I have had some pretty low moments as a mother. Looking back, I likely had trauma from my emergency c-section with my twins. When my twin daughters had just turned one and I returned to work, my husband and I managed a long-distance relationship while he went to school in a neighbouring city and lived with his parents. During the next two years, I worked full time as a teacher and gave birth to our son (another c-section, which naturally required a recovery even though I lived alone with two-year-old twins). That pregnancy was sheer exhaustion. During that maternity leave, however, we relocated to where my husband lived and we were finally able to line up our family, careers, and life goals.
While I’m not a horror genre writer, that has the making for a terrifying setting. Honestly, though, the day-to-day stress was manageable, and I thrived in being busy. Likely because there was an end goal- “get through this year, this month, this day”. Once we lived as a family, I returned to work with a six month old baby and three year old twins; even with the full support system of my husband and in-laws, I couldn’t manage. I began resenting my role as a mother, seeing little purpose, and no end to the monotony of our life.
I turned even more to books: everything self-help, parenting, and life management I could get my hands on. I’ll be updating my library with all the books I’ve read and enjoyed and taken things from. I began to find joy in the simple pleasures, purpose to my role as a mother, teacher, and wife, and slowly began to find myself again, as an individual. Becoming medicated for anxiety and ADHD changed my life entirely, and I was able to juggle the everyday with more focus and energy, which greatly built up my self-esteem and regulated my mood. Less crying during bedtime, shaming the kids for their mess or for “making me late”, more cuddles, more positive self-talk and parenting-talk. I’ve changed as a mother, and truly feel that calm, joyous energy that I always felt in my regular life when I was just “me”. It has been a long road, and every day is a new chance to be my best self and raise resilient children. While reading Brain-Body Parenting, the author Mona Delahooke, PhD, perfectly described my past turmoil and held up a mirror to what was happening inside my nervous system (which she fittingly refers to as a safety detection system):
“Of course, the safety-detection system works the same way in adults [as it does in children]. When my children were young, I was extra tired and stretched, I could easily temper over simple things. My body budget balance was always low because of the withdrawals from parenting three children and working as a psychologist. If we were late getting out the door in the morning, or in a public place where I was worried one of my toddlers might wander, I’d bark orders at them. When my body budget was in a deficit, I’d sometimes say things I later regretted, projecting my own lack of internal resources onto my kids: “Hurry up! You’re making us late!” (Message: stop being a slacker.) My depleted state was adding to my share for being late, my own issue, and I was taking it out on my children. Lack of sleep, work stress, multitasking, and managing their lives and my own frequently turned me into an authoritarian and controlling mom, markedly different from how I was with them when my nervous system felt safe and secure. (Back then I didn’t connect the words nervous system and parenting in a meaningful way.)” (Delahooke, p.41-42)
While years have passed and pages have been read on the topic, the amount of stress in my life has not diminished in the slightest. People get ill, work gets busy, trauma gets revisited, and my mood dysregulates. However, my ability to handle stress has greatly increased: I am better at recognizing triggers within myself, practicing meaningful self-care on a regular basis, and accessing medication and therapy for underlying issues. I’d highly recommend Brain-Body Parenting: How to Stop Managing Behaviour and Start Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids; Delahooke continues to define topics and give practical advice in the areas of self-compassion, self-regulation, and self-care, all which build a mother’s self-esteem and in turn benefit the children we are raising.
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