You’re Not A “Bad Mom." (Alexandra Sacks, MD)

#199 — When we get pregnant, everybody talks about the baby. But what about the mother?

Becoming a mother—even thinking about becoming one—involves complex feelings and emotions. But the “Bliss Myth” idea says that we should feel one note about becoming a parent, and that note is happiness and joy.

If we don’t feel joy, and we don’t love motherhood, then are you a bad mom?

No! It’s totally normal to feel a huge range of feelings, including ambivalence, anger, regret, disappointment, love, tenderness, exhaustion, frustration, and more. Having feelings, especially multiple conflicting feelings, doesn’t make you a bad mom: it makes you a human being, like the rest of us.

Alexandra Sacks, MD is a reproductive psychiatrist who popularized the concept of matrescence, or the period of transition surrounding becoming a mother. Her 2018 TED Talk reached 1.5 million views worldwide, and she wrote a New York Times article called The Birth Of A Mother that was the number one most read piece of 2017 for the Well Family Section.

The truth is more complicated, and Dr. Sacks says a huge range of feelings about motherhood is all totally normal. Things like panicking when you find out that you’re pregnant, or feeling ambivalent at first when you see your newborn, or having new feelings about your partner or your own parents are all absolutely reasonable feelings to have during your pregnancy and parenting journeys.

In this episode, we talk to one of America’s top reproductive psychiatrists about the range of emotions and feelings that come with motherhood, and why matrescence is totally natural and normal.

In this episode we talk about:

• Matrescence as an extended phase of all women’s lives, including women who choose not to have children or who experience infertility, and Dr. Sacks focused work on the period of pregnancy and the first year of motherhood.
• The Bliss Myth and other honest stories we’re missing about motherhood.
• The harmful trope of the “bad mother” as the cornerstone of evil characters in myth and popular culture.
• The idea of the “Good Enough Mother” as permission and guiding light for mother’s overwhelmed by messages of perfection; that we should aim for not superhuman perfection but providing a safe, stable, loving childhood.
• How being a “perfect” mother can actually harm our children in the long term, leading to decreased resiliency, slowing the learning process, and interfering with children’s ability to grow and achieve independence.

FULL SHOW NOTES: https://startupparent.com/110

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THE WISE WOMEN'S COUNCIL: https://startupparent.com/wwc