MOMENT | THIS will help you when you feel like you are drowning in parenthood, with Jess Our Mama Village

0:03Hi everyone, welcome to this week's Motherkind moment. Thank you for being here. Thank you for pressing that little play button. This is your place on a Monday for calm, connection, and maybe even a shift in perspective before the crazy week ahead. This week's moment is with Jess, who runs our Mama Village. She is a registered psychotherapist and mom of two little ones. And this is taken from a brilliant episode. I hope you love the clip. Here it is. So something that we tell to our clients at the practice is we don't have to do all the work at one time. I think there is a lot of talk about reparenting and it's so important.

0:44And at the same time, there are seasons of parenthood where you feel like you're drowning in the water. I mean, if I think about myself, let's say when I had the two little ones at home, pandemic, everything is just a mess. And I have this visualization of like, you're just trying to stay afloat. Sometimes you just need what we call life jacket approaches. And so those are things like trying to use self-compassion. So when you have that mom guilt voice, you're trying to be more compassionate on yourself. You're trying to like take a sensory break in the bathroom. Like I would literally just go to the bathroom, turn off the lights, make sure my kids were safe and just sit in darkness for like a minute just so I could catch my breath for a second.

1:26So we're doing more of those strategies that are still that deeper work to regulate ourselves, but they're more life jacket approaches. And once we have that life jacket on and we're floating, and we actually are in a season of parenthood where it's still hard and still sometimes there's waves that come up that make us feel like we're drowning, but it's not all consuming in that same way. That's the season where it might be a little bit easier to do that deeper reparenting work. You need to be floating first because if you try and do all this work and you put that pressure on yourself to do everything all at once, sometimes it just makes us feel like we're drowning even more and it can be even harder to get our head above the surface.

2:04So I don't know if that metaphor is helpful, But that's something that I often think about and encourage parents to when they're like, oh my goodness, now I have a baby and they're breastfeeding all the time. I'm up a million times a night and this and this and this. And I have to reflect on my traumatic childhood. Like I just can't do it all. And I say, yeah, you're right. You literally can't. So let's take that off the table. Let's get you floating. And a lot of that is that self-compassion, grace for yourself and just some mindful exercises, stuff like that. Let's get you floating. And then we can do that deeper work.

2:34it's a beautiful metaphor and it's brilliant and I think it's so true because it does seem just this kind of this flood to carry on your kind of water metaphor of when you're right in the thick of it and all this stuff is coming up it can just feel totally overwhelming so I just love that idea of yeah we've got to be floating before we can do the deeper work we need to have that space right internally and externally. And I talk about that because in my parenting course and on my page too, I talk about reparenting. And I say that in the course, this is important to have these tools to help you reflect on your past and help you all these things.

3:18But it's okay also to acknowledge if it's not the time to dive into this, because we're talking about this so much more, which I love and think is like so important. Parents are now feeling this pressure as well to like always be doing this deep reflection. I'm like, no, no, it's okay. Like you don't have to do it all the time. And it becomes so much easier, but right at the beginning or different seasons, it can be really hard to do that.