How mums can be kinder to themselves

There are a lot of books and advice out there for new mothers, but for Zoe Blaskey many of these put even more pressure on them, more expectations about how they should mother, contributing to a sense of guilt and never being good enough.

So she decided to write her own after starting a successful podcast, Motherkind, and becoming a coach. The book, also called Motherkind, is based not just on hundreds of podcast interviews, but thousands of hours of coaching.  Her mission is to make life easier for mums. “I believe motherhood is one of the most important and yet under-supported roles in the world. I want that to change,” she writes, calling for a different way to support mothers which is not promoting martyrdom, perfectionism, people pleasing, guilt and control but is about self-worth and self-value and about understanding the kind of pressured landscape mothers face today. That landscape includes the amplifying pressures of social media and increased expectations both on the work and home front, with more mothers of young children now working and often working full time.

The first chapter is about pregnancy and the months after the birth – the act of becoming a mother for many – which is summed up by the word ‘matrescence’.  Blaskey says it is ‘a time of change on almost every level: physical, hormonal, economic, social, emotional and spiritual’ which essentially changes women. Resistance, she says, only causes stress and undervalues the transition period. It’s the polar opposite of Helen Charman’s book, Mother State, which talks about motherhood being more about the years after birth than the process of giving birth. In Blaskey’s book both are important. Nevertheless, both books are an attempt to support mums in the face of all the expectations on them: for Charman motherhood is political and requires a much broader network of support; for Blaskey it is about giving individual mums the tools to challenge the expectations they face.

Blaskey [pictured above] talks about the importance of self-compassion and of learning to  move from inner critic to inner coach so we are on our own side. That means not just understanding the pressures new mothers face, but also trying to negotiate ways to reduce it by finding out where you most feel it and seeking ways to manage it. That might be, for instance, through asking for help, making visible the invisible ‘mental load’ and negotiating with your partner in a non-confrontational way – talking about how you feel exhausted, for instance – to find ways to lift it a little.

No more people pleasing

One of the biggest challenges for women is unlearning the tendency to people please. That requires constant attention and challenge. Blaskey also suggests thinking of it from the point of view of what your children need and then applying that to yourself. In fact, an essential message of the book is that mothers need to be role models for their kids rather than martyrs because then they are just passing down the huge load of expectation to their children. Children, after all, learn from what you do more than what you say. Blaskey also has practical tips about boosting energy for the long term because motherhood is not just about practical caring, but also being ‘an emotional shock absorber’, and there are sections on good and bad guilt and the importance of boundaries.

The book ends with an important section on how being a parent can trigger memories of your own childhood, but Blaskey says having children can be a healing process. “We can ‘reparent’ ourselves by giving ourselves now what we might have needed when we were younger,” she writes. For her it is about the possibility of beginning again or at least refocusing on what really matters. In that way, she says, our children teach us as well as vice versa. She ends with a new ‘blueprint’ for motherhood which is based around believing in yourself, protecting your time and energy, creating boundaries and caring deeply about yourself. She ends with: “We need to  question the rules, break the rules, and make our own rules.”

While the book claims to be a new approach to motherhood, and certainly a lot of books do increase expectations and pressure on mothers, the idea that mums need to look after themselves more and forge their own path is not particularly new. However, that being said, it needs to be restated for each generation because the pressures come in new forms and seem to ramp up every time. Each generation has to teach the next that there is no one way to do motherhood. The next generation, who have grown up with 24/7 pressures via social media, will need their own support and will have to navigate their own way, but hopefully they can learn from the current generation of mums that they don’t have to be perfect and that they can do it their own way, and they will pass that down the chain.

*Motherkind: A new way to thrive in a world of endless expectations by Zoe Blaskey is published by Harper Collins. 

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