Time to find our strength as a mother

This episode discusses the concept of "mum's strength." We reflect on common compliments and questions that mothers receive about their ability to handle the multifaceted demands of motherhood. She candidly discusses the feelings of self-doubt that mothers sometimes experience, dispelling the myth that motherhood should come naturally and without challenges.

The episode is divided into three key areas: physical, mental, and emotional strength. Each area is explored thoroughly, offering practical advice and insights for mums looking to strengthen their overall well-being.

**Physical Strength:** The host discusses the toll that pregnancy, childbirth, and sleep deprivation can take on a mother's body. She emphasises the importance of regular exercise and proper nutrition, offering practical suggestions for busy mums to incorporate physical activity into their daily routines.

**Mental Strength:** The host acknowledges the mental challenges that mothers face, from sleep deprivation to decision-making and balancing responsibilities. She provides valuable tips on setting boundaries, practicing self-care, and using mindfulness techniques to reduce stress and anxiety.

**Emotional Strength:** Addressing emotional challenges unique to motherhood, the host explores the impact of hormones, isolation, and the need for meaningful connections. She encourages self-compassion, self-acceptance, and building connections with other mums as a way to nurture emotional resilience. Practical tools like journaling, gratitude practices, mindfulness, and meditation are also discussed.

The episode concludes with a heartfelt reminder that seeking support, whether from friends, family, or professionals, is not a sign of weakness but a vital aspect of motherhood. The host invite listeners to share their thoughts and experiences, fostering a sense of community and empowerment for all mums.

Tune in to this episode for an enriching exploration of motherhood, self-care, and the strength that comes with embracing the challenges of being a mum your way.

Transcript

Hello. 

I am so glad that you have joined me for this week's episode where we gonna be talking about how we can find, nurture, and protect our mum strength. Now, you might be thinking, what is she talking about? What is mum strength? But I'm sure you've heard phrases like 

"You're so strong"

"I don't know how you do it?"

"What's your secret?" 

Often people are referring to how you're managing to juggle all the different parts of motherhood. How you look after the home, the children, taking care of all the things that we have to do on a daily basis, all the stuff that we do to keep our families running. It's like a business, isn't it? It's a lot. And often, these comments are the only real praise or appreciation that we get for it from the outside world. 

So you're so strong. It confirms that what you do every day is a big load that you're carrying, or I don't know how you do it, that confirms the disbelief that you can pull it all off over and over again, that they're impressed with your stamina and your mothering skills and that they don't think they could do it themselves. What's your secret? This one's harder to take as compliment because it implies that we have some secret knowledge or tricks that we've learned, and especially when we are new mums or early in our journey, we are in a huge learning curve. We're reading everything that we can get our hands on books, magazine articles, online mummy forums were searching for all these answers that for some reason, we were expected to know. It's like we expected some magic download into our brain when we became pregnant or give birth. Ping, the download of expert mummy is now available. 

The truth is that most of us probably expected being a mum to be a lot easier than it is, that we would naturally take to it, that we might be tired because we know we're gonna get lack of sleep, but then it wouldn't really be that hard. There is so little value placed on the things that us mums do on a daily basis. The mums work, if you like, by our society and by people around us and we grow up with that, you know, we have this assumption that it must be easy, which couldn't be further from the truth. And this natural instinct actually has to be learned. It's almost like we're doing a degree or an apprenticeship. We spend years becoming trained as a mum and an expert in our family and our kids. 

So what is our secret? Why are we so strong? How do we do it? 

Well, for a lot of us, we might not know. We're just showing up every day and we're just getting on with it. We're just getting things done. When we hear these comments, we can feel like a fraud that we're putting on a show that we're pretending that we're faking being supermums. We don't have a choice, do we? We have to get things done, and everyone's relying us to get things done. 

So I wanna touch on how we can find and nurture and protect that inner strength. There are three areas that we need to think about here. Our physical strength our mental strength and our emotional strength. Because if we don't take care of all three, then the crack start to show in her armour, and then the motherhood journey that we're on, it can all feel too much of a weight that we have to carry. So when I talk about our physical strength, I am of course referring to our body, Our bodies often take the brunt of our neglect. We have obviously been through huge transformation of pregnancy, of birth, of probably breastfeeding, all of it can take this huge toll on our physical health. And then we also have to take into account the lack of sleep, and the lack of proper rest, the lack of time to do any exercise or to feed and nourish our bodies, it's no surprise that our physical health can suffer. 

But what can we do? Well, we need to treat our bodies like the homes that they are because they need to be functioning and performing as best they can be for our whole life, not just for the motherhood part of it, but all of our lives. It's the only home we really have. It's our true home, so we need to take care of them. And there are 2 main ways that we can do that. We can choose to make it a priority and exercise and nutrition are those things that we need to really take care of. Whatever exercise you can find that you enjoy and you're able to make time for is gonna help you to keep your body staying healthy strong, flexible, and functioning in the way that we need it to. 

So if you know that this is an area you're neglecting or putting off because it's not important right now, and I totally understand exercise can be the last thing that we feel like doing if we've been up all night with the baby, or after a full on day of being mum and doing all the things we do each day, try to think of something you could do in 10 or 15 minutes and that you could add in at any point of the day if you find a bit of time. So maybe when you are brushing your teeth, you do some squats or lunches, or maybe if you are doing the school run, you decide to wear your running gear and you do a quick run on the way back home. I'm not a runner, but it is a very popular activity, and I, you know, hold my hat off to anyone that, that can do it. Another suggestion that a mum gave me this week was to do it when I'm making dinner, to put on, like, a 10 or 15 minute workout from an app, on my phone or maybe to put on some music, just dance around in the kitchen in between when I'm timing things for dinner. Maybe that would work for you. 

The point is that you need to factor in the exercise or physical movement, even simple stretching, it could be added in when you're down, playing on the floor with kids, or if they're watching TV before bed, it has to be something that works for you that you enjoy doing so that you're actually motivated do it and that you will fit it in when you find that little bit of unexpected time? 

The benefits of doing this physical exercise will be to increase your physical ability to hold, carry, play with your kids. It's gonna help increase your mood. It's gonna help increase energy, and it can even help you get better sleep. But most importantly, it's gonna help you to be able to cope with the demands of motherhood. Physical strength is really one of the foundations for overall strength. And if you do suffer with anything like a sore back or a sore neck or muscle aches or headaches, then you will totally understand how not being physically strong can impact you on a daily basis. And, you know, you can go and see an osteopath or physio, you need to make time for yourself to deal with those problems because when you aren't feeling physically fit, it then impacts everything else. And it can be a lot. 

To support our physical strength, we need to exercise, but we also need to combine that with proper nutrition and hydration. So staying properly hydrated is super important. And if you follow me on Instagram or my Facebook group, which you should be, by the way, then you will have heard me talk about having kidney stones and having to deal with that. Thanks to my absolutely shocking bad hydration levels throughout my pregnancy and breastfeeding journey. I did not drink enough water at all, nowhere near enough of what I was meant to. And I was just super busy, and I didn't make it a priority, and I just didn't do it. So now I'm having to deal with the consequences. 

While your body is amazing and it's really adaptable, it can only keep covering up all of the cracks, and it can only do so much if we continue to deprive it and neglect it. So I want you to think about how much care and attention that you take for your children's diet and hydration, even your pets, you take care to feed and water them, we're so good at making sure that everyone else eats regularly and drinks water throughout the day. Well, you need to be adding yourself to the priority list. And if it helps, when you feed and water them, feed and water yourself at the same time. 

When it comes to a healthy and balanced diet, I love to think of the rainbow, and I say this to my kids most days that it helps to remind them and myself off. I'm quite visual, and so by ensuring that me and my kids eat a variety of colors, I feel we get a good balanced diet. And it's really easy to add in fruit and vegetables, and it also makes it interesting. So I go with a eighty, twenty split. So 80% of the time it's healthy, and then 20% of the time it can be treats like chocolate or wine. Well, wine for me, not the kids. And I don't do any restrictions or count calories or stop or ban certain food groups, because I don't think it's sustainable in the long term. 

So finding ways to exercise, to cook and eat healthy, to regularly, stay hydrated, It's all going to keep you physically strong. Now, next, I want to talk about how we can support ourselves to be mentally strong. So that we can navigate all the demands of motherhood. Mentally, we are up against sleep deprivation that leaves us feeling tired, irritable with no willpower and resilience. We are constantly making decisions every day about everything, and we can often beat ourselves up and over analyze these decisions and question our choices, which can lead to feelings of mom guilt. And we're continuously trying to find and maintain balance between giving to everybody else and to meet our own needs. There is a lot of mental energy being spent, and It is a lot, it is a lot for us to deal with and handle. So what can we do about it? 

Well, self care is how we can preserve our mental strength. We need to prioritize and make time for it. And when I say self care, I don't mean a spa day or a massage. I am talking about prioritizing the jobs and tasks that we take on. Are they urgent? Can they wait for another day? Can they be delegated to someone else either in the family, or is it something we can pay somebody else to do? We need to set boundaries and we need to give ourselves permission to say no to people, activities, or anything that drains us. Being present in the moment and in our day so that we aren't wasting our mental energy on worries, about things that have happened or didn't go how we wanted them to or anxiety about the future, like what's gonna happen when this comes about, or when the kids start school or at Christmas, what am I gonna do? It's about being in that moment. 

So we can use breathing techniques and mindfulness. They are useful tools that we can use to reduce our stress to keep us present in the moment. We can develop these skills, and that's gonna help us develop our resilience. It's gonna support us, to nurture, and really take care of our mental strength. And lastly, I wanna touch on our emotional strength as this is probably the most challenging We are affected by our hormones, our cycles, we are affected by those around us, and we all have different abilities when it comes to being able to cope and process our emotions. So when making an effort to nurture and protect our emotional strengths, we can really have a positive impact on our overall well-being. 

So how can we nurture our emotional strength? Well, what we can do is give ourselves self compassion and self acceptance by nurturing and working on these two areas, we can increase our emotional resilience. So what I'm talking about is that the way we speak to ourselves. Our inner voice, it's super important.  We need to question and silence what I like to call and refer to as our inner meanie, that little voice inside our head. We don't want to be doubting or criticising ourselves. Feeling shame, guilt, or that we aren't good enough. So how do we do that? How do we silence it? Well, we need to really look at ourselves. We need to get to know ourselves, all of it, our good qualities and the positive things about us that we like, and also the things that we don't like, the bad qualities. All of it makes us who we are and none of us are perfect. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. And if we're honest with ourselves and we really accept these of ourselves, all of it, then we will no longer be judging ourselves, and that inner meanie is gonna quieten down. We also won't be afraid of what other people might think or judge us for because we already know all of it. We aren't pretending or trying to hide part ourselves in an attempt to look like we have it all together and that we're perfect. 

So what I want you to do is make yourself two lists. 1, I want you to fill with your strengths. And one list is for your weaknesses. And I want you to be really, really honest, and I want you to really be accepting of who you are, all of it. This is how we're gonna build that emotional resilience, and we're gonna protect our emotional strength. So the other way that we can nurture and build our emotional support by being part of the world, and this can be super hard because once we become mums, we can find ourselves quite isolated and quite lonely. Initially, it might just be us and the baby. The days and the nights might be long. We can feel very alone. Even if we're surrounded by people or we can still feel lonely because we aren't having conversations or making connections beyond a superficial. How's the baby sleeping? How's the baby feeding? And that type of thing, it's what I like to call the conversation fillers. It's all the things that you find your repeating over and over and saying just because you're filling that gap of silence when you're in these groups and situations. Usually, you're talking about the baby or the kids, and it's not often that we have a real and honest conversation about ourselves, about how we're truly feeling. About how we're finding this new reality that we're living, this new life that we're now in. Maybe we haven't even had the time figure this out ourselves. 

So by doing our best to make connections with family, with friends, with other mums in person, or online, where we can be honest and truly connect with exactly how we're feeling. It gives us that sense of belonging and support and gives us emotional strength. When we feel seen, heard, understood, and accepted, then we have real connection, and we can gain emotional strength from that support. There are also tools that we can use ourselves, things like journaling, doing a daily gratitude practice, including mindfulness or meditation into our life that can help us to feel grounded, and it can strengthen our connection to ourselves and so our emotional resilience. 

If you find that you are struggling with emotional strength, maybe you're feeling down or tearful, or like it's all too much, there is no shame in asking for a greater level of support. Your GP is a great place to start when I was feeling overwhelmed and like it all too much. I went to my GP, and I thought that she was gonna give me antidepressants, and I was really feeling upset about this and like I was failing, but when I got there, she totally understood because she had 3 children under 3, she actually had a set of twins, which is harder, I think, than even me with my 3 under 3. So she understood, and she was, you know, really clear, she said, you're just struggling with lack of support. And it's all normal. It is all too much to handle, and she referred me through to a therapist to talk through my feelings. So I didn't end up on antidepressants because it wasn't what I needed. What I needed was more support, more emotional support because I was struggling and overwhelmed. And I was processing a lot of grief as well from losing my own mother and having that weekly telephone call because it was COVID, so you couldn't visit. It made a huge difference. It gave me perspective and it helped me strengthen my emotional and my mental health. 

So please don't ever think that you have to do this alone. You really don't. None of us are born with this knowledge of how to do it either. It has to be learned and our journeys are all so unique and so different, but there is a commonality.  There's a commonality there too.  And if we speak and we share our truth with each other, instead of pretending that we are fine, then we can make honest connection and we can build real friendships and real relationships. So I hope that you've enjoyed this week's episode. I would love to hear any thoughts you have, or maybe you've found things that work for you that other mums might need to hear as well. You can send me a message, or you can come and share in my Facebook group Being Mum Tribe. That's all for this week, but I will be back next Friday with another episode for you, and I hope that you have a lovely weekend.