Background & Culture Theory Archive

Why body awareness matters most for working mothers and how it can help in avoiding maternal burnout

I have started this blog with a sketch of how centuries of cultural practices are contributing to mums feeling guilty. A guilt that can lead to overwhelm and maternal burnout, because women are taking on more and more without looking after themselves. Why and how body awareness makes a difference to realigning with yourself and with what is truly yours, will be the verse of this blog. But I skipped a step since I have not really explained what I mean when I talk about ‘body awareness’. Defining body awareness is key to understanding

why it will make a difference to your experience as a working mother;
why it is important to reconnect with your body;
and lastly, why it is not your fault that the disconnect happened in the first place.

Defining body awareness

Body awareness is the ability to perceive, understand, interpret and react to the signals of our bodies from within and without. Signals from without would be feeling a breeze on your skin, for example. The body schema is another aspect of body awareness. It combines signals from without and within and allows you to move more or less effortlessly and more or less consciously through space.

For example, if we wear a large backpack, or a bulky purse and we move through crowds, our body schema normally incorporates that protruding item to allow for smooth movement without bumping into other people. To do that we combine physical signals outside of ourselves (like seeing other people, feeling the backpack) with signals from within. The vestibular system adjusts how you balance your body with the added weight, for example. The body schema is a big part of proprioception, i.e. the way we perceive ourselves within our own body in time and space.

Signals within can be basic needs like having to use the bathroom, being hungry or tired. Feelings and emotions also manifest physically and are signals from within, but can and often will be triggered from events without our bodies. If you fall and scratch open your knee, for example, the resulting pain comes from within your body while its cause came from without. Sadness can stem from a loss of a dear person. Happiness can be incited by spending time with close friends. Anger often comes from other unresolved feelings and so on and so forth.

Learned disconnect

Often we have learned from a young age that we cannot or must not trust these signals. The scratched knee does actually not hurt (as badly as we make it out). We have been told to calm down, or not be too intense, when we did not feel calm at all. We have all heard:

picture shows a street sign saying yield. We have learned to yield to the perception of others when it comes to our body rather than trusting ourselves paving the ground for maternal burnout.

‘Don’t be sad.’ or

‘You are so much prettier when you smile.’

It means that we learned to distrust our body’s signals and how we perceive them ourselves. We exchanged this at least partly with what others thought appropriate behavior and appearance might be. Our own bodily signals were henceforth labelled ‘too much’ and had to be ‘reigned in.’

This is the short version. If you look at it in more detail – hopefully I will get around to it eventually, it is even more complex. Especially women are being taught about their own bodies from a young age distorting their own perceptions and trust in themselves.

How motherhood boosts the disconnect

Fast forward to motherhood and you have the perfect ground for fully disconnecting from your own body and developing maternal burnout. Years of being told that others know more about your body, what it should look and feel like, you enter to a nowadays almost complete medicalization of your own body that henceforth shall serve to create another human being. We now know that even the brain changes during pregnancy to prepare for the task of motherhood. Once the baby is born most likely you will be dedicated to raising it and putting it first. From an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense and keeps the species alive.

Overwhelm & maternal burnout

However, it disregards that we no longer raise our children collectively. Often even grandparents are not close by to support the growing family. Taking care of one or more children, in particular when they are still young, is physically as well as emotionally draining. If you add to that a disconnect from your own body, a consistent disregard for your own needs, you are on the fastest way into overwhelm and maternal burnout. This is not what our children need. This is not what we need, nor do we want it. It’s just something you so easily slide into without noticing.

Disappointed professional ambition

Then we add to this professional ambition. Maybe you experience personal disappointment at what you thought you’d achieve professionally, but simply haven’t. Simply couldn’t, because it was just too much. All the time and money you spent on education. The time spent on working hard to proof your value at work, on personal development and continued education. Will you wait until they are older, but then maybe so will be your parents or in-laws – who will look after them? Probably you, because your partner is likely to earn so much more than you at this point, that it doesn’t make sense otherwise.

Empowering body awareness

I am digressing a little, but then again, I am not. This is the scenario that is very real for many of us. I am not saying, that it isn’t important to take care of other people, but it should be a conscious choice and not something you end up doing, because you are a woman. To the contrary taking care of other people is hugely important while it doesn’t get nearly enough recognition socially. Last but not least of all, you can only really take care of other people, if you know how to take care of yourself.

Picture of a woman in a lotus seat. Body awareness can help you steer clear of maternal burnout.

This is where the loop closes: In order for you to be able to take care of yourself, you cannot skip the step of reconnecting to yourself and to your body. It allows you to decide how you want to take care of others. It allows you to choose to pursue a career and how to prioritize according to your own as well as your family’s needs. Body awareness won’t solve all your problems, no. It will, however, make you stronger, more resilient and creative in finding solutions that work for you. It will empower you in situations where you’d otherwise feel helpless or maybe even hopeless.

Do you want to take back control? Do you want to empower yourself, to trust yourself to make the right choice?

– deeply rooted in the past – & what you can do about it now

If you are a working mum, chances are that your life is full! Full of laughter, full of play, full of color and chaos, full of healthy meals, full of delightful moments with the whole family, fabulous family outings and vacations… or maybe not… maybe it’s not just like that all the time – mostly, sure and especially on social media -, but not exactly all the time…

showing cluttered chair and desk - mum guilt for not being on top of all the chores at home — ©Congerdesign (Pixabay)

Motherhood in real life

Technically, come to think of it, yes, there is laughter. Yes, there is color (on the new rug) and chaos (literally everywhere). But there are also tears and shouting, because you opted for the wrong cup or you cut the sandwich incorrectly, or just because you decided bath-time could no longer be avoided, or because you said the wrong thing at the wrong time to your teenager. And with that, there is also a whole lot of guilt – mum guilt to be precise.

Where mum guilt creeps in

Many of us still live in pretty traditional setups. Even if you and your partner are striving to divvy up care work more equally, it often doesn’t come easily, but needs careful planning and hashing things out. So here we are, actually pretty well organized (not to call it optimized), well-read when it comes to modern needs based and gentle-parenting , and yet, we feel guilty:

Guilty for meals that are not quite as healthy as we know they should be;
Guilty for homes not as picture perfect and tidy as we see on social media, in catalogues and invariably at that perfect friend’s home (who frantically tidied and cleaned ahead of our visit);
Guilty for sending our kid(s) to childcare while we are at work;
Guilty for spending the evening in front of the TV with our partner, because we are both exhausted from the day (when we ‘should’ be connecting and having meaningful discussions about life).

But let me backtrack a little.

The roots of our mum guilt – past perfectionism

Most of us raised as girls will have learned how important perfection is and that only perfect will do. Perfection at all levels: motherhood, relationship, professional life, and impeccable looks, of course. Yes, we can do it all, and it all needs to be perfect. Now you are asking yourself, what this has to do with a patriarchal society, or maybe not, but bear with me as this is really a crucial thing to understand, if we want to move past the guilt and into our own strength.

two wedding bands on an open book — ©Pexels (Pixabay)

Girls were expensive (parents had to accrue a dowry) and had to be married off to a good family (not least to form alliances). The best chance a family had for their daughter to find a fitting match was to be as perfect as possible in all matters of family life (i.e. care-work) and physical appearance. In short, she had to be an asset and not a liability for her new family. The physical appearance was a sign of health, so important when it came to ensuring healthy heirs.

The ‘motherhood penalty’ – how the past impacts the present

Nowadays that we have long gone beyond this paradigm, the patterns have still been passed on over and over… and over, so that they are hard to extricate. At the same time we are no longer just in the home space, of course, and luckily so. Yet studies show that most care-work is still done by women. We are also participating in society at many other levels – not least as professionals at work. Our physical appearance (obviously) also matters in the public domain, so much so that I will dedicate a separate article to the female body and how it is being objectified by past and current culture.

Studies furthermore show that there is a pay gap between men and women. While women without children are catching up with men, mothers still trail behind and risk poverty when they are old, because their pension is too meagre to support them. In fact, when a woman has a baby her career stalls, or even dwindles. A man, on the other hand, becoming a father is most likely to experience a career boost.

Of course, we are now starting more to take precautions, that we won’t fall short in pensions later on. But we are still a long way from equality when it comes to combining parenthood and paid labor. It also means that the pressure is on women to catch up in their career, or to push harder for that promotion when our plates are already full with most of the mental load, if not all the care-work in many instances. More pressure is likely to also create more mum guilt for the times when we feel overwhelmed. When we feel we don’t get enough done. When we are not in line with our values when dealing with the kids.

Modern parenting for a future society

And let’s not forget: Having children and raising them is not nearly as private as everyone makes it out to be. No, we are raising the next generation of our societies. We are doing so mindfully in an ever more complex world.

We now understand better that raising children does not work with reward and punishment. Kids need connection and nurture. They need a secure space to be their own person, making their own mistakes… As parents we are here to hold them, to offer advice, to allow them to try and fail on their own terms. We set age and individually appropriate boundaries negotiated between child and parents over and over again. These are recurring discussions and negotiations, reflections and questioning of standards and how things ‘should’ be done.

Working against deeply rooted patterns

Even trying our best (and that is true even in moments where we fail to meet our own standards) we will forever doubt whether or not, we made the right decision in that exact moment. With perfectionist ideals in mind it seems a Sisyphean task. Let’s not forget that most of us probably never enjoyed the kind of upbringing we want for our children. Thus we have to constantly analyze and go against what was deeply engrained in us during our own childhood.

Unsurprisingly, what remains when our child goes through a hard time is the guilt, the worry:

‘Could I have done anything differently?’

‘Did I work too much and did not spend enough time with them?’

‘If only I had done…’

And we all know that we will probably never get an answer to these questions either. Mum guilt waits for us at every turn our life and that of our children takes.

Mum Guilt and the body

This is but one perspective on guilt and where it is coming from. It will differ for each of us when it comes to other reasons we feel guilty. Guilt can be influenced, for example, by how we were raised, where exactly we grew up and if our family lived according to rules of a particular faith. Peer relationships we have had, if we were bullied and so much more can also play a role. Regardless of the reasons, guilt is an emotion hugely relevant to maintain human groups in their functioning.¹ As a result guilt comes along with strong physical cues, like stomach aches, nausea, tension, sleeplessness to just name a few. These will all be reactions that you will want to get rid of quickly as they are so incredibly uncomfortable. They are also an opportunity to reconnect and notice the signals of your body.

Doing right by our children…

So, what can we do about it? Are we just doomed to suffer through this worry over and over again? How to change a system, a culture that has its roots so far in the past? It takes several generations to change something established such a long time ago. And still I believe that we do not have to suffer silently (and smile doing so, of course).

So, yes to a degree, we will always worry that we are getting things wrong, or that we got things wrong in the past. We are only humans after all and bound to fail. The key is to acknowledge failure, accept and learn from it to do better next time. ‘Better’ is not a scientifically defined concept, but is the continuous striving to do right by our children.

…means doing right by ourselves

Lastly, but not least importantly, it also means to strive and do right by ourselves:

to know our own worth and
to define motherhood on our own terms
to reconnect to ourselves and realign physically as well as mentally.

The latter really is the basis for the other two. Only once we reconnect to ourselves on a physical level, taking all our own needs seriously, we realize our own worth. Our worth that was there all along buried under expectations and cultural practices. It also means that we’ll be able to have more self-compassion when we feel guilty. We can strengthen our resilience. Self-compassion and resilience will help us to be there for our children when they need us most. It will help us to apologize without holding a grudge, to be a good and healthy example to them in what it means to be human. We will set them up to be more resilient, because they see us fail and get up again. And we allow them to fail and try again.

Your inner strength professionally

woman sitting on a wooden floor with legs crossed, hands folded in front of the chest; picture is cut-off at shoulder level; mum guilt for taking care of ourselves — © Irina L (Pixabay)

By reconnecting to yourself, you’ll also be able to

set healthier boundaries at work with the confidence that
your performance and focus are at their best while
recognizing when they are not and
how to remedy from a place of strength and trust that you are worthy everyday regardless of your performance.

Re-connecting to yourself through your body will allow you to choose your own career path. It will help you focus your professional life how it suits and serves you best without sacrificing motherhood or ambition. You can make more intentional choices and prioritize the way that is best for your family and yourself.

Breaking the guilt cycle together

As mentioned above guilt has a strong physical manifestation. Therefore it is probably not the ideal place to start practicing to reconnect with your body. In order to break the cycle of mum guilt and its effects on our children eventually, we need to become mothers that are connected to ourselves even in moments of guilt. We need to feel mentally and physically grounded most of the time and notice as well as acknowledge when we are not. It is not a matter of just waiting and pulling it together until the kids are older and it gets easier (because what if it doesn’t?). We are risking too much by waiting, we are risking not being the mum that we always thought we’d be, the (professional) person we’d become.

We are in this together! It is a constant practice that I am here for with you. The blog is and will be a great resource for your, but if you want to ensure that you get all the news and resources first, please consider subscribing to my newsletter.

Guilt ensures adherence to rules. Also note the connection here as motherhood is inextricably linked to maintaining a group, i.e. a family firstly, but secondly a society. ↩︎