emphasise the importance of finding our own values, needs, and dreams in order to live a fulfilling life as a mother.  I share moments from my personal experience of my pregnancy and birth journey, highlighting how societal conditioning often leads to unrealistic expectations. I discuss the need for mothers to acknowledge their true feelings and realities, rather than conforming to an idealised image of motherhood. I encourage you to identify your core values, needs, and aspirations and by aligning your life with these, you can create a more authentic and satisfying motherhood experience.

Transcript

Welcome to this week's episode. 

Time to match our expectation of motherhood to our reality. 

It's so easy to get caught up in life and following the crowd. We go along with what society tells us we should want. And we believe when we accomplish those goals or achieve those dreams, that we'll be happy, we'll feel fulfilled, and we'll be living our perfect lives. Sadly, this is not how it often works out. And the truth is that the reality of what we create doesn't live up to the expectation we had in our heads. Every stage from pregnancy, giving birth, and daily life with a newborn toddler or older child involves us discovering how our expectations don't match the reality.

This is not our fault.  This is all part of the social conditioning, cultural beliefs and patterns of behaviour that have meant we've been kept in the dark. We all know the phrase, if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. Before we become mothers ourselves, we are only ever shown or told about a part of the story and what being a mother means. People only tell us the nice bits, the good parts, never the bad or the messy parts. We are sold this image of a mother who is blissfully happy and that motherhood is this magical time in our lives. So when we are faced with the reality of pregnancy, the morning sickness that really lasts all day, the sore back or the restless legs, even our beautiful baby bumps, they do not always match the perfect picture. My first bump took ages to pop and I was fairly neat most of the way through the second trimester. But as I approached the due date, I felt like I was Mrs. Blobby and it was impossible to get comfortable. And if I even looked at chocolate, I got heartburn. The reality didn't quite match the picture I'd been holding in my head. 

Then came the birth. I was of the understanding that if I trusted my body, it knew what to do. One of my mantras had been to say my body knows how to grow my baby, it also knows how to birth my baby. If I surrendered my fear, then my body knew what to do. I simply had to breathe, relax through the contractions, and my body would do the job it needed to do.

I wouldn't feel pain, that came from resistance. I would feel pressure. But nothing I couldn't handle. So there I was, planning my water birth, doing my hypnobirthing and having my essential oils and crystals. I do believe these things helped me stay mentally strong and they allowed me to be able to cope with the reality of 54 hours of labor, being blue lighted away from my planned water birth at home and to hospital because my daughter had decided to poo herself. I'm not surprised, we were over 40 hours in at that point and rotate to dilate. The mantra I kept repeating wasn't working at all, certainly not fast enough.

The midwife that I had for my home birth ran out of gas canisters for the gas and air and she had to call for more. Luckily, when I got to hospital, they had it plugged directly into the wall. I ended up delivering my daughter on my back legs in stirrups and with an episiotomy to boot, not the dream birth I had envisioned. That's only the start, though. Once you bring the baby home, you really see the gap start to widen between the picture you expected and the reality of postpartum and this new life you've begun as a mother. The comical boobs, the fact you can't sit down unless on a doughnut cushion for a few weeks at least anyway, the night sweats, the unexpected emotions. I woke up from a nap about five days after my daughter was born and just couldn't stop crying. I'd been fine.

When I went to sleep, my milk had come in. It's very common, was what the midwife told me when I mentioned it. If it was so common, why did no one warn me about it then? From the hospital staff to the community midwives, the health visitors, my family members, everything was all about the baby. Was she feeding? What did she weigh? What color were her nappies? How was she sleeping? Questions asked to me were very brief and any issues were answered with it's very normal. Well, it wasn't normal to me. And why had no one mentioned any of it before? I kept being told how great I looked, but no one wanted to hear how I felt or any of the details about the reality I was nigh in. People want to visit and hold and see the baby and hear you say it's all worth it. It's wonderful, you're blissfully happy.

This is, of course, completely true, but there is so much more. This is just one small part of the totally massive story, but people only want the highlight reel and this is what we give them. We learn to conceal and hide our reality because we feel shame or guilt or not good enough. If we dare to complain or say that it's not perfect. After all, we wanted this and we dreamed of it. How dare we complain or say it's not all rosy and wonderful? This all then continues as we move along our path of motherhood. We smile, we say the things we know are acceptable. We hide the parts that aren't palatable to those around us.

This myth, an ideal of the blissful life of a mum that we were expecting, is not what we find. And yet we don't feel we can share our truth and our reality without feeling judged that there's something wrong with us for not enjoying every moment. When people say you'll look back and miss these days, that's not how you feel when you're living them. We can't say that. We just smile and say oh yes, it's going so fast. The sad truth is that for a lot of us, what we're doing is surviving. We're living day to day, dealing with whatever needs taken care of and we're putting ourselves on hold. We gradually stop doing the things that nourish us and fulfill us because it's easy to do, we don't think it's forever and we can't do it all.

So something has to give and so it's easy to let that be things we see as for us that are extras or frivolous. So we are living, yes, but we aren't living our dream lives, are we? How do we create a perfect life for us? Well, we need to start with ourselves every day. We are creating our reality with our thoughts, our words, our actions. It's all about our perspective on what we see happening around us. We have our own filters that we use to view our world and so we need to accept and acknowledge that what we are shaping is our life. What expectations did you have about motherhood and daily mum life? How did you think it would be? Once you know what story you're telling yourself and what picture you are painting, what you expected, you can take a closer look and figure out what's actually missing from your daily reality. You have the power to shape and change your life but you need to decide what it is you want to change about it.

Sometimes it's difficult to see the forest for the trees when we're in the thick of it. Daily mum life can be a lot. We know we feel overwhelmed, tired, frustrated that there isn't enough time in the day to get everything done, but we don't know where to start. We got into this situation gradually so in order to come out of it and create a life that is more in line with what we really want, we need to do that gradually as well. We have made a habit out of putting ourself and our needs at the bottom of the list so it's not easy to start prioritizing them. And we may even have a lot of feelings of guilt and things around that and we might not even know what those needs are anymore because we've forgotten them. It can be overwhelming trying to look at the big picture. So my advice is don't try to simply make some time and some space to allow yourself to connect with you.

This is about figuring out what you do want and letting go of what you don't. You need to identify what it is you really want. And you're going to have to question the conditioning and self imposed limitations and beliefs that you have taken on board. You will have ideas of what a good mother is, what she looks like, what she does. These all come from our family upbringing, our society, our culture. Everything we've ever seen or heard or read has contributed to forming our beliefs around what makes a good mother and what makes a good life. So what is it that you believe? What does a dream life look like to you? I want you to be really honest with yourself and think deeper than surface level. People will say, oh, if I won the lottery and I had lots of money in the bank, then I'd be living my dream life.

But it's often not about the actual money. It's about the freedom that it gives them. They're not going to have to work in a job they don't love. They'll be able to live wherever they want and not simply where they can afford to. They'll have the time. Time to do things that they love and time to spend it with the people that they care about. That's the expectation that money will make you happy, when actually it's all those other things that make you happy and money just gives you the means to get there. So that's why we need to be intentional and we need to be honest and truthful about what it is we really want on a deeper level, if we're going to be clear about how we're going to create it.

So we know that the picture we thought was motherhood wasn't the full story. A lot was hidden from us. But each mother's story is actually completely unique. So you only know the reality of your life and your motherhood journey. You're the only one that knows that. You need to stop guessing and assuming and so creating a false expectation for yourself, you need to start really questioning at your core, what are my values? What are my wants and needs? What are my goals? What are my dreams? This is how you start to build up the true, real, honest picture of your ideal mom life. One that you know you truly want, and then you can go about creating it. 

I really hope that some of the questions I raised have got you to think about what your beliefs and expectations are for motherhood. It's only by knowing ourselves on a deeper level and asking ourselves these questions can we figure out how we can create a life we love living. And I want that for you. Thank you so much for listening and joining me this week. I'll be back again next Friday with another episode for you.