Mother Agency
“We adjust ourselves to fit, to adapt to others’ ideas of who we should be. We shift ourselves not in sweeping pivots but in movements so tiny that they are hardly perceptible even in our view. Years can pass before we finally discover that after handing over our power, piece by small piece, we no longer even look like ourselves.”
Modern motherhood asks that we center the child instead of the mother. During the MotherBLOOM program, we spend the first few sessions discussing personal histories and transitions to motherhood. This helps us to see patterns in our matrilineal ancestry that may have informed our beliefs about motherhood. It allows us to honor the transitional period of matrescence, that time of motherhood where we move from Maiden to Mother. And we are able to pause and reflect on the values that shape our identity, both the values that we have carried with us through our lives, and the values that we shed or adopt as our life circumstances change.
Now we begin to shift our focus from understanding our roots to looking ahead to the opportunities of empowerment within mothering. The next sessions equip us to see motherhood less as a role of selfless service, and more as an opportunity to step into our own authority. Motherhood can be an extremely empowering experience as we learn to set boundaries, trust our intuition, and practice bringing ourselves back into balance. This is not the narrative of modern motherhood, but it’s the motherhood of the future, and we’re leading the way.
Attachment Parenting
I began my mothering journey without a lot of guidance. I didn’t have a lot of friends who were new mothers yet, and my own mom was a state away. My birth experience with my first son left me shattered - because I hadn’t gone into labor on my own and was induced at 42 weeks pregnant, I had an unshakable belief that somehow it meant I wasn’t supposed to be a mom. So to compensate for this perceived shortcoming, I threw myself into mothering intensively.
I wholeheartedly embraced attachment parenting. AP is based on an emotional attachment theory that a baby should form an emotional attachment early on to a primary caregiver, usually the mother. It was popularized by Dr. Sears and his book, The Attachment Parenting Book : A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby. Practices include extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping and nursing on demand, carrying the child in a sling, and others that are incredibly time and energy intensive for the mother. Mothers are expected to put the child’s needs far above their own. This behavior is what defined a “good mother,” at least in my peer group. At the time it felt like a progressive, conscious parenting choice to center the child’s needs, instead of the "children should be seen and not heard" of my mother's generation. It wasn’t that hard to do with one child, especially since I was privileged enough to be able to work part-time as a yoga teacher.
But then I had a second child. Went back to work full time in a demanding sales career while I was still breastfeeding. I would nurse him in the car before I dropped them both off at daycare, pump at lunch, pump in the afternoon, then pick them up and nurse him in the car before I drove home. This process repeated itself when I had my third child. I’d be expected to show up to sales presentations as though I hadn’t been up half the night nursing a baby, or caring for a sick toddler, or cuddling a scared little boy who’d had a nightmare. I remember vividly one afternoon - I was pumping breastmilk while driving while talking to a client over Bluetooth. I was so proud of how good I was at multitasking...and I was also exhausted
The demanding expectation of attachment parenting makes the following difficult: holding a full-time career, maintaining a romantic relationship with your partner, having interests beyond your children, and getting a good night’s sleep for years. Attachment parenting wasn’t meant for the nuclear family living in isolation. Baby wearing wasn’t meant for one woman to carry the baby for two years straight; she would have had help from her older children, her sisters, and other mothers in the village. The literal weight would be distributed.
This isn’t a post against attachment parenting. But it is a post warning against coupling attachment parenting to mother martyrdom. It was SO EASY to lose myself completely in the guise of being a good mother and wholly attached to my babies. Healthy attachment comes with healthy boundaries. As my babies have grown to be older children, we have to navigate new boundaries. (I will confess, this is still particularly difficult for me with my youngest child, my daughter. Even as a motherhood coach, I’m still figuring a lot of it out as I go!)
Agency
Creating agency in my mothering experience starts with boundaries. In the beginning, there were no boundaries between me and my babies - I allowed them full and unrestrained access to my body, my energy, my attention and my identity for years. Constantly giving and giving and giving without boundaries eventually breeds resentment and if you’re not conscious about it, you’ll explode.
How do you learn where your boundaries are? In my case, it’s a matter of listening to my body. When my daughter is asking me to play with her and I feel my heart start to race and a literal sense of repulsion in my body...that’s a boundary about to be crossed. What do I do about it? It varies. Sometimes I try to distract her with something else: “let’s go ride our bikes, or have a dance party, or eat some ice cream.” Sometimes we have to compromise: “I am actually reading a book right now. Why don’t I come sit next to you and read my book while you play? We can do that for 20 minutes and then I will play with you.” Sometimes I have to draw the hard line: “No, I am not able to play right now,” and I have to prepare myself for the consequences.
This is not easy work. But it is also important work, and it is work that is required of women as we navigate a patriarchal system of oppression. It starts with setting boundaries and expands from there; learning to speak with authority and say no when necessary, understanding how to balance our nervous systems so we are able to move from fight or flight into rest and digest, sitting quietly with intention to discern what is our true desire and belief in any situation. This is the gift of mothering agency, it allows us to practice these skills in our own homes, with our children that are here to call us into this work over and over again.