Love. Motherhood. And why perinatal mental health is important.

If you ask me where life will take me my answer has always been the same.

When I was young I said one day I will live in “in Boston” and help people.

Or there was the time I told my mother that I wanted to be Dr. Quinn Medicine woman.

Or in high school when I said I would be 80 sitting in a room full of books, some that I wrote, and talking to people.

And then while in Australia when I told a random man I would be a business owner who helped women and he laughed and said “Dear you are much too soft for that”.

And yet here I am. Focusing on wisdom, neuroscience, innate knowledge to help others remember the parts of themself they have forgotten. It is an act of love.

It’s above love for humans finding their way back to their souls.

It’s about mothers brave enough to face the changes, the cracks, the spaciousness that occurred through birth and the years of motherhood.

It’s about relationships. Connecting to one another and reminding others that “No man is your enemy, no man is your friend, every man is your teacher”- Florence Scovel Shinn. It is about learning to love yourself so that you can love others.

Mothers are the start of love (yes, even broken messy love).

Mothers remind us of where we came from and where we can go.

Mothers and motherhood is misunderstood. Motherhood is not a problem AND it does not always (err really ever) fit into this “fast paced, productivity driven, outcomes are the best” world.

Motherhood (start, middle and yes even with adult children) is marked by a slower pace of life. It is the tug of holding on and letting go. Teaching risk while remaining a soft place to land. Oh, and learning to hold space for you, as the mother.

You do not enter motherhood and thrive. No - you stumble, you grow, you shine light on the things for years you were able to avoid and then small win after small win, honest cry after honest cry, surrender by surrender… you start to thrive.

We can land back here though - in love - always.

We need to allow ourselves to seek support, even for a moment, so that we can land back in love. We need to be reminded that from 0-3 our brain matter REALLY DID change and from 0-9 months our body is regulating our child's body. Then as the child grows the needs do not dissipate- it just gets different.

When we can sit in the moment of the gravity of this work, I believe we can start to feel the joy. It is and always will be both/and and yes/yes when experiencing life.

Try this for the next four days: Check in with yourself about three times a day and write down your emotions. Remember that emotions (the body’s response to the initial emotion) only lasts 90 seconds after that it is the thoughts you think that keep it (your emotion) alive. Go back on the fifth day and observe how your emotions vary. Use this tool when you are feeling stuck as a reminder that - even though our brains are hardwired to focus on the negative as a way to ensure wooly mammoths stay away from our kin - THERE are also other emotions, too.

And hey…if you do this and there are straight up NO other emotions than ones that feel crappy…reach out to a friend, a therapist, a hotline for some help because YOU deserve to feel all your emotions.