77. My RAW Truths About Motherhood & Relationships As A New Mom (Bonus Mother's Day episode!)

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In this episode, you are going to hear my raw truths about motherhood and relationships as a new mom.

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Speaker: Welcome to Heartbreak to Wholeness, the podcast helping you heal from the mindfuck of narcissistic relationships and move towards the secure, peaceful woman you want to become. I am your host, Bre Wolta, Relationship Clarity Coach and EFT Certified Practitioner. Let's dive in.

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Hello and welcome back to the episode today in honor of Mother's Day is all things motherhood and relationships that I am learning as a new mom.

In this episode, you are gonna hear my raw truth about motherhood, the good, bad, and the ugly. You're going to understand how motherhood can trigger wounds from past toxic relationships, and you're gonna learn how to tend to your inner child while you are raising a child.

And be sure to stick around to the end of the episode where I will pull an Oracle card that will offer you a message that you can use this week to stay more conscious in your healing

[00:01:00] Motherhood. Ooh, where do we start? I guess what I wanna first say, if you're new here and you don't know, I had a baby for months ago and I'm just coming back from maternity leave. As I am recording this episode, little Miss Faye Willow is up in her bassinet and we are fingers crossing that she stays in her nap during the whole recording of this episode.

Um, one piece of motherhood that I'm learning is you just take advantage of every moment that you have, so my husband and I welcomed Faye into the world four months ago, and I have been sitting with how to talk about this experience for some time, and I've been sort of in this half baked place of, there's so much I wanna share and there's so much I wanna say and, and it's true what you've heard from every parent ever in that you can't even describe it in words in that.

It's harder and more wonderful than you could ever describe [00:02:00] to somebody, and you won't understand until you've been there. But I wanna try, I wanna try to explain what this experience has been, because if I could use one word to, to sum it up, it's intense. And I had a friend once tell me, she's like, having a baby is just more, it's more beauty, it's more pain, it's more joy, it's more sadness.

It's just more, everything is more. And I didn't quite like gather that all at the time that she was telling me that. But it was during the part of contemplation where my husband and I were like, do we wanna have a child or not? And she's like, there's not a right or wrong answer.

There's, there's a choice where you experience life in more in amplification, and there's a choice where you keep experiencing life as you have up till now. And that really helped me. Mentally prepare, I think. But being in the experience has expanded me in ways [00:03:00] that I, I could have never anticipated. , and when I was in the early weeks, the weeks where you're getting up every hour and a half to breastfeed in the middle of the night where you are not sleeping, where you don't know what the fuck you're doing in any sense of the word,

from diapers to swaddling to soothing there, there's just so much that you're trying to learn all at one time on zero sleep. So the first six weeks were brutal. They were. It was relentless and we had moments of beauty. We had moments of like staring at this little human in awe and wonder and tears streaming down our face.

Me and my husband's face. Sometimes tears were streaming down our face while she was crying and we're like, I don't know how to do this. And there were many phone calls to friends of mine who have children where I was just like, oh my God. This is, this is a lot. Is this too much? Is this, did we make the wrong [00:04:00] choice?

Is this, you know, just so beyond what I expected it to be and beyond what I thought was literally humanly possible from the actual labor and delivery to raising a child and raising a child on zero sleep with zero resourcing and. You just can't access your same tools when you are in survival mode that way.

So when people would ask me how I was doing, I would get so angry. I was like, I can't even put into words how I'm doing. And it's not like a good or bad, it's like a good and bad, but. How do I explain that in terms that make any sense? So I wanna read to you a text message that I had sent back when my stepsister asked me how I was doing.

I said, I'm feeling all the things in magnification. Incredible heart exploding love with overwhelming incompetence, deep [00:05:00] comfort with very real fear. The labor and learning this little human has been the most insane ceremony thus far. Excruciating, exhilarating, overwhelming, cup filling, heart bursting, heart wrenching with both.

Please make it stop, and I never want this to end Moments. Plant medicine comes close, but there is nothing comparable to this emotional, physical, and spiritual demand of this. Every day feels a little like an eternity and a blink of an eye. I keep coming back to the impermanence of it all, and it helps.

But damn, I have a new respect for parents who embark in the journey in this way, and I'm getting teary even rereading that because it brings me back to that moment. I can remember writing this message to her on my couch. And just sort of bewildered at [00:06:00] what, what was happening and, uh, like hormones were surging and it was very much during that first period of time where your body's just been flipped upside down and inside out, and your hormones have dumped and you're just weeping all the time.

And it was such a tender moment. And so, I mean, it was a tender six weeks to go back to that, that survival mode place that we, we, my husband and I just had to figure it out. You just had to do it, and everything else got pushed to the side, pushed on the back burner. There was no like space to process what we were feeling.

There was no time for that. It was one job and one job only, and it was figure out why she's crying and keep her alive. And that's intense when you've had, when you get gifted a life [00:07:00] to have to keep alive.

That is a responsibility on a level that I've never experienced. And it was intense to come back to that word. It was intense.

So when I said in my message that I have a whole new respect for parents, I do. I see a mom or dad walking down the street and I just wanna go and give them a hug. I just want like, I just want them to know that. This is hard and it's like why are we not all talking more about how hard it is?

Because I love Faye. I love her so much, and now that she's four months old, she's starting to have some feedback and some smiles and some laughs and it's, it's heartwarming on so many levels. But it took me a little while to, to connect to her in the beginning and to [00:08:00] feel that overwhelming sense of like, I'm your mom.

And I'm still sort of trying on what that term even means. Like somebody will say, you're doing great Mama. And I'm like, who's, who are they talking to? You know, it still hasn't totally sank in that this is a new part.

This is a new part of me and one of the things that I have learned and am still very much in process of being with is honoring the part of me that existed before Faye, the part of me who went through my toxic relationship and worked her ass off to heal from that, and not just heal from that, but heal from all of the limiting beliefs and all of the things that accumulated over my lifetime to lead me into that relationship to keep me in that relationship.

I was so addicted to chaos for. Almost 30 [00:09:00] years of my life, and I worked so hard to come out of that, to live a peaceful life with a partner who brought me peace. And that is what I found with John.

John is an incredible man. He is the most healthy relationship that I have ever had. And our life together, prefe was peaceful. I don't mean easy, I mean peaceful because. In moments of disagreement or in moments where we were learning something new about each other or where we accidentally upset the other person, we always came back into the repair. There was a rupture, and then we repaired. And in that repair, we strengthened the trust and we strengthened the peace.

And so being with him is that breath of fresh air that it is that I come home and I plug back in. And get recharged by that relationship. It's not always easy, [00:10:00] but it's peaceful.

And I worked really hard to get to that place and I didn't realize at that time of my life how important it was that I had found peace. And so when Faye came in and threw this bomb into our, into our experience, right? Babies do that. There's a beautiful book called Baby Bomb, um, that I highly recommend you read if you are considering having a baby.

Um. But she threw this bomb into the relationship that created chaos. And to go back to specifically weeks one through six, it was so chaotic and so unpredictable, and I didn't know what I was doing, and we were running on adrenaline and not sleeping and everything in my body. Was pointing to alert, alert, alert, alert.

We know this and this is wrong. We worked hard to get out of this [00:11:00] and so I couldn't name it then, but I could see now through working with my therapist that I have a part of me that is grieving the loss of that peace. I have a part of me who. Sees how much hard work it took to get there and got really scared when she felt a similar chaos.

Even though the situations were completely different, she felt a similar chaotic environment and all of her hairs on her back of her neck stood up like, this is not right. And so there's this process that I'm in right now of, of just sitting with that. Sitting with her and honoring her grief, honoring her grief around this beautifully peaceful experience that we had and didn't actually know what we had when we had it. That has been for me, in terms of relationship to self, something that I've uncovered [00:12:00] pretty recently actually, and I'm just trying to hold.

With compassion. Because we have a lot of parts of ourselves, and that's one thing I come back to with my clients, that's one thing I come back to with myself that helps me find curiosity and compassion. It's like, oh, who's this part? This is a new part. She's coming out to say, oh my God.

We are tethered to a human being now, and we are working in timers and pumping and breastfeeding and all the things that keep you in demand for another person, which is different. And I get to hold her. I get to be with her in the same way that I'm with Faye. And I'm gonna come back to that in a moment.

But the important piece here that I want you to take away is when you're in a new, chaotic situation, especially if you've come out of a chaotic past in relationships, it is totally normal to [00:13:00] feel parts of you that don't like the new situation. Even if it's, even if it's a beautiful new baby girl, and I'm sitting with.

Letting that be. Okay. And I wanna offer that to you too, in hopes that that helps you feel that your parts are accepted and seen and validated. The other thing that I wanna speak to about relationships is relationship with someone else. So it has become crystal fucking clear how important it is to have a solid foundation.

With your partner before you bring in a baby. And I know that's not the case for everybody, and I know a lot of you listening have had children with your narcissistic ex or with your narcissistic current partner,

and my heart goes to you because if there's anything that will put a woman in a place of needing someone to show up, [00:14:00] it's having a child. And John and I, like I said, we have, we had, and we have a very solid relationship. We had a very solid foundation. And in weeks one through six. We, we got rocked. We both went back into, reverted into some of our patterns.

Our communication started slipping and it got a little bit scary. We're like, wait a minute. We don't recognize ourselves right now and we don't recognize how we're showing up in the relationship for each other. Again, it was intense and once we started getting a little bit more sleep, thankfully we were able to find some resourcing and remember the tools that we had.

But me, even as a coach and a teacher of EFT tapping and someone who practiced meditation and p practiced breathing techniques and had all of these like beautiful ways that I would tend to myself before Faye [00:15:00] for six weeks, I forgot everything completely. Everything. And when I finally sort of like popped my head up above water, I was like, oh yeah, oh yeah.

I can actually just stop and take a breath when Faye is screaming. Oh yeah, I can actually hum or shh to myself while Faye is screaming. Oh yeah, I can actually rock back and forth myself even though we rock all the time. Because you always feel like you have a baby in your arms.

But I, I remembered all of these things that I was able to access because I wasn't, I wasn't in survival mode as much anymore, but it took us a while to get there.

And for me, the emotional experience of becoming a mother was already like more than I could hold. And then you put on top of that the experience of, of seeing myself revert to my passive aggressiveness or seeing [00:16:00] myself revert to not putting my needs, not even having needs, like they weren't even second, third, or fourth.

They were just non-existent and. And sacrificing my needs so that John could have sleep. And I watched myself do this. I watched myself slip back into the codependency and into the not communicating. And that was so scary on top of everything that I was moving through.

If you've felt that. If you, and, and maybe you didn't feel that because you had a baby, but maybe you felt that just getting into a new relationship where there's new triggers and new, a new person's baggage of shit, and you're trying to figure it all out, and all of a sudden, all of your baggage is out of the suitcase and, and sprawled across the floor, and you don't know how you're underneath a pound of dirty socks.

I see you. I understand what that feels like to be thrown into a situation and have your triggers arise.

And awareness is the first step there. For me, the fact that I [00:17:00] was able to see it. Even while it was happening was already a step above where I was, but when I was just oblivious to what I was doing in the past. So that gave me a little bit of hope. And then from there, as I became more resourced with sleeping, then I started to have a little bit more space, more capacity to tend to.

Feelings to tend to what was happening and then to be able to communicate that to John and then for us to be able to work through it. But it's such a layered process because when your body is in survival, when you're in the sympathetic nervous system, your cortisol is pumping, you aren't accessing any other parts of your brain other than what do we need to do to survive?

And usually that's fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. The four trauma responses. So. All of that to say if you're listening to this and you're in something chaotic and you're trying to make sense of what you're feeling or what you're, what's happening,

you might just need some regulation first [00:18:00] in order to allow you to get to the place where you can then start to see and assess and make changes. But I have so much compassion for you and for me in that space of. Being in a situation that was rocky and scary and uncontrollable and unpredictable, and where you feel incompetent and like talk about triggers.

It was like every single one, every single one of my parts popped up and have popped up since.

And that gets to be part of not just becoming a mother, but just existing in the world. So being able to tend to your inner children. I talk about parts work a lot with my clients. If you're not familiar with parts work, I encourage you to research internal family systems IFS work, and it will give you so much good information about looking at yourself as a multitude of parts and having [00:19:00] multiplicity.

So I have a part of me that is grieving, becoming a mom. I have a part of me who is leaning into becoming a mom. I have a part of me that feels afraid that I'm so needed. Again, I have a part of me that's anxious because I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I have a part of me who finds so much joy in getting to sit down and watch my daughter learn how to pick her neck up, like so we have these parts in us, and.

The same way that we would tend to a child. We have to tend to our parts because we can't give what we don't have. And if I'm not able to tend to my own parts and their fears and anxiety and grief, how am I supposed to show up when my daughter is feeling fear or anxiety or grief? We have to have to have to meet ourselves first, and we have to give importance to our inner children while we are raising a child. [00:20:00] This is one thing that came up in my last therapy session was that I had neglected my inner children when Faye came, and it's like she took all of the attention , and all of the capacity that I had to tend to her, rightfully so because I was keeping a human alive, but my inner selves felt neglected and felt unseen, and I wasn't making space the same way that I was before she came. And so part of my work now is trying to balance even for two minutes a day, sitting down and imagining my parts in their safe space.

I do that. I'm trying to do that. I'm trying to do that every single day, even if it's, you know, while I have one second while she's feeding to close my eyes and just tune into myself. It doesn't look the same as it did before. I don't get to sit down and, and light the sage and the Palo Santo and pull my Oracle cards and make a whole ritual of it every day.

But I'm [00:21:00] finding these little moments that I'm able to, to tap back in and that. To me, I'm not a parenting expert. I am four months into this adventure, but to me, I have felt more like myself when I've been able to do that, when I've been able to tend to my parts and Faye and give time to everybody.

That not only fills my cup so that I can pour as a mother, but fills my cup to pour into the relationship with John. And so we have now been seeing our relationship get back to what it was as both of us are, again poking our heads above water and not drowning in the same way as we were in the beginning.

So if you are a mother, I see you and I wanna hug you, and I want you to know that you are. Amazing. You are holding so much with grace [00:22:00] and maybe there are moments where you lose your shit, but you are a fucking superhero, and I want you to hear that. And if you are wanting children, I want you to hear that it's possible to find a relationship that will give you that stable foundation.

In order to hold you while you get rocked with this experience, with this baby bomb that's coming, it's possible for you to find that partner. It's possible for you to make it through another chaotic experience and to find peace again in the chaos like you've done with moving through a toxic relationship and to every woman listening, you can be. The loving parent to your parts that maybe you didn't have, and maybe you get to practice being that loving parent before you have actual children, or maybe you're not having [00:23:00] children, and you just get to be an amazing, loving parent to yourself, and that is an important job.

So on Mother's Day, I want to honor, mothers, and that can be a physical mother with a physical child. And that can be you with your inner parts because both of those things takes incredible courage and strength and resiliency. And I see you.

And on that note, let's pull an Oracle card as a message to all of the moms out there and all of the women who are mama ing their parts and see what wants to come through for you today. We got crone. This is a card with a picture of an older lady's face, and I will find the message in the book and share it with you.

So I'll find the message in the book and read you what Crone says. Crone a sacred historian. She's here to comfort [00:24:00] you. She brings a clear vision of what was so that you remember that you have survived life's darkest times and have the scars to prove it. Her worn face is a badge of honor. She's no longer seduced by the shoulds of life.

She's here to encourage you to keep your eye towards your best future self. Knowing that every misstep wrong, turn, and failure is part of the richness that life and longevity have to offer. Cron is the wise elder who needs not explained, defend or reason. She knows her truth and accepts her victories and her failures equally.

Do not look backwards with regret over things that cannot be changed or you'll not rid yourself of the bitter taste in your mouth and the meaning of your experiences will be soured. Crone doesn't give a fuck and neither should you.

Such a good reminder as women and as we move from maiden to mother to crone. To remember that we have this wise elder part of us that can help guide us through all of these [00:25:00] challenges and uncertainties. I absolutely love that message and love that Crohn's. Don't give a fuck, because I can use a little bit more of that permission and that energy I know in my mothering and in my life as I try to balance all of the things.

If you haven't listened to the episode where I talk about being pregnant and my journey on becoming pregnant and how John and I made that decision, I will point you back to episode 50 is called special announcement, the massive life update that I never thought I would make.

You might find that interesting to learn a little bit more about how Faye came to be, and let's just give a shout out to Faye here who is still napping away and allowed mom to record this episode for you. Happy Mother's Day to all of you women out there, whether you have children in external children or inner children, or both, I see you.

I honor you. You are not alone.

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