Work. Mama. Life.

From Motherhood Burnout to Abundant Health, Joy and Wellbeing

Ali Young

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780730396574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: General Health

Embrace the joys of motherhood without losing yourself

Motherhood is an amazing journey. It's a time of chaos and calm, joy and frustration, overwhelming stress and incredible fun. But as mamas strive to juggle the health of their children, their home and work lives, and their relationships, they can often put themselves last, risking physical and emotional burnout.

Work. Mama. Life. is for all those mamas trying to achieve a better balance. Through a combination of evidence-based research, first-hand mothering experience, and easy-to-follow exercises, this guidebook will show mamas everywhere how to rediscover their joy, self and health in the face of the intense challenges working motherhood brings.

In Work. Mama. Life, health and motherhood expert Ali Young delivers an expertly balanced combination of evidence-based research, clinical experience, and personal familiarity to help mums everywhere reclaim their lives and reset their health.

Learn how to:

• understand matrescence and your 'mother brain'
• identify early signs of stress and burnout
• find and embrace your village
• reinvigorate yourself and ditch fatigue
• bring lightness and brightness to yourself and others.

A real book by a real mum filled with real tools for the real world, Work. Mama. Life is a practical, evidence-based, and authoritative resource for every mother who's sick of feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and burned out. Work. Mama. Life. will help every current, aspiring, or expecting mother to navigate their experience of motherhood and reclaim their life with calm and good health.

Part I
WORK (AND YOU)

Balancing Motherhood and Life

Let's explore the world of motherhood!

As I said in the introduction, this part of the book is all about arming you with the knowledge to make thoughtful and considered decisions and to be able to change when you need to. To soulfully lead your life with heart and health firmly in your grasp.

When I began the journey back to working-mum land, I knew all the right things to do … or so I thought. I was busy, I was rushing, I was yelling … I was trying to do it all. In this part of the book I share a lot about my motherhood journey.

I'd like to start by planting some seeds of hope that you aren't alone and that you are in the right space to learn about motherhood.

In part I we'll be looking into the knowledge and backstory of motherhood. In each chapter, I'll give you some gentle run-throughs of important stuff that will help you rediscover your awesome self and your health, and to find a bit more joy. I'll share some knowledge and research, and paint a picture of how it might show up for you. Or, at least, how I've seen it in some other mums' worlds.

I definitely had to turn on and off my researcher brain for this part of the book. My hope is that I've injected enough real life into it that you get to the end and can see the parallels in your own world. Doing the work now on the you part of motherhood will make understanding the how a lot easier.

The body is a wondrous thing. It is able to adapt and change and mould, and it responds perfectly to its environment all the time thanks to our brain and nervous system. But stress can lead us to being switched ‘on’ all the time, which isn't healthy. And stress is something we all had our fair share of during COVID, particularly during lockdowns. For mothers, this has had a particularly significant impact.

In this part of the book, I'll be bringing to light how your body is magical. How it's wonderful. How it's able to allow you your human existence and keep being resilient through the motherhood gig.

Enjoy learning about your awesome self because that's exactly what you are. My hope is that by the end of part I you will be able to recognise just how amazing you are and that if you're struggling a bit to balance motherhood and life (including work), you'll learn how to reclaim your ‘self’ again!

(1)
INTRODUCING MOTHERHOOD AND JOURNEYS

My motherhood and journeys into the great awesome unknown!

I thought I would start out on our journey of discovering burnout, mum-life, working-mum life and all the glorious in between with a bit of a discussion about my motherhood. Because sure, I can qualify myself with skills learned at uni, but there's nothing like the trenches and supporting thousands of mums along the way!

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In this opening chapter you'll read a bit about:

• my motherhood journey
• burnout — how it can show up and surprise us
• support systems and stress
• patriarchy in motherhood (a quick little chat and eye opener)
• insights into healing yourself and vitality.

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Observations from before I took the leap into motherhood

When I graduated from RMIT University way back in 2002, I thought motherhood was just another linear element in our life, a trajectory that a lot of women traverse along because it is the ‘done’ thing. As a country kid growing up in regional Victoria, I was encouraged to study one of three professions: doctor, lawyer or stockbroker. These were perceived as my way out of the country life and into a ‘safe job’.

My mum worked at the hospital in town as a sonographer and I would often go there after school to wait for a lift home (town was some 45 kilometres away from our home). Interestingly, I began to observe the difficulties professional women experienced in that environment, and how they were always juggling and figuring out how to ‘manage it all’.

When I was 15, I went to a chiropractor for the first time and, as well as getting rid of the pain I'd been experiencing in my feet for a long time, I learned that they could choose their own working hours. Subconsciously, choosing chiropractic — a career that is supportive of working mums — was a no-brainer. Not only had it been modelled to me as an easy working-mum choice but having been around inter-generational models of working mothers, I guess I felt well placed to ‘have it all’.

As a 23-year-old chiropractor, I gave it little regard, however, and began on my lightning-fast career trajectory. This took me to the other side of Australia, all the way to Perth, where I met some amazing women who have influenced my motherhood. Love stories abound about how we all met … but I'll save that for another time!

At university, when I was studying chiropractic, there was zero focus on matrescence (the beautiful shift and change from woman to mother, something I'll be discussing in depth in chapter 3) and the stages of motherhood. We were taught about the pregnant mother, but not how to care for the post-partum one. We were taught about newborn babies, infants and toddlers. We were taught about the hormonal flux of adolescence. There was no highlight reel of the elements of motherhood we needed to be supportive of. It was pretty much glossed over. This really needs to change if we are going to support mothers in the way they need us to.

When I began practising, I was blessed to take over a private family practice and I began working closely with mums, both for themselves and as parents of the children under my care. It was here that I witnessed, firsthand, the desire of mothers to have all of the best things for their children, including health.

Mums would constantly chase the to-do list that helped them to keep their child/ren healthy, with a complete disregard for their own health. There was so much focus on doing everything for their family that stopping to care for themselves was never a priority that made it onto the completed to-do list.

This pattern would keep occurring until they fell in a heap, which is where I would step in as part of the team putting them back together.

Sound familiar? I'm sure it does for some of you. And probably not for others.

Interestingly, this was modelled to me in practice as the norm for all mums. It took until I became a mother, and explored how I could maintain my own personal vitality, to dig into these concepts of health for mums. The dichotomy of not being selfish, but choosing to care for myself as well as my child — which may be different from the expected norm in standard Western society — was a hard pill to swallow. The true expression of both mum-guilt and the ‘perfect mother’ myth had ingrained themselves in my thoughts around what a mother was, and it began to impact my motherhood.

I'd seen my business partner and best friend traverse a multiple pregnancy, and how the system had expectations of her to birth a certain way because she was having triplets. She sought out health professionals who supported her choice to have a vaginal birth, which somewhat made her an outlier. This then formed an element of minority fatigue throughout her mothering journey. Add to this the expectation that, because she became a mum to three amazing little humans, she was supposed to constantly be equally fully fatigued and extremely grateful.

She, however, chose something different for herself and her family. For her, work was a large part of her values system and it allowed her to feel herself amid the chaos of three tiny humans. This modelled to me the ‘anti-perfect mother’ myth. There were times, of course, where the mum-guilt associated with any and all decisions around return to work — or not performing at work after the kids had been up at night and she hadn't slept well — was very real. The reality of the stress of trying to maintain a perfect work–life–mum balance was extraordinary, and this was well before the crazy times of the 2020s.

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II PAUSE MOMENT

• Did you observe friends/family/colleagues before you became a mum, who in retrospect shaped your thoughts on mothering and motherhood?
• What pre-framed ideas (like fatigue, tiredness, joy, playfulness, connection, isolation) did you take into motherhood?

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My journey into motherhood

My journey into motherhood was an unplanned but much-longed-for surprise. A wedding night baby, in fact. I know … totally ironic for the hea...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I: WORK (AND YOU)
• Part II: MAMA
• Part III: LIFE
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX: RECIPES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT