Reflections on Early Motherhood

With Mother’s Day approaching, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation from a local therapist who was sharing her thoughts on motherhood. She spoke about a variety of related topics, including moms who lose themselves in their children and their general lack of self-care. While this therapist was well-meaning and certainly identified many common problems mothers face, I walked away feeling like, as it always seems, the true motherhood struggle was deeply misunderstood. Moms know identity and self-care are important; the question is how to foster this with all the responsibilities that come with the new role.

The therapist warned, “Don’t lose yourself in your kids. It’s too much pressure for them. You must have something that is just yours.” What an easy thing to say when you’re not in the thick of infancy. I never wanted to “lose myself” in my kids. When I first became a mother, I was also a middle school teacher by profession. I proudly proclaimed during all stages of my pregnancy that I loved my job, I loved my life, and I certainly would not be leaving or giving anything up just because I was about to add a child to my life. Enter, stage right, the 4am wake-ups to pump breastmilk. Enter, a colicky infant who woke up every hour to be held and would wake again every time she was put down. Enter, obscure daycare illnesses that took us both out for weeks on end. Enter, the emotional struggle of seeing my daughter for one hour before bed. The remainder of my free time was quickly eaten up by meal prep, clean up, bath time, washing bottles, and preparing for the next day, and frankly, I was drowning. One of the most difficult decisions I ever made was to leave teaching to stay home. Choosing to let go of that part of me felt like losing a limb. And yet, I couldn’t see how to balance everything.

And many seasoned moms will talk about the lack of support mothers receive, and that can be a huge issue for many. But the truth is, I was not alone during this time in my life; on the contrary, I was heavily supported. Most of this support I actively rejected. My parents and in-laws were local and, quite frankly, desperate for time with their only granddaughter. They insisted my husband and I take time for ourselves, spend time alone, and just drop her off with them. As well-meaning as they were, they did not understand that dropping off my little girl not only came with a heaping pile of guilt but also seemed so complicated that it didn’t seem worth the effort. During this time while working so many hours, I was constantly dropping my daughter off at daycare, only to see her for a short time before we went to sleep. The idea of dropping her off again on the weekend, when my face-to-face time with her had been so minimal to begin with, was heartbreaking for me. Not to mention, since I was breastfeeding, I would need to pump extra bottles for drop off and ensure all grandparents were well versed on the method of paced-feeding. During my outing with my husband, I would need to pack my pump and make sure I had privacy to protect my milk supply, expressing every 2-3 hours while I was gone. In terms of infant supplies, my daughter had horrible gas pains due to an unidentified dairy and soy intolerance, so I’d need to pack a huge diaper bag which held diapers, wipes, gas drops, extra clothes, burp cloths, bottles, milk, and the pacifier. The therapist at the presentation enjoyed repeating, “What would happen if you just left the house and didn’t pack the huge diaper bag? Think of the animals in the forest. Mama bear takes her cubs on hunts, and she doesn’t pack a bag.” In my case, my baby bear would scream for the entire time we were apart. And that isn’t something anyone would want.

No one is arguing that mothers should lose themselves in their children or that mothers should forego all means of taking care of themselves. The therapist was not wrong about her call to action there. But the crux of the problem is not if mothers should retain their own identities and make time for self-care but instead how to do this. I don’t have any magical answer other than it takes acceptance of the present stage of life with the knowledge that the answer for each mother will come in their own time. I’d venture to guess most mothers in the depths of their exhaustion have googled suggestions for self-care for new moms. I did. And do you know what I found? The internet is ripe with fruitless suggestions such as, “Wake up a few hours before your children. Make yourself coffee, exercise, or read a novel.” This is a laughable suggestion when kids are very young. New moms are already terribly sleep deprived. During the height of my time trying to work full time with an infant, I was already up at 4am to get everything ready for the day. Asking me to get up earlier in the name of self-care would have been cruel, to say the least. I even attempted this oft-touted strategy as my children got older, only to find that someone would inevitably hear me bumping around in the kitchen, and suddenly, our day would begin together at 5am, and my self-care cup would still be woefully empty.

Can we just be honest with new parents about motherhood? I wonder why this therapist was so hesitant to just state the reality: being a mom is extremely difficult, and it doesn’t get any easier, it just gets different. As I sat in the therapist’s presentation, listening to her pressure these new moms about their whole identities, I wanted to turn to the mom behind me with the week-old baby in her arms and say, “You don’t have to have it all figured out right now.” Having a baby turns your whole world upside down. And the truth is, it takes time- sometimes years- to find yourself again, to want self-care, to figure out a balance between yourself as a woman and yourself as a mother. And if I could tell new moms one thing, it would be to be patient with themselves as much as they try to be patient with their babies, to offer themselves the same amount of grace. Because they will figure it out and find something that lights them up again outside of being a mother. Maybe it will be yoga. Or maybe it will be their careers, or maybe it will be traveling. Whatever it is, moms will find it. Their spark is waiting for them when they are ready to find it, no timeline, no pressure.

A Yogi’s Journey Back Home

Can we get real for a moment? Can we push past the Instagram yoga balancing challenges and the performance wear advertisements of the joyous yoga models with smiling faces? Because when I finally decided to brush the dust off of my own personal practice, I didn’t do it with a full face of makeup and a picturesque grin. I crawled back to my yoga practice on my knees, broken down, lost, and deeply disconnected from my mind and body. It wasn’t pretty, but in time, yoga brought me back to life, back home, back to myself. This experience with yoga is my “why.” It is why I believe with my entire heart and soul that the modalities associated with yoga exist to renew joy and to connect people with their community and, more importantly, with their inner selves.

In May of 2018, my husband and I made the leap to move away from family and friends in Chicago. We left our childhood homes and friends behind to travel to San Antonio with our two young kids to further his career development; only a few years later, we would be forced to move out of our new home and abandon all of our belongings without any real understanding of if or when we would be able to return.

It was late in the summer of 2021 when I noticed the black, misshapen mark on the ceiling of our children’s playroom. I sat there on the carpet, playing dolls with my seven and three-year-old, worrying.

“I think we have a problem,” I told my husband later that day, pointing at the ceiling. “I think it’s probably mold. What else could it be?”

I spent a lot of that summer worried. I kept my children outside as much as possible, and we spent hours upon end at the pool, from breakfast to bedtime. I was uneasy inside our house, and the unease grew when a test confirmed that high levels of toxic mold were present in our home.

After beginning to work with insurance to remediate the issue, my husband came home from work one evening and met us at the pool to deliver some news.

“They approved us for a hotel stay until we can figure things out,” he whispered to me so the kids wouldn’t hear.

“When do we leave?” I asked.

“Tonight,” he replied.

While I felt grateful at the chance for a safe haven, so many questions ran through my mind. What would happen to our house? What would happen to our belongings? Old pictures? Childhood stuffed animals? Mementos from grandparents? Would they be salvageable? When would we get to come back home?

We left that evening with seven days worth of clothes shoved into a garbage bag, sealed tightly to keep any spores contained. We brought our two kids, our two cats, and left everything else behind, shut up in a house that was too dangerous to live in anymore.

Life in the hotel was strained, to say the least. While we had a clean, safe space, it was small for our family of four and two pets. We had two queen beds in one small room, a kitchen table, a stovetop, microwave, and a bathroom.

“Well, it’s bigger than my first studio apartment,” I joked, swallowing the fact that I never lived with three other people there and only later realizing the hotel space was significantly smaller than my hole-in-the-wall studio.

The three and a half months we lived there dragged unbearably. I was homeschooling my older daughter at the little table in the hotel room, keeping both kids mostly inside to avoid the busy roads that surrounded the hotel. We had no family in town, no one’s house we could stay at during the day to pretend things were normal. My kids didn’t have any toys; we had to replenish what we could, keeping in mind that we didn’t have anywhere to keep them, and big bills were inevitable in the very near future. Our friend base that we had previously worked so hard to build was now forty minutes away in traffic, not even accounting for the return trip back, and we certainly had no room to host. My husband was stressed to the absolute max, trying to juggle work and remediation efforts. He was also having physical symptoms from the mold exposure, so he would leave for work before the kids would wake up, go to the sauna to detox after work, and arrive back to the hotel shortly before the children were ready to go to bed. After the lights went out for them, the night was also over for us; there was nowhere to go.

This was truly the loneliest, most stressful time in my life to date. I felt isolated, scared, and helpless. We never knew week to week whether our hotel stay would be renewed or if we would have to figure out another place to go. As an extrovert, I craved the company of other people, and instead, I felt trapped in a 300 sq ft space with no one who fully understood the stress of what I was experiencing. I felt completely at the mercy of decisions made by others, that I had lost agency in my own life, and that was disempowering, to say the least. My seven-year-old, who had developed into a sweet, even tempered child, began to have screaming tantrums that would last for the better part of an hour, both inside the apartment and inside the car, because she was so confused by all of the sudden changes.

Later that November, we made another move to an apartment as work continued on our home. This move was both welcomed and also feared, as it was yet another change from what we had grown used to. Later, we also spent a couple month stint in Chicago for the holidays with family to try to forget the mess back home.

By the time April of 2022 rolled around and our home had been properly remediated and belongings cleaned, we were ready to move back to the home we had left 8 months earlier. But the unfortunate reality is that by the time our house was back to normal, I was in a state where I felt anything but “normal.” I was struggling badly with the experiences wrapped up in our story, and I knew I needed support. I couldn’t make it through the day without crying, and some days, it was difficult to get out of bed. I didn’t sing anymore, barely smiled, I struggled to force myself to eat, and my breathing was shallow and strained.

I attended my first studio class in over four years at Yoga Six in the spring of 2022. I entered the room quietly, keeping to myself. I followed the instructor, and ended up silently crying on my mat in savasana. I was completely broken.

It wasn’t easy to go back at first. I felt vulnerable, and, frankly, embarrassed at the emotional outpouring that seemed to keep happening. I kept my tears quiet and hoped no one noticed. But something kept pulling me to my mat, and I could feel myself healing. Over time, I began to eat more regularly. I cried less. I began to smile and sing and play with my children. The messages I heard in class, messages like, “You are in control. Do what feels right for your body today,” were simple but powerful and encouraged me to trust myself and listen to my inner voice. The instructors began to notice my regular attendance in class and made sure I knew my attendance mattered to them. They greeted me at the door, they noticed when I missed a class, they asked about my personal life and followed up on subsequent days. And, just like that, I had a community and a new place to call home. I began ensuring I wouldn't miss an opportunity to practice, even if it meant waking up at 5am most days of the week to make it happen. As an added bonus, I got the start of a six pack of abs.

My personal yoga practice lifted me out of a dark place and back into the light. I was reminded that even when I cannot control the chaos around me, I can control my breath. I can control my actions. I can control my perspective. And I can trust that everything is aligning for my highest good.

I started my teacher training in November of 2022 with Mel Marie Yoga, desiring to delve deeper into the practice and history and to better understand how yoga had such a powerful effect on my life. I felt passionate about sharing yoga with others because I understood what it was like to be lonely and desire community. I understood what it was like to find joy through the asanas. I wanted to take all the pain and stress of my experiences and transmute it into something beautiful, and that beautiful something is Invitation Yoga & Events.

Invitation Yoga & Events exists to bring people together and to strengthen relationships between friends, couples, family members, and teammates. Every experience is designed so participants feel supported, nurtured, and cared for, no matter where they are on their life’s journey.

Yoga does the magic, and I am honored to be the guide.