Redefining our relationship with the transition to motherhood to improve maternal health outcomes

The transition into motherhood is a phenomenal site of challenge, growth and power.

Importantly, I believe we can use this process to dislodge old stories that don’t serve us, to leave them on the ground.

Status Quo for this transition:

The way things are, women pass through these pivotal years of transition with woefully inadequate support.

As women we have always understood on some level that our role is to keep quiet, head down, hustle, work harder.

To accept things the way they are.

At no point does this message scream louder than the transitional years of pregnancy, birth and motherhood.

Community care is gone. We leave women to stand alone. Ill-equipped. Under resourced.

Exhausted and overwhelmed.

Women are set up for failure, and then asked to accept it as their own.

Embedded beliefs have taught us about who the Perfect Mother is even before we reach our own motherhood. We know the rules.

It goes something like this.

Become pregnant (easily). Love the pregnancy (every moment), defer to the experts (smiling), be grateful, be quiet. Become a mother - slim the body, clean the house, nourish the child, pick up a side hustle. Don’t Drop Anything. Be grateful that you now Have It All.

We understand what not to do - never be angry, bored, never question experts or the status quo.

In a culture of motherhood equals sacrifice, we are taught to feel guilty for prioritising our basic human needs and shame about any parts of our experiences that deviate from perceived perfection.

Maddeningly, it’s all so ingrained we barely see it. Can barely pin the words to articulate a single piece of it. We can’t create a new world and a new way when we can barely locate the sense of this unease. We might just file this one under ‘our own individual failing’. Swallow it down.

The story of this transition hasn’t always looked this way. It doesn’t have to look this way.

We can hand back anything that doesn’t serve us.

As things could be:

I believe it is necessary to redefine this transition through a lens of awe and possibility.

The terrain we cross in this cracked-wide-open times.

The way we unravel, unveil, unfurl. It’s drenched in beauty. It is a reverence story.

I have treated thousands of women walking through all sorts of challenges in my practice. With my own eyes and my own heart I have witnessed women birth, triumph, grit, crawl, soar and thrive. So this vision and story of reverence doesn’t come from a naive blindness to hardship and struggle.

It is an acknowledgement of the common thread that weaves through each of our stories. It is the way we find a way to continue on, in spite of it all. The way we continue to open to and rumble with what’s in front of us.

I stand in awe of the capacity, strength, compassion, determination and grit of women. And I believe it’s time we reframe women’s health and maternal health standing from here.

From this glory. This triumph. This power.

Because from here, we can see what women moving through these transition years genuinely deserve…

Everything. They deserve Everything.