Latest / That Mom / The Science of Motherhood Explained
Transcript
- Maria Woods: you Welcome to That Mom, the podcast where we explore finding more joy and more meaning in the beautiful chaos of motherhood. I'm your host Maria, and I'm so glad you're here. Now, I don't have to tell you that becoming a mom is life-changing, but my guest today, Elle Fort, actually talks us through what happens when we become a mother. How is our brain, our body, our hormones different? There's real differences that contribute to how we feel after giving birth and after becoming a mother. Welcome Elle to That Mom. So welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you. Thanks. It's so great to be here. Would you mind starting with a little bit of your journey and how you got into the motherhood space? Well, how I got into the motherhood space is that I became a mother myself. Because I feel like you never really know until you know. And there's not anything that can fully prepare you, although I so desperately wish that somebody would have better prepared us ⁓ for what to expect in that motherhood journey. And since becoming a mom, I've really had an opportunity to dive into exactly what happens to us when we become a mother. ⁓ And ⁓ I just think that so much of that information has been missing or erased. so turns out so much of us, so many of us are struggling with the same things and it's the way that the system is designed. So coming from a policy and advocacy background ⁓ and also going through my own personal lived experience of my entrance to motherhood, which we can get into, ⁓ realized that while everyone's situation is unique, there are so many common threads and common experiences. And I just felt like we were doing mother this disservice in the world. We are literally the life givers. And We are completely invisible and lack so many systems of support, knowing that that's not all on us, that it's not a personal failure, but accepting that that is where we are right now. ⁓ So with that radical acceptance, what do we do? What do we do knowing that the systems aren't set up to support us and knowing that the things that we're struggling with are the things that so many other moms and women are struggling with. And I think that motherhood often puts kind of a magnifying glass on areas of our life that aren't serving us or out of alignment. All of a sudden, your coping skills are not stripped from you, but many of your coping skills are further out of reach. And so you find yourself in this limbo, this in-between where the old you is gone. She's not coming back. We're not going to bounce back to her. We're going to bounce forward, but you don't know yet what it is you're bouncing forward into. have not yet fully transformed into the mother archetype of yourself, right? In this journey of a woman's life from child to maiden to mother. I've heard some say maven is next, which I love. And then crone. So transition. from maiden to mother, you know, is so important for kind of the next evolution of a woman's self and identity. And at the same time, everything about her has changed. So it can be just extremely, you're like, it's like the rug has been pulled out from under you. And all of a sudden you're looking around going, wait, who am I? What am I doing? What are my relationships? What's my purpose? What are my passions? Does my career fit me anymore? Do my relationships fit me anymore? Do my coping skills serve me anymore? Do I need to examine habits and patterns? So all of that can come to light. And it's so many things at once. that are transforming and changing, that it can feel very destabilizing. Yeah. There's so much, I think, to unpack in what you said. ⁓ You said you explored a lot about what happens to us when we become mothers. So maybe we start there. What does happen to us? Because I think you're right. We feel a lot of similarities and common threads. Of course, experiences are different. But what have you learned about what happens? to us as we become mothers. So the big thing that I had never heard before I became a mom and about when my son was about 18 months old, I heard the word matressence. And a lot of people have never heard of the word matressence. It was developed by social scientists at Columbia. And it is the transformational journey of a woman becoming a mother, similar to adolescence. In adolescence, our hormones are shifting, our identity is shifting, right? Same with a woman or a birthing person. When they become a mother, everything shifts. It's amazing to pause. It's such a transformative thing. I'm even thinking about in the hospital, you have the baby if you have the baby in the hospital. And it's all about the baby. And very little attention is paid to the mother in that transformation. But yet, anyone who's been through it knows how life-changing and vulnerable it feels. I'm just loving that we're naming this transition and liking it to something that we all know is a big deal, ⁓ adolescence. Yeah. And adolescence didn't always exist. It was a term that social scientists came up with. Before that, we just had kids and adults. But it turns out that there's this really key transition phase. so, matressence is similarly this transition phase, and it can take years. There are so many things going on inside a female's body after giving birth. And I will say that also the science says you don't even necessarily have to be the birthing person. You don't necessarily have to birth. in order for these things to happen. But your brain completely rewires itself. You're learning so many new skills, right? You are ⁓ sleep deprived frequently, right? Your nutrients have been completely depleted. I mean, the gray matter, the fat that makes your brain work has just gone to build this other child's brain if you're the birthing parent. ⁓ During the postpartum period, your brain is extremely neuroplastic, which means that experiences that you go through in your postpartum period really imprint on your brain's wiring and your nervous system. So I'd to talk more about the nervous system. you know, we all know fight or flight. Some of us talk about freeze and fawn, ⁓ but these habitual patterns that we've learned and then all of our coping skills are taken away. Right? you were somebody who, ⁓ know, just even in terms of like sleep, or maybe you're someone who got a lot of fulfillment and purpose from going to a job or from your career, or maybe you were regular at the gym and all of a sudden your body is not ready to go and have a workout in the way that you used to. ⁓ Hopefully you're on leave. So what I see often with these high achieving driven women who have been told since they were growing up that they can have it all and they've got the career and the partner and the you know house and the next thing is to have a kid when that with all sorts of love and when that child arrives all of a sudden The focus goes off of the mother and it goes to the child and the mother is like incapacitated to get up and move around and is not answering emails and is not, right? She is, her world all of a sudden shrinks to myself and my body and my immediate physical needs. and this child and their body and their immediate physical needs. it is not that's huge. And it is invisible. And for women who have not practiced slowing down and have not deconstructed their sense of self worth from their career or other projects that give them a lot of meaning, all of a sudden, you know, you're in a bed, you're like, boobs are leaking, your abdominal muscles are destroyed, you're relying on people to fill up your water cup so that you aren't thirsty while you're nursing your baby. I mean, it's constant. And so you go from this hyper-functioning leader to almost like a baby yourself where You need to keep the baby warm. Somebody needs to keep the mother warm. You need to feed the baby. Somebody needs to feed the mother. You need to comfort the baby. Somebody needs to be there to comfort the mother. These are basic human needs. so mothering the mother during that time when her brain is extremely neuroplastic and picking up all sorts of signals and cues about what is safe and who is safe and am I and my child going to survive, right? This is like evolutionary biology 101 of am I okay or am I going to be stressed out? And so many mothers go through postpartum and their maternity leave alone. They're often isolated in a home of a nuclear family. That was not how we were raising children for hundreds of thousands of years. ⁓ And that is a small that our primitive brains still interpret as Where is my tribe? Where is my village if I am all alone all day? for eight hours a day caring for this infant then and no one's caring for me then something is wrong like Yeah, you've been cast out of drop Right? So if you're feeling uneasy, that's just a biological response, an evolutionary response. Yes. And you're sleep deprived. And you have nutrient depletion, most likely. And your body is changing, and it looks different. You have a hard time picking up a laundry basket. mean, this is like you go from type A hyperfunctioning to. you were like a baby, you know? And you need someone to like swaddle you and care for you. So in Chinese culture, there's a day of 40 days of postpartum period will dictate the health of the woman for the next 40 years of her life. It's such a critical period. Wow. Yeah, it's amazing because I think anyone listening who's been through the experience of birthing, becoming a mother, it's like, yeah, of course, that's exactly how I felt. But yet, how many of us were prepared for that in advance? Or how often do you hear this conversation spoken about? You might hear bits and pieces, but to really have it explained the way you just explained it, think, is so validating and also just bringing a lot of awareness to this huge change. Yeah. The hormone changes after giving birth alone. I mean, it takes two years for you to stabilize your hormones and more if you've been breastfeeding. years? Two years, there are some people who, and look at the gray matter that women lose after they give birth. It can take up to seven years for that gray matter in your brain. The fatty tissue that allows your neurons to fire quickly can take seven years for it to recover back to pre-baby basis. The child's DNA is literally floating in your bloodstream for the rest of your life. once you have another human growing inside of you, there is DNA that crosses the placenta and your child will always have not just the DNA that they've inherited, but actually your cells in their body. And you will actually have some of your child's cells in your body for the rest of your life. Like brain scans from scientists can an AI brain scan can predict with 100 % accuracy whether or not a woman has had a baby. They can take a random woman's brain, scan that brain and say, is this somebody who has gestated and given birth? Yes or no? And the brain is that different? And it's that different. So this idea that we bounce back to the person that we were before is just not how the science works and it's not how it's meant to work. The tricky part with, with matressence, it's not, we don't know how long it really takes for you to feel totally grounded and like connected to your sense of self in your journey as a mother, right? So this is why postpartum can last years, matressence can last years. But the more that this conversation is invisible and untalked about, the more lost women are going to feel. Yeah, I can totally see that. And Elle, what do you do to help women who are feeling disconnected or feeling lost? Do you mostly work with women who are more immediately postpartum? Do you also work with women who maybe have children that are a little bit older? What does your process look like? It's a great question. think everybody benefits from the type of skills that I teach. So mindfulness, somatics, nervous system regulation. I see so much nervous system dysregulation in our world and society at large that I feel like everyone can benefit from these tools and skills. What makes me unique is that I'm specifically working with moms. And so I understand the constraints. We might not have 45 minutes to go and meditate every day. We might not be able to, you know, have a solid morning routine if the baby wakes up at 4 a.m. screaming. It's just not in the cards for us. So I work with a lot of mothers who have small children, and most of that is not in the immediate postpartum time. The immediate postpartum time It's really like survival. You're just figuring it out. And my biggest advice to that is like, give yourself grace, give yourself time. Both of you are new at this. And, you know, what I often do is I work with moms who have small children, but who have started to experience responses and reactions within themselves, behavioral patterns. And maybe those are cycles that they learned from when they grew up, right? So we're talking about generational cycles. Maybe they're coping skills that this person learned when they were small. And they learned, you know, not to stand up and ask for what they want or the need to control everything. Babies don't like being controlled. If you tell them to go to sleep, they will not do what you say. And it's a rude awakening, right? So I think that small children, let's say, you know, under the age of seven or eight ⁓ are really going to trigger all of the parts of yourself that you have not yet examined and rewired that are Like that's their purpose. Their purpose is to trigger us. And so that not because we want to fix the child's behavior, but it's actually about fixing our response to that behavior. And that ingrained habitual response where we just react is often wired into our nervous system from a very young age. So when you're healing the mother, You are not only rewiring her nervous system and working with that window of neuroplasticity in the postpartum period, which can again last years. but you're also mothers are so powerful because there's something called mirror neurons. The child's nervous system actually develops to mirror the mother's nervous system. So it's like a two for one. You're working with the mother. to rewire her system, her stress response, her thought patterns, the way that she inhabits and embodies herself, her feeling of connection to her authentic self. And all of that is going to imprint on the child as the mother understanding that she is safe in her body, that what is happening to her is normal. that she's allowed to ask for support and get her needs met. so we're- that's fascinating. So a lot of this is supporting the mother, ensuring she's getting her needs met, her nervous system feeling safe. ⁓ How do moms go from a place where they're working through what is my new identity or what is my authentic self and- How do I get my needs met? How do you even start to unwind that with a mother of small children? ⁓ I'm just asking the easy question. Yeah, I know. ⁓ It's tricky. ⁓ I find a lot of it comes down to our sense of self-worth and ⁓ the way that we've been conditioned to ⁓ often serve others and put the needs of others first. And then when we become a mother and when we realize that this developing nervous system is mirroring our nervous system and is completely reliant on us, we... ⁓ I'm sorry, I'm hearing a siren and it made me lose my train of thought. That's okay. So we, right, we realize that as the mother's nervous system is healed and rewired, it imprints on the child's nervous system to feel more safe, tuned, more connected to the world. And when we start doing that work, often means that women start to see that they actually deserve to have their needs met. They deserve to feel safe in motherhood. They deserve to feel safe in their bodies, in their relationships. They deserve to feel secure in their careers. They deserve to love and appreciate and pamper their own body that has given them this gift of life. And it's in many ways, like deep spiritual work of connecting to this new version of yourself that you have not previously met and finding out who she is, what are her priorities, what are her values. ⁓ And this is why so many women go through massive life changes after they become a mother. switch their careers or, you know, create new boundaries in their relationships. ⁓ Because motherhood is that amplifier, that magnifier that will trigger you and show you the places in your life where either you need to do more work or something is no longer serving you and you need to step away. Yeah. And I think the way you speak about it because it has such an impact on the children, it kind of provides an extra layer of permission, not that we need it, that it's not a selfish thing to think about the support you need or the boundaries you need or the self-care that you need because it extends beyond yourself ⁓ as well. If you are stressed out and overwhelmed and constantly operating I would say in the somatics and nervous system world, we say outside of your window of tolerance, right? If you are constantly pushing through when what you actually need to do is slow down and rest, your child will also mirror that urge, that sense of urgency, that sense of stress, that sense of nothing I do is ever good enough. That sense of everybody else comes before me and I better make sure that Everybody else's needs are taken care of before I even sit down and have my first bite of dinner, right? So So it really flips and in a lot of ways we're learning this Alongside our children if we have not yet Really done this work before we're we're learning this alongside our children and we're modeling for them in real time What it means so it's also this wonderful learning opportunity where you can actually teach your child the new skills and techniques that you are learning and you'll start seeing your child modeling this stuff. I mean now in schools they teach children about you know taking deep breaths, feeling their feet on the floor but this was stuff that when I was in school in the 90s that we didn't have somebody come to our class and do yoga with us, that was not a thing, right? It was math and science and reading and I think that people are starting to realize that this emotional intelligence and the somatic awareness of being able to track what state is my nervous system in, what sensations am I feeling in my body? Is my chest constricted? Are my shoulders tight? Is my jaw clenched? Am I bracing for something? ⁓ Or am I numb? Am I dissociated? Do I feel like dead inside? These are very common physical sensations that live in the body that are shaping the way that we perceive our reality and shaping our thoughts and shaping our habits and shaping our behaviors. So when we can learn, to see them and shift them, our child also sees, okay, it's normal to get stressed, right? It's normal to get triggered. It can even be normal for, know, my son runs out into the middle of a parking lot and I'm gonna yell at him, you know? And he's gonna get scared. And then I'm gonna get down on his level and I'm gonna say, you know, this is what I have to do in order to keep you safe. So the other thing I really want to make sure that we're talking about is that it is not about being the perfect mom and perfection. That you're learning this alongside your child and that is how your child witnesses you getting triggered, regulating yourself, and then repairing and reconnecting with them. It's not about not getting triggered. You don't want to be the same mom, perfect all of the time, right? We're real people. We're real people. We don't want to be like emotionally gaslighting ourselves to the point where we're like zombies walking through the kitchen, know, namaste-ing our way to, to a sense of, of happiness and calm. We need to be authentic. We need to be able to express what is really coming up. And our nervous system is there to protect us. It is there for a reason. Your child runs out into a parking lot. Right? Like running after them, yelling, stop and grabbing them and pulling them back. That is actually a protective response. That is the right way to go in that situation. Right. It's there for a reason. And there are times because so much of, so many of us have lived through situations that were simply overwhelming to our nervous system, that our nervous system learned a certain coping mechanism. Maybe it's to freeze. Maybe it's to run away. ⁓ which, you know, always staying busy is a form of avoidance and running away. It's the flight response. So for a lot of really high performing women who've like jam packed schedules and, you know, eating their lunches at their desks, this is the flight response. So teaching your body how to pause, notice what is coming up in the body. and saying, you know what, I'm gonna check in with you and I'm gonna say, it's okay, there is no bear that is about to jump out at us from behind a tree. That email from my boss is just an email from my boss. It does not mean I'm fired or gonna lose my job, right? And so there's some recognizing that the response that your body is having is disproportionate to the reality of the situation. And then there's a choice point. Once you have that awareness, you can make a choice. Do I want to react in the way that my nervous system wants to react in order because it thinks it's protecting me? Or do I want to ground myself, find my center again, and then respond in a more intentional way that helps? me break out of that pattern of constant stress and overwhelm? Yeah. You brought up ⁓ high achieving women and keeping busy. And I identify with that a little bit. And I identify with pressure that I put on myself to do things well, to do things, to check them off my list. I actually think ⁓ I can see that in my young son, that he puts a lot of pressure on himself. And so now I'm like, ooh, I think that's coming from me and some long established habits long before I was a mom. If anyone else is resonating with that, how do you start to unwind that? it's like in the moment, I think you can have awareness about what you're doing. But what if you're constantly kind of putting pressure on yourself, you're constantly doing, how do you break free from something like that? I find that the first step is often rest and slowing down. And I say that and I know that you are probably having some sensations come up in your body when I say that. Right. I've been working on it a little bit. Yes. Good. We need to because nobody taught us how to right. go ahead. Sorry. It's the awareness for me that I'm just becoming aware, know, in my 40s that like a jam-packed schedule doesn't work for me. That I can do it, but that something has got to give at some point or after so many days, like I just feel frazzled or whatever it is. So I'm like learning just for example, how to manage my own schedule and how to build in the buffer and more realistic time for the things that I need to get done. Sounds so small and silly, but I think For me, that's one small piece of it, not putting this unrealistic schedule on my plate and then expecting that I can do that day after day. Yes. It's definitely managing your energy. And I would say that one of the first things is that once you start slowing down, once you start allowing yourself to rest, you're going to feel exhausted. And that's normal. That's part of the process. because your body has been living in a stress response for years or decades. I know that I was somebody I also identify as this high achieving, right? I would like drink coffee all day and be go, go, go and back to back meetings. And, you know, it took me a while to realize that the nervous system, which controls so much in our body, like our heart rate, our breathing rate, our hormone levels. I mean, the nervous system is just like the central keyboard of our entire system. The nervous system responds in slowness, in pattern, and repetition, and in physical sensation. So what Can you feel, what can you smell, what can you taste, what can you touch? And the repetition part of it is this is not just, oh, I really need to book myself a massage this month, right? A once a month thing or even like, oh, I need to get back into the yoga studio three times a week. That's great. And what I often work with mothers on is these like five to 10 minute practices that you can do anywhere. Because we know that when you get triggered, you're not gonna have a yoga mat and a yoga block in 45 minutes. Right? So you want to do the practices when you're not triggered in order to start to rewire your system when your system feels safe. And so the more you notice what is happening in your body was key. For me, it started really simple. It was like, can I have a glass of water before I have my fourth cup of coffee? Can I stop writing email and go and use the bathroom when I feel the urge to go and use the bathroom? The email will still be there when I come back. Yeah. Right? Or can you? pour yourself a glass of water before you get your children breakfast. Would that be possible? Like that's something, you know? I totally identify with these small things. It's really, really basic. And what we're actually doing is we're rewiring your nervous system to feel safe taking care of your own physical needs. Because tuning into your body several times a day and asking yourself, OK, what is it that my nervous system needs? Right? If you are thirsty, but not yourself a drink, if you're hungry, but not feeding yourself, if you're tired, but not sitting down to rest, your nervous system interprets that as, we must be under stress. We must be in survival because if I'm tired, but can't rest, there's gotta be a reason why I'm, I'm doing this for survival. Right? So instead take a moment and pause. and do what it is that your body needs you to do in order to care for your body, your body will start to trust you to keep it safe. And I hate to say this, especially to moms, but nobody is fully responsible for taking care of you and your body in the way that you are. You should absolutely ask for help and you should absolutely like find the village, get the support. And ultimately, nobody else is responsible for making you feel safe in your body. Only you can do that. And that starts with, can my body trust me to take care of its basic needs? Yeah. Wow. So simple, but I'm sure there's a of people saying, I need to work on this. It's so simple. And yet I cannot tell you the number of women who are like, ⁓ yeah, I, you know, If I realize I need to go to the bathroom in a meeting, I just hold it till the end of the meeting. Well, what, what would happen if you said, excuse me, you know, I need to go listen to my own normal body cue, you know, or, I'm going to go, you know, get a drink or, ⁓ I'm chilly. Can we turn the air up? Right. So it's just, you know, As somebody who was very focused on doing and producing, it took a lot for me to feel like I could just be and be in my body and pay attention to what it was telling me. And that that alone was good enough. But the truth is that like that is what we have to do in order for a nervous system to feel safe. And then that sends the message to our children that we are safe. That raises a whole nother generation of kids who feel connected, who feel attuned, who feel secure, and who aren't getting stuck in these generational stress patterns of, know, oh, when mom and dad yell, I go hide in a closet, or, you know, I get an A, I'm made to, you know, feel like a failure. These are messages that get passed down from generation to generation. so recognizing with awareness what those patterns are, pausing and choosing to respond rather than react breaks that cycle and allows your child's nervous system to develop in a more fully formed way. Children who were raised under like the constant message that they're not good enough or that we're not safe or that something is urgent because we're in survival mode, we've got to do the thing, is a message to them that they have to perform in order to feel safe. Such a powerful message about slowing down. Yeah, they have to conform in order to belong. And so the cycle continues. And sooner or later, that kid becomes a parent themself and you know, the kid spills their milk and all of a sudden, you you lash out, you explode because not because it's about the spilled milk, it's about your nervous system's capacity to handle the unexpected, the uncontrolled. It's about how do you respond when something doesn't go as expected. Is that an emergency for you or is that just a, ⁓ let's get some paper towels and clean that up together, right? So there's a choice and an intention in how we handle those stress points because we're never gonna be able to remove all of the stress points. That's just not how motherhood is. That's not realistic. Elle, I've so enjoyed talking to you. ⁓ Would you tell the audience where they can find you if they want to learn more from you? Sure. I am mindfulhealingmama on Instagram, and my website is mindfulhealingmama.com. And there are all sorts of nervous system regulation and vagus nerve stimulation techniques that you can watch there. There are prerecorded workshops on my website. ⁓ And if we have just another minute, I'd love to just leave your audience with one practice that they can do in the moment to shift their nervous system more into that safe and connected spot. Perfect. Yeah, let's do it. Awesome. ⁓ so this is called the physiological sigh. And it's been shown that if you do it for five minutes a day, it can actually reduce your cortisol levels and We do it naturally, ⁓ but the breath is such a powerful nervous system regulation tool because it's one of the only autonomic nervous system functions that we actually have conscious control over. So the physiological sigh sends a signal to your nervous system to shift it into the safe and connected rest and digest state. In the moment, what you're gonna do is First you prepare by just emptying your lungs. You take a long, slow breath in. can be through the nose or the mouth, and you're gonna hold at the top just for a moment, then you're gonna sip in one more sip of air to fully fill the lungs. And then exhale slowly like you're blowing on a cup of tea. until your lungs are fully empty. And then you can do it again. Gentle inhale. Sip in more at the top and let it go. I do this three or four or five times and I automatically notice my shoulders are down away from my ears. The register of my voice has dropped. I feel like relaxed in my pelvic floor. My jaw isn't clenching. So when we use these small tools that we have right here in our body in the moment, and you can practice them five minutes a day, not when you're under a super high stress, then it's like a muscle, you've exercised it, and at that moment where you wanna snap, but you have the ability to make a different choice. You can take three breaths, take three physiological sighs, and go, you know what? It's just spilled milk. We've got paper towels. It's not an emergency. It's not an emergency. I love that. Elle, thank you so much. This is so practical, and I think just helps to provide such a better understanding of what happens to us as moms and how we can choose intentionally to live a little bit better every day. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure. This is Maria and you've been listening to That Mom. Thank you for being here. If this episode resonated, share it with a mom who needs it too. And if you're ready for more, your next episode is waiting because every conversation here is meant to empower you to live better.