The Losses of Motherhood

00:01
As a mother, you feel deeply. You feel many times two seemingly opposing feelings at once. You feel immense joy and anger. You feel the need to be alone and to have time for yourself and at the same time you don't want to leave your baby with anybody else.

00:21
You feel a sense of empowerment and a sense of complete helpless helplessness. and many of these emotions, particularly in an emotionally illiterate culture, like, well, most of our cultures, are taboo. You're not encouraged to express them, least of all to feel them.

00:42
One of the feelings that come with motherhood, and that is very little spoken about or acknowledged, is grief.

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Mothers are culture shifters and creatrixes. Then why are they kept in the background, quiet and unsupported? I'm Simona, Seasons of Matressen's guide and educator, holder of space for mothers, woman honoring her body, her womb, and her wise cycles, and this is Motherlived, the podcast that centers mothers and brings to light their lived experience, shifting the way mothers care for themselves and the way we support mothers as a culture.

01:30
I'm filling the gap between what we think we know about mothers and their true lived stories and transformation. I sit down with amazing wise women, thought leaders, wealth of creativity to talk about matrescence, motherhood, womanhood, cyclicality, spirituality, sexuality, and all the juicy, deep, complex threads we weave together as women.

01:55
You won't leave this podcast without a seed of change or inspiration growing inside you. Welcome.

02:12
Becoming a mother is such a huge and unacknowledged transition, and one that, paradoxically, remains unseen and kept quiet, made small by the culture in which we live in. And if you're thinking, yeah, but when a baby comes, we have baby showers, we throw parties, we prepare, everybody knows, we're letting everybody know.

02:35
Um, we're having a gender reveal party, so how is it small and unnoticed? Yes, the birth of a baby does not go by unnoticed, but the birth of the mother does. All the focus is on the baby.

02:53
All the questions and the care are about the baby and the one who experiences this huge transition, the mother, is left behind. Her own experience of going through it, of becoming a mother, fades away and becomes invisible.

03:10
It gets mixed up with the arrival of the baby and all the fussing and the care around the baby, which is presumed to be enough to care for the mother as well. It's like, hey, this whole package of care that we have and worry for the baby should come should cover the care for the mother as well.

03:27
Well it doesn't. Our culture asks mothers to bounce back to the way they used to be and not make a fuss about their experience and their transformation. It asks mothers to not change, to get back on the old genes, to go back to the way their bodies used to be, to go back to being the same them, and to seemingly and breezily remain unchanged.

03:54
Go through it and remain unchanged. After a hurricane rushes through every corner of your being, rearranges, tears down, and reassembles everything you knew in a different way, you wake up as a new mother, being asked to remain the same, which is impossible and unnatural.

04:16
It's ridiculous and it's unhealthy, not just for the mother, for everybody surrounding that mother, for her baby as well. I've seen photos of celebrities being photoshopped to look as if they don't have a postpartum belly anymore.

04:32
month after b the birth, you know, like, oh my god, look how she's lost weight and she looks exactly the same as before. Looking serene, perfectly rested, and wonderful as they used to. And that is not reality.

04:47
This is not a healthy way of stepping into motherhood. You're experiencing one of the deepest, most profound transformation as a mama, and it is meant to change you. Change and transformation are the single constant of our lives.

05:06
This is what keeps us growing. We evolve, we live experiences that are meant to shift us, right? To stretch us into new and better versions of ourselves. And matrescence is one of the most intense and potent shifts that brings with it immense growth.

05:24
Resisting change creates struggle inside us, conflict between parts of ourselves. We're being pushed and pulled and un it creates unrest and feelings of inadequacy. A mother is supposed to change. It's normal for her to become a new version of herself.

05:47
And this is an ongoing process. this forging and and refining of this new you of discovering and also settling into a different version of yourself is constant. It's a constant process. You're constantly being asked to evaluate and update your values, your beliefs, your perspective, your roles, your relationships.

06:12
It is hard. And when your own transformation as a mother isn't seen and supported, neither are the acceptance and expression of all the feelings and emotions that come with matrescence. You're not supposed to complain, you're not supposed to get angry.

06:31
To say that being a mother is anything but amazing, oh, it's a no-no. It's only a reason to be grateful. Society asks you to keep quiet, to do your job, and to need zero support if you can, you know?

06:47
That is extremely hard to do. That is unfair and cruel to the mother. As a mother, you feel deeply. You feel many times two seemingly opposing feelings at once. You feel immense joy and anger.

07:04
You feel the need to be alone and to have time for yourself and at the same time you don't want to leave your baby with anybody else. You feel a sense of empowerment and a sense of complete helplessness and many of these emotions, particularly in an emotionally illiterate culture, like, well, most of our cultures, are taboo.

07:29
You're not encouraged to express them, least of all to feel them. One of the feelings that come with motherhood, and that is very little spoken about or acknowledged is grief. Grief as in the one you feel when you lose someone dear to you.

07:49
However, grief is not only reserved for the moments in life when you lose someone you love, when they die or when their relationship ends. Grief is and does well up inside us for everything we lose, for every little loss, for every micro loss, for every end, for the big and for the little things we used to have or do and that are now gone for one reason or another.

08:16
I do get how associating grief with motherhood might feel weird and is countercultural. Yeah, remember how a mother is supposed to only feel blissful and grateful and serene and amazing as being a mother.

08:32
It defies the perfect mother myth and the blissful perspective on becoming coming and being a mother, yeah, in which everything is lovely. It's full of light and positivity, and being a mother only fills you with good feelings.

08:47
I'm showing right now some inverted commas in the air, yeah, with my fingers, because I don't believe in good and bad emotions. I believe in emotions as natural, as a part of us, of all of us, in all their complexity, and all their shapes.

09:04
Grief kinda sticks like a nut to the wall in this painting, right? If you're a mama, you know that it is not reality and that motherhood isn't always blissful, and you've certainly experienced an impressive amount of emotions, varied and complex, a million times a day.

09:26
Grief is a part of a mother's experience. Grief is part of matrescence. It's part of becoming and being a mother. As all transitions and rites of passage, becoming a mother also follows the same pattern of ending an era, ending a stage of life, and beginning a new one, passing into a new stage of your life, into a new you, which means means you will be experiencing grief for the ends you've had, for the endings, for the things you've had to say goodbye to.

10:02
Even if you didn't have this moment of closure consciously, you might experience grief for losing the life you had, the routines you had, for not being able to sleep in late anymore, for not being able to get drunk with your partner and arrive home in the morning anymore, for not having that flexibility anymore, for not being able to lose yourself into an activity completely because your baby is always somewhere in your mind.

10:33
Maybe you might feel grief for not being able to do your favorite thing anymore, your hobby, without having your mind and heart always wander back to your child. You experience micro losses as a mother since you were pregnant since the moment you become pregnant you start experiencing these micro losses you can eat the same things you wanted to eat you can't eat the same things you used to eat.

11:03
No more cheese, no more uncooked fish, I don't know, all sorts of things. You can't move as you used to move. Your body becomes like this alien spaceship that takes some time getting used to and that grows without asking you.

11:21
You experience these micro losses every day and in one way or another, they are preparing you for the biggest separation that is going to happen, the birth of your baby.

11:38
Some things have ended when you became a mother. And in a way, you've experienced tiny little deaths, tiny little endings of parts of your life. And that, my love, may bring with it a normal feeling of grief and a normal desire to feel that pain, to let it move through you, to have that closure and then move on.

12:05
Death and endings, as much as they are unspoken of in our culture and as much as we run away from them, they are a natural and constant part of life. And they mark the beginning of something new.

12:22
Every new beginning comes from some other's beginnings end, said Seneca, the philosopher, and the band Semisonic and their song Closing Time. Not gonna start singing now because I don't have the voice for that.

12:38
You may feel grief over the shifts and the change of the relationships in your life. You may feel grief over lost friendships, lost intimacy with your partner. You may feel grief for the control you've lost over your life routines or over your body that somehow started being a free-for-all place with little hands and bodies constantly kneading it and sucking on it and climbing on it and using it to stay alive.

13:10
It's normal to miss the way your life used to be and to feel a certain level of loss over parts of you and of your life that are now changed. Maybe you miss timelessness, you know, that feeling that there's nothing to do, nowhere to be, now that you know, life with a child brings with it so many routines and schedules and all that.

13:34
Maybe you miss just walking around at your own pace, lost in thoughts that don't concern another being other than yourself. Whatever it is, know that it is part of this transformation that matrescence brings.

13:49
Letting go and separating from that stage of your life and slowly re-emerging into a new stage, into new routines is the cyclical pattern of transformation, of growth. And it doesn't mean that if you're now settled in your role as a mother, you can't experience this grief sometimes.

14:12
You can still remember those parts and those moments and allow yourself to feel that grief that comes over you in that moment. And know that that does not mean that you're not a good mother.

14:25
It means you're human. Becoming a mother comes with beautiful and hard new beginnings, with with hope and power, and a newfound sense of self, and it also comes with hardship, it comes with loneliness, it comes with grief.

14:44
And allowing that grief to be felt while being supported by a trusting friend, by your partner, by a family member or by a professional like a therapist or a matresen's guide can create a sense of closure for you and allow that feeling to move past you and open the door to new things

15:08
If anything you've heard here was triggering for you or made a deep impression on you, I deeply encourage you to to seek support if it feels pondering and reflecting on it, hard to do alone.

15:21
If you feel that it's hard to take on your own and to do this alone, please go and look for support. Ask for it. And know that whatever you are feeling is okay, is normal, and you don't have to go through it on your own.

15:39
That was all for today. Sending love and care to you. Big hug.

15:54
Thank you so much for listening to Motherlived and if you liked it, please show your love by sharing with other mothers who need it, who haven't yet discovered matrescence, who are struggling, who need to feel seen, heard, and supported.

16:08
This is how we create the much-needed cultural change in the way mothers are seen and held by society, returning their power to them and trusting the medicine that they bring to the world. Have you joined my newsletter community of wise mamas yet?

16:23
You get three mini audio episodes exclusively for you, meant to help you dive deeper into your lived experience. They cover the unseen work that mothers do, beliefs we hold about motherhood and their impact on your mothering, and cyclical alignment as a tool to help you practice self-compassion and presence.

16:43
Join us today on simonamustata.com slash newsletter community. Until next time, hold on to the belief that you are enough and that you carry the wisdom you need to guide you, Mama. Hugs.