May 16, 2023 • 18 mins
On today's episode of the Happy Families podcast we're playing part of Justin's conversation with Amy Taylor-Kabbaz in our recent Hot Mess Summit.
Topics included in this episode -
- Why you can't do it all as a mum
- What motherhood means and why historical stereotypes aren't helpful
- The concept of matrescence
Amy Taylor-Kabbaz is the founder of the Happy Mama Movement, hosts the Happy Mama Movement Podcast and is the author of 'Mama Rising (Discovering the New You Through Motherhood'.
You can purchase the full Hot Mess Summit at the Happy Families website.
Find us on Facebook at Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families
Email us your questions and comments at podcasts@happyfamilies.com.au
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's the Happy Families podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's the podcast for.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
The time poor parent who just wants answers Now. Hello,
this is the Happy Family's podcast. My name is Stops
Justin Colson, the founder of Happy Families and the parenting
expert on the hit TV show Parental Guidance. Season two
just weeks away to being on your screens on the
Channel nine. Cannot wait for you to see season two
On the podcast. Today, I'm speaking to Amy Taylor Cabaz.
(00:27):
She's the founder of the Happy Mumma movement, author of
Mumma Rising, and she has her own podcasts as well.
Amy thinks deeply about what it means to be a
mum in modern times, embracing the beautiful mess and the
idea of what you might have heard of before. It's
a word that doesn't get thrown around a lot. It's
called matrescence.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
One of the biggest realizations I've had, not only in
my own experience of motherhood over the last fifteen years,
but the thousands of mums that I've coached through my
programs over the years, is that we never feel like
we're on top of it. We never feel like we've
nailed this parenting thing. In fact, that's not true. I
have fleeting moments of thinking, God, that's.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Good, Amy, this is I've got it, I've got.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
It, and then three seconds later, one of them will yell,
one of them will do something, something will happen, and
that feeling's gone again. So I think it's come to
the point where now I'm just at that point of
acceptance that this is what it looks like and this
is actually doing a great job, you know, headscarf and all.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
I have a question for you, a headscarf lady, how
old were you when you finally made it to that point,
because this is a critically important thing I reckon while
you're pondering your answer, I'm dangerously close to fifty. I'm
in my late forties now, and again, I never I mean,
those words just don't make sense to me. I'm so
old that my eldest daughter, who's been married for three
(01:57):
and a bit years, is having serious conversation about her
procreative capacity. And I mean, I don't even want to
say the word, but I'm going to say it because
we're on the summit. But the word grandfather, yeh is
starting to pop up in conversations. I mean, there's nothing,
nothing happening yet, but the suggestion is that the next
(02:17):
couple of years. And I mean, here's how old I
am the other night, So not not long ago. We
moved to the coast a few months ago and moved
the coast and a great neighborhood, great community. Some people
that we didn't know said, hey, why do you come
and have dinner with us on Friday nights? So we
went out for dinner just the other week and we're
sitting with these people and they're definitely a couple of
years older than us, and their kids are all adults,
but they only had a couple of kids, and I mean,
(02:39):
we've got a couple of adult kids now as well,
three of them, and so we didn't really think that
there was much of a difference between us. And this
is the terrifying thing. They don't look that much older
than us. They're definitely older than us, maybe five seven
years older. She's sixty three and he's sixty one. And
I'm like, what am I going to dinner with sixty
year olds? For what's happened to me? But like it
(03:01):
creeps up on us, doesn't it. So how old were
you when you kind of went this is kind of
who I am, and the whole hot mess thing. I
just need to accept that this is what life actually is.
It's a process of making it up as we go along,
but hopefully getting better at the stuff we're making up
because we get to experience more and more. When did
it really kind of start to click for you?
Speaker 2 (03:23):
My youngest is eight. I have three children at the moment, fourteen, twelve,
and eight, and I think when he was about four,
three or four. I call it in my work the
inner mean Mama, this internal dialogue that says, you're doing
a bad job, you should be doing better, You're screwing
this up. I can't do this anymore. That it's almost
(03:45):
Sometimes it's so unconscious we don't even realize we're telling ourselves.
I think it was about three or four years into
his life that I really started to be able to
silence that in a consistent way. Is it still there? Yes,
it was there yesterday. But I know how to recognize it.
I know it's not my truth, and I know how
to speak back to it. But that took I started
(04:08):
that process when my first was born fourteen years ago.
It's taken me a really, really long time to turn
that in a judgment off and silence it. I think now,
and I can say this without ego and quite strongly.
I know I'm a great mum to my kids, but
that doesn't mean I'm perfect. I just know that I'm
(04:32):
doing the best I can every single day, and it's
taken me a long time to feel confident in that. However,
I am still working much more strongly on feeling like
less of a hot mess in other parts of my life.
So it's like I shifted all my focus on too
really taming that inner mean mumma voice for many, many years.
(04:54):
And because my kids are now at that beautiful age
where we can have conversations and I can and see that,
you know what, they are growing into really great human beings.
I think when they're really little, it's hard to know
if you're doing a good job. It's hard to know
whether those toddler tantrums are going to turn into a
you know, an adolescent that you know breaks into homes
(05:15):
and gets drunk, and you know, it's harder to know
you're on the right track when they're really little. Now
that my kids are this age and we sit around
the dinner table and have these amazing conversations like it's
my favorite part of parenthood to hear them talk about
their worries about the planet, their reflections on what they
saw on the news, their way that they're handling a
(05:37):
difficult friendship at school. Even my eight year old you know,
I can see, yeah, okay, we're on the right track.
Other parts of my life, like work relationships, there's still
an ongoing internal coaching that I have to do to
just settle this perfectionist tendency I've always had ever since
(05:58):
I was little, about how perfectly I need to have
this all done.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
I really like the idea of experience. As I'm hearing
what you're reflecting. I mean, this is why I had
six kids, right. We just keep on going till we
get it right. I'm just kidding. But what we found
is the more kids we've had and the more experience
we've had with child rearing, the more comfortable we've become
with what matters and what does and the less that questioning, nagging,
(06:24):
doubting voice has impact on us, and we become increasingly settled. Amy.
I've got a copy of your book, Mumma Rising, but
it's just out of reach on the floor behind me.
Because when Kylie and I were recording a podcast the
other day, she had it in the hand and she
placed it on the floor there. I can't go go
gadget arms to get it, and I want to stay
here in front of the in front of the camera
while I'm chatting with you. So I'm just going to
(06:44):
need everyone to believe that you've written a book called
Mumma Rising, and imagine that I'm holding it up for you.
Let's talk about this now. This conversation as part of
the hot Mess Summit is probably give more towards mums
than dads, but I think dads will certainly learn and
get great value out of this discussion. So Dad's hang
around for this one please. I've got a handful of
questions about what you've written in the book, and a
(07:05):
handful of questions about the whole subject of being a
hot mess. So, now that we know how old we
are and how we are all just making it up
as we go along, I want to go back to
the beginnings of parenthood for just a sec As we
as we first become parents, we often come to what
with the perfect image of what we think it should be.
I know my perfect image was my kids will listen
(07:26):
to me and do us they're told, which was a
disastrous approach to parenting. It didn't work very well at all.
But you speak a lot about where that perfect image
comes from and how to change it. Can we just
start there?
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yes, I think it's so important for us to get
a cultural and historical understanding of where we get these
ideas from, because you know, whether you're our age, justin
or younger, most women on the planet have been told
since they were born that they could do anything. That
we are in the generation now of theist and that
(08:00):
we now have choice, although it depends on where in
the world do you have that choice right now? But
we have this ability to be a mum and be
something else. You know, I distinctly remember growing up feeling
like I needed to never be just a mum. Being
just a mum was a waste of my skills, my talents,
(08:21):
my life because we were really raised in this era
of our opportunity and the glass ceiling and you know,
smashing through the glass ceiling. But what that did to
our generation and is still doing in a lot of ways,
is undervaluing motherhood.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
I'm so glad you said that, because as you say,
just a mum. I pause and Kylie only ever wanted
to be a mum.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah, And I've worked with a lot of women who
say that as well, Like Amly, I actually did only
ever want to be a mum, but I felt like
that wasn't enough by others.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
So no matter how you came to it, whether it's
a surprising turn of events to want to be a
mom so much because you thought you'd always be career driven,
or whether it's been ever since you're a little girl
you knew that motherhood was your thing. We come to
this and in the moment of becoming a mother, we
experience what we know now as matrescence. It's this change
(09:18):
in identity. It's not only a change in your brain
and in your hormones and in your body, of course, but
it's also a change in how you view the world,
how you view yourself, your relationships, your economic status, your
position in society, all of it. The best way to
understand it is like matrescence is like adolescence. It's this
period of becoming this new version of yourself. So just
(09:42):
like a child doesn't wake up on its thirteenth birthday
and is suddenly an adult. There's this period of and
you would know better than anyone that it's actually almost
a decade of brain changes, hormonal changes, but also personal
changes of pushing back and questioning and and exploring different
things and changing your mind about who you want to
(10:04):
be and what you're here to do, and this real
transition period. And we know now that that's also what
happens to a woman when she becomes a mother, and
so if we are to so for example, for me,
I always thought that, yeah, I'd love to be a mum,
but it will be something that I almost add to
(10:25):
my life. But nothing else will change. You know, I'll
still be I know.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
We laugh now I'm going to say famous last words,
but you yes.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Literally changed everything, as it does for all of us,
whether we're aware of it or not. But I thought
it would be something I could almost add to my
resume in the sense of I'll still work the way
I've always worked. I remember my husband and I had
a conversation when I was pregnant with our first baby.
You know, this is not going to change us, This
is not going to change our relationship. We made these
commitments not to change. We were still going to be
(10:56):
who we were, and that's literally impossible. Motherhood, parenthood, fatherhood
changes you at your core and it makes you suddenly
revalue everything. So if we are growing up in a
period of time where being a parent is not valued,
it's not seen, it's not celebrated, we have to justify
(11:18):
ourselves to be able to put motherhood first or fatherhood first.
And yet internally, this is exactly what's happened. You can
feel this split within us. We can feel this. I'm
not who I used to be Suddenly. I don't want
to go to work like I used to Suddenly. The
things that I thought were important just aren't important anymore.
(11:39):
When I'm at work, I want to be at home
with the baby. When I'm home with baby, I want
to be at work because I feel like I'm invisible.
We are in this period of matrescence of these deep
questioning of who we are, and it is very, very messy.
It is the definition of a hot mess.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I don't want to talk about it. It's a fundamental
identity issue.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Right absolutely.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
But you would just start to say, but we don't
talk about it.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
We don't. And you know, in my study and research
around this, justin there's so much talk around that second
wave of feminism in the seventies, where we really empowered
women to choose whether they wanted to be a mother
or not and mother in their own way, and that's
what we've been told. But actually, if you scratch the
surface of any woman, whether she's a mother or not,
(12:30):
and ask her about what her definition of a good
mother is, it looks surprisingly like a nineteen fifties version
of a mother and a wife. We may externally say
that we've released ourselves from that identity, but actually most
of us still carry within us this assumption that we
should love being a mum every minute every day, that
(12:53):
we should fell pregnant naturally and easily, and birth naturally
and breastfeed naturally, that we should be happy to sacrifice ourselves,
make everything from scratch, you know, play all of the games,
do all of the things, and if any of us
aren't feeling that way, even if it's just for part
(13:13):
of the time, we feel like we're a bad mum.
And that's where this idea of the good mother theory
comes from. That internally we may say outside, oh, you know, yes,
I know, I don't have to do it all and
I can get help. But every single mum I've worked
with over the years justin feels bad about asking for help,
feels like they should make the birthday cake from scratch,
(13:36):
feels like they shouldn't be putting their kid in for
extra hours at daycare. You know, there is this again
in a mean mumma voice, this internal good mother expectation
that makes us feel really bad about the reality of
the messiness of this time in our life.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
I love what you're saying here. It reminds me so
much of what I've said in the opening remarks to
the Summit. I'm talking about the beautiful, beautiful mess effect. Right. So,
we love each other's vulnerability, Oh, sorry, not each other's.
We love it when other people are vulnerable. We love
it when other people ask for help. We love it
when other people talk honestly about their body or about
their failures as a parent. We love when other people
(14:16):
own their stuff. But we feel like we can't do it.
We feel like it's fine for all of them to
do it because they've actually got it together, and when
they're highlighting that they've had a challenge, it's just because
they had a challenge, Whereas my life is challenged like
there's something going on here with the whole and that's
why we're doing the Hot Mess Summit. But this good
mother theory, it seems to be almost at the heart
(14:37):
of our identity as parents and create so much mother guilt, right, so.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Much mother guilt. And you know, I think in a
way we're trying to break this. I love what you've
just said, because we're trying to break this down at
a cultural sort of social media level in some accounts,
some accounts still very much hold up the perfect white
family with the perfect white kitchen and the perfec white
baby in the perfect white outfit.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
But that looks so good because and it looks so.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Good, and pretty much none of us are immune to
looking at that and thinking, oh, but I totally agree
we forgive each other's messiness, but it actually has to
start with forgiving our own messiness. And I think the
biggest thing that I do in my work through this
lens of matrescence is to break down that cultural assumption
(15:27):
of who you're meant to be and what is meant
to look like and feel like. You know, there's this
another theory that I absolutely fell in love with when
I was doing all of this research is the maternal mandate.
So the maternal mandate is a description of, again what
women assume about themselves and the world assumes about women
(15:49):
that if you are born a woman and you are
of a certain age, you should be wanting to have children.
Once you have one, you should want more, You should
feel pregnant easily in that, you should love every minute
all of that. And again, this is somehow what we're carrying.
You know, ask any woman who is in a long
(16:10):
term relationship, someone's going to ask them, are you going
to have a baby soon? Once they've had one baby,
they're going to say, and when will you have the
second one? You know, we continue to put these expectations
on each other and ourselves, and the key to being
okay with the mess, because it is a beautiful mess,
is to realize, I think one of the main important
(16:35):
questions we can ask ourselves is whose expectation is this?
Where is this coming from? Because it might come from
your mum, and it might come from your mother's group.
But I think it's also just as empowering to realize
it comes from the culture that we've been brought up
in that tells us we should be able to do
(16:55):
it all. We should be able to have a great home,
a great body, a great relationship, be a great mum,
be great at work. And it's actually physically not possible
to do that on our own the way that we're
doing it at the moment. Something has to break.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
That was Amy Taylor Kebbaz, the founder of the Happy
Mamma movement and author of Mamma Rising. I spoke to
Amy as part of the Happy Family's hot Mess Summit.
You can find out more about the hot Mess Summit
at Happy families dot com dot you just jump into
the shop. That hot Mess Summit is still available for purchase.
And so many great conversations, so many incredibly intelligent and
(17:38):
helpful people to help make our lives less of a
hot mess, especially especially the way things are going at
the moment with inflation and interest rates and all the
stress in life. And we're going to put all of
Amy's links in the show notes. You can find more
about her there. You can also find, like I said,
the hot Mess Summit on the Happy Family's website. The
Happy Families Podcast, as always, is produced by Justin Roland,
(17:59):
from which Media. Craig Bruce is our executive producer and
for more information about making your family happier, we'd love
for you to check out that pop Miss Summit at
happy families dot com dotu, or visit us at our
Facebook page, Doctor Justin Colson's Happy Families
It's the Happy Families podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's the podcast for.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
The time poor parent who just wants answers Now. Hello,
this is the Happy Family's podcast. My name is Stops
Justin Colson, the founder of Happy Families and the parenting
expert on the hit TV show Parental Guidance. Season two
just weeks away to being on your screens on the
Channel nine. Cannot wait for you to see season two
On the podcast. Today, I'm speaking to Amy Taylor Cabaz.
(00:27):
She's the founder of the Happy Mumma movement, author of
Mumma Rising, and she has her own podcasts as well.
Amy thinks deeply about what it means to be a
mum in modern times, embracing the beautiful mess and the
idea of what you might have heard of before. It's
a word that doesn't get thrown around a lot. It's
called matrescence.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
One of the biggest realizations I've had, not only in
my own experience of motherhood over the last fifteen years,
but the thousands of mums that I've coached through my
programs over the years, is that we never feel like
we're on top of it. We never feel like we've
nailed this parenting thing. In fact, that's not true. I
have fleeting moments of thinking, God, that's.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Good, Amy, this is I've got it, I've got.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
It, and then three seconds later, one of them will yell,
one of them will do something, something will happen, and
that feeling's gone again. So I think it's come to
the point where now I'm just at that point of
acceptance that this is what it looks like and this
is actually doing a great job, you know, headscarf and all.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
I have a question for you, a headscarf lady, how
old were you when you finally made it to that point,
because this is a critically important thing I reckon while
you're pondering your answer, I'm dangerously close to fifty. I'm
in my late forties now, and again, I never I mean,
those words just don't make sense to me. I'm so
old that my eldest daughter, who's been married for three
(01:57):
and a bit years, is having serious conversation about her
procreative capacity. And I mean, I don't even want to
say the word, but I'm going to say it because
we're on the summit. But the word grandfather, yeh is
starting to pop up in conversations. I mean, there's nothing,
nothing happening yet, but the suggestion is that the next
(02:17):
couple of years. And I mean, here's how old I
am the other night, So not not long ago. We
moved to the coast a few months ago and moved
the coast and a great neighborhood, great community. Some people
that we didn't know said, hey, why do you come
and have dinner with us on Friday nights? So we
went out for dinner just the other week and we're
sitting with these people and they're definitely a couple of
years older than us, and their kids are all adults,
but they only had a couple of kids, and I mean,
(02:39):
we've got a couple of adult kids now as well,
three of them, and so we didn't really think that
there was much of a difference between us. And this
is the terrifying thing. They don't look that much older
than us. They're definitely older than us, maybe five seven
years older. She's sixty three and he's sixty one. And
I'm like, what am I going to dinner with sixty
year olds? For what's happened to me? But like it
(03:01):
creeps up on us, doesn't it. So how old were
you when you kind of went this is kind of
who I am, and the whole hot mess thing. I
just need to accept that this is what life actually is.
It's a process of making it up as we go along,
but hopefully getting better at the stuff we're making up
because we get to experience more and more. When did
it really kind of start to click for you?
Speaker 2 (03:23):
My youngest is eight. I have three children at the moment, fourteen, twelve,
and eight, and I think when he was about four,
three or four. I call it in my work the
inner mean Mama, this internal dialogue that says, you're doing
a bad job, you should be doing better, You're screwing
this up. I can't do this anymore. That it's almost
(03:45):
Sometimes it's so unconscious we don't even realize we're telling ourselves.
I think it was about three or four years into
his life that I really started to be able to
silence that in a consistent way. Is it still there? Yes,
it was there yesterday. But I know how to recognize it.
I know it's not my truth, and I know how
to speak back to it. But that took I started
(04:08):
that process when my first was born fourteen years ago.
It's taken me a really, really long time to turn
that in a judgment off and silence it. I think now,
and I can say this without ego and quite strongly.
I know I'm a great mum to my kids, but
that doesn't mean I'm perfect. I just know that I'm
(04:32):
doing the best I can every single day, and it's
taken me a long time to feel confident in that. However,
I am still working much more strongly on feeling like
less of a hot mess in other parts of my life.
So it's like I shifted all my focus on too
really taming that inner mean mumma voice for many, many years.
(04:54):
And because my kids are now at that beautiful age
where we can have conversations and I can and see that,
you know what, they are growing into really great human beings.
I think when they're really little, it's hard to know
if you're doing a good job. It's hard to know
whether those toddler tantrums are going to turn into a
you know, an adolescent that you know breaks into homes
(05:15):
and gets drunk, and you know, it's harder to know
you're on the right track when they're really little. Now
that my kids are this age and we sit around
the dinner table and have these amazing conversations like it's
my favorite part of parenthood to hear them talk about
their worries about the planet, their reflections on what they
saw on the news, their way that they're handling a
(05:37):
difficult friendship at school. Even my eight year old you know,
I can see, yeah, okay, we're on the right track.
Other parts of my life, like work relationships, there's still
an ongoing internal coaching that I have to do to
just settle this perfectionist tendency I've always had ever since
(05:58):
I was little, about how perfectly I need to have
this all done.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
I really like the idea of experience. As I'm hearing
what you're reflecting. I mean, this is why I had
six kids, right. We just keep on going till we
get it right. I'm just kidding. But what we found
is the more kids we've had and the more experience
we've had with child rearing, the more comfortable we've become
with what matters and what does and the less that questioning, nagging,
(06:24):
doubting voice has impact on us, and we become increasingly settled. Amy.
I've got a copy of your book, Mumma Rising, but
it's just out of reach on the floor behind me.
Because when Kylie and I were recording a podcast the
other day, she had it in the hand and she
placed it on the floor there. I can't go go
gadget arms to get it, and I want to stay
here in front of the in front of the camera
while I'm chatting with you. So I'm just going to
(06:44):
need everyone to believe that you've written a book called
Mumma Rising, and imagine that I'm holding it up for you.
Let's talk about this now. This conversation as part of
the hot Mess Summit is probably give more towards mums
than dads, but I think dads will certainly learn and
get great value out of this discussion. So Dad's hang
around for this one please. I've got a handful of
questions about what you've written in the book, and a
(07:05):
handful of questions about the whole subject of being a
hot mess. So, now that we know how old we
are and how we are all just making it up
as we go along, I want to go back to
the beginnings of parenthood for just a sec As we
as we first become parents, we often come to what
with the perfect image of what we think it should be.
I know my perfect image was my kids will listen
(07:26):
to me and do us they're told, which was a
disastrous approach to parenting. It didn't work very well at all.
But you speak a lot about where that perfect image
comes from and how to change it. Can we just
start there?
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yes, I think it's so important for us to get
a cultural and historical understanding of where we get these
ideas from, because you know, whether you're our age, justin
or younger, most women on the planet have been told
since they were born that they could do anything. That
we are in the generation now of theist and that
(08:00):
we now have choice, although it depends on where in
the world do you have that choice right now? But
we have this ability to be a mum and be
something else. You know, I distinctly remember growing up feeling
like I needed to never be just a mum. Being
just a mum was a waste of my skills, my talents,
(08:21):
my life because we were really raised in this era
of our opportunity and the glass ceiling and you know,
smashing through the glass ceiling. But what that did to
our generation and is still doing in a lot of ways,
is undervaluing motherhood.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
I'm so glad you said that, because as you say,
just a mum. I pause and Kylie only ever wanted
to be a mum.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah, And I've worked with a lot of women who
say that as well, Like Amly, I actually did only
ever want to be a mum, but I felt like
that wasn't enough by others.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
So no matter how you came to it, whether it's
a surprising turn of events to want to be a
mom so much because you thought you'd always be career driven,
or whether it's been ever since you're a little girl
you knew that motherhood was your thing. We come to
this and in the moment of becoming a mother, we
experience what we know now as matrescence. It's this change
(09:18):
in identity. It's not only a change in your brain
and in your hormones and in your body, of course, but
it's also a change in how you view the world,
how you view yourself, your relationships, your economic status, your
position in society, all of it. The best way to
understand it is like matrescence is like adolescence. It's this
period of becoming this new version of yourself. So just
(09:42):
like a child doesn't wake up on its thirteenth birthday
and is suddenly an adult. There's this period of and
you would know better than anyone that it's actually almost
a decade of brain changes, hormonal changes, but also personal
changes of pushing back and questioning and and exploring different
things and changing your mind about who you want to
(10:04):
be and what you're here to do, and this real
transition period. And we know now that that's also what
happens to a woman when she becomes a mother, and
so if we are to so for example, for me,
I always thought that, yeah, I'd love to be a mum,
but it will be something that I almost add to
(10:25):
my life. But nothing else will change. You know, I'll
still be I know.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
We laugh now I'm going to say famous last words,
but you yes.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Literally changed everything, as it does for all of us,
whether we're aware of it or not. But I thought
it would be something I could almost add to my
resume in the sense of I'll still work the way
I've always worked. I remember my husband and I had
a conversation when I was pregnant with our first baby.
You know, this is not going to change us, This
is not going to change our relationship. We made these
commitments not to change. We were still going to be
(10:56):
who we were, and that's literally impossible. Motherhood, parenthood, fatherhood
changes you at your core and it makes you suddenly
revalue everything. So if we are growing up in a
period of time where being a parent is not valued,
it's not seen, it's not celebrated, we have to justify
(11:18):
ourselves to be able to put motherhood first or fatherhood first.
And yet internally, this is exactly what's happened. You can
feel this split within us. We can feel this. I'm
not who I used to be Suddenly. I don't want
to go to work like I used to Suddenly. The
things that I thought were important just aren't important anymore.
(11:39):
When I'm at work, I want to be at home
with the baby. When I'm home with baby, I want
to be at work because I feel like I'm invisible.
We are in this period of matrescence of these deep
questioning of who we are, and it is very, very messy.
It is the definition of a hot mess.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I don't want to talk about it. It's a fundamental
identity issue.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Right absolutely.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
But you would just start to say, but we don't
talk about it.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
We don't. And you know, in my study and research
around this, justin there's so much talk around that second
wave of feminism in the seventies, where we really empowered
women to choose whether they wanted to be a mother
or not and mother in their own way, and that's
what we've been told. But actually, if you scratch the
surface of any woman, whether she's a mother or not,
(12:30):
and ask her about what her definition of a good
mother is, it looks surprisingly like a nineteen fifties version
of a mother and a wife. We may externally say
that we've released ourselves from that identity, but actually most
of us still carry within us this assumption that we
should love being a mum every minute every day, that
(12:53):
we should fell pregnant naturally and easily, and birth naturally
and breastfeed naturally, that we should be happy to sacrifice ourselves,
make everything from scratch, you know, play all of the games,
do all of the things, and if any of us
aren't feeling that way, even if it's just for part
(13:13):
of the time, we feel like we're a bad mum.
And that's where this idea of the good mother theory
comes from. That internally we may say outside, oh, you know, yes,
I know, I don't have to do it all and
I can get help. But every single mum I've worked
with over the years justin feels bad about asking for help,
feels like they should make the birthday cake from scratch,
(13:36):
feels like they shouldn't be putting their kid in for
extra hours at daycare. You know, there is this again
in a mean mumma voice, this internal good mother expectation
that makes us feel really bad about the reality of
the messiness of this time in our life.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
I love what you're saying here. It reminds me so
much of what I've said in the opening remarks to
the Summit. I'm talking about the beautiful, beautiful mess effect. Right. So,
we love each other's vulnerability, Oh, sorry, not each other's.
We love it when other people are vulnerable. We love
it when other people ask for help. We love it
when other people talk honestly about their body or about
their failures as a parent. We love when other people
(14:16):
own their stuff. But we feel like we can't do it.
We feel like it's fine for all of them to
do it because they've actually got it together, and when
they're highlighting that they've had a challenge, it's just because
they had a challenge, Whereas my life is challenged like
there's something going on here with the whole and that's
why we're doing the Hot Mess Summit. But this good
mother theory, it seems to be almost at the heart
(14:37):
of our identity as parents and create so much mother guilt, right, so.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Much mother guilt. And you know, I think in a
way we're trying to break this. I love what you've
just said, because we're trying to break this down at
a cultural sort of social media level in some accounts,
some accounts still very much hold up the perfect white
family with the perfect white kitchen and the perfec white
baby in the perfect white outfit.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
But that looks so good because and it looks so.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Good, and pretty much none of us are immune to
looking at that and thinking, oh, but I totally agree
we forgive each other's messiness, but it actually has to
start with forgiving our own messiness. And I think the
biggest thing that I do in my work through this
lens of matrescence is to break down that cultural assumption
(15:27):
of who you're meant to be and what is meant
to look like and feel like. You know, there's this
another theory that I absolutely fell in love with when
I was doing all of this research is the maternal mandate.
So the maternal mandate is a description of, again what
women assume about themselves and the world assumes about women
(15:49):
that if you are born a woman and you are
of a certain age, you should be wanting to have children.
Once you have one, you should want more, You should
feel pregnant easily in that, you should love every minute
all of that. And again, this is somehow what we're carrying.
You know, ask any woman who is in a long
(16:10):
term relationship, someone's going to ask them, are you going
to have a baby soon? Once they've had one baby,
they're going to say, and when will you have the
second one? You know, we continue to put these expectations
on each other and ourselves, and the key to being
okay with the mess, because it is a beautiful mess,
is to realize, I think one of the main important
(16:35):
questions we can ask ourselves is whose expectation is this?
Where is this coming from? Because it might come from
your mum, and it might come from your mother's group.
But I think it's also just as empowering to realize
it comes from the culture that we've been brought up
in that tells us we should be able to do
(16:55):
it all. We should be able to have a great home,
a great body, a great relationship, be a great mum,
be great at work. And it's actually physically not possible
to do that on our own the way that we're
doing it at the moment. Something has to break.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
That was Amy Taylor Kebbaz, the founder of the Happy
Mamma movement and author of Mamma Rising. I spoke to
Amy as part of the Happy Family's hot Mess Summit.
You can find out more about the hot Mess Summit
at Happy families dot com dot you just jump into
the shop. That hot Mess Summit is still available for purchase.
And so many great conversations, so many incredibly intelligent and
(17:38):
helpful people to help make our lives less of a
hot mess, especially especially the way things are going at
the moment with inflation and interest rates and all the
stress in life. And we're going to put all of
Amy's links in the show notes. You can find more
about her there. You can also find, like I said,
the hot Mess Summit on the Happy Family's website. The
Happy Families Podcast, as always, is produced by Justin Roland,
(17:59):
from which Media. Craig Bruce is our executive producer and
for more information about making your family happier, we'd love
for you to check out that pop Miss Summit at
happy families dot com dotu, or visit us at our
Facebook page, Doctor Justin Colson's Happy Families
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