I mostly write about birth, I’m sure that there are some who think that I talk about it too much (it’s a risk hazard of my profession lol), but this time I’m going to write about YOU.

Specifically...

What are you doing for you?

• In the lead up to your birth?
• After your birth?
• During the sometimes seemingly never-ending journey of parenthood?

As mothers, as parents, we often put ourselves last.

During pregnancy the health of our growing baby and the physical health of our body that is growing our baby are often seen as most important, and our mental and emotional health can be ignored and even pushed aside and forgotten as not important.

During and even after birth it’s often the same – our baby and our physical health are seen as the most important things, our emotional and mental health often gets ignored, usually until we reach breaking point when it can no longer be ignored.

What can we do for US to make it easier on OURSELVES?

Something that we enjoy, something that makes us happy, even if it’s only for 5 minutes every day.
So what makes you happy? What brings you joy?

What can you do FOR yourself today, tomorrow, next week, next month and even next year?

If this is new to you then choose to take 5 minutes out of your day right now (not literally right at this moment but at some point today), sit the kids in front of the TV for 5 minutes, leave the washing in the washing machine or in the basket for 5 minutes, leave the dishes in the sink for 5 minutes, once the kids are in bed take 5 minutes before you jump into doing your usual post-kids-are-in-bed routine, and do something that makes you feel happy and/or brings you joy.

 We can do something FOR US.

​And we NEED to do something for us alongside everything else that we do.

So, what are YOU doing FOR YOU?
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Be Informed.

What does this mean to you?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/informed) the word informed means: “having a lot of knowledge or information about something”.

In the pregnancy and birth field, and in the medical field in general, to be “Informed” means that a person knows the potential benefits and risks of a particular thing, and any other alternative options to that particular thing along with any potential risks and benefits of those alternatives, when obtaining “informed consent” PRIOR TO medical procedures being booked in and/or done.

Part of my job as a doula, and what will also be part of my job as Childbirth Educator once I finish my CBE training, is to INFORM my clients of their options. This means going through the benefits, the risks, and any alternative options and their benefits and risks as well, in order to help my clients be able to make their own informed decisions - that are the best decisions for them - about their care and their births.

Last night I had a discussion, on a very public platform, with someone who was only partially informed and either wasn’t willing, or wasn’t ready, to take the next step into being fully informed.

I won’t lie, it frustrated the shit out of me at the stubbornness and lack of willingness to LEARN more about the subject rather than just accepting as gospel what one single government agency with a known bias and a known lack of up to date evidence based practice had to say, but I kept my responses polite and shared relevant evidence based links (quality links, from multiple highly respected sources) and then wished the person a “good night” and took myself off to bed.

Sleep wasn’t easily obtainable however, the subject of being “informed” kept going around and around in my head, on repeat, and I started wondering about how I could get it out there that there is the necessity for us as parents, and I include myself in the “us” as I am a parent too, to be informed not only about pregnancy and birth but also about the choices that we will have to make as parents – something that seems to be actively discouraged in society in general, we are told and expected to all be the same do the same regardless of our own individual circumstances and personality types

So this blog post is being written – not to promote one agenda over another but to encourage YOU as parents to inform yourselves about your choices.

Don’t just rely on what one government agency or one paediatrician, or on doctor, tells you to be correct or true.
DO THE RESEARCH FOR YOURSELF so that you can make an INFORMED decision based on multiple information sources instead only of one or two information sources that could potentially be biased to make you think that that option (that you are being pointed towards) is the only option available to you.

Look up the studies (PubMed is a good place to start, studies done within the last 5-10 years are the most up to date and usually the most evidence based, you can also look into the authors and make comparisons between studies and then look deeper into any differences that you find – remember, studies done on small numbers of people, eg under 100,000 people, don’t give an accurate overall look into the general population, larger studies of over 100,000 people give a much more accurate representation of the general population in the area/s that the study took place), visit the WHO, ACOG, RANZCOG, Mayo Clinic and CDC websites, and read through everything so you can be informed about the risks and benefits, when something should or shouldn’t be done (contraindications) and why they are being suggested, offered, mentioned and told to you.

When you are fully informed you can make an informed decision.

When you are making an informed decision you are making the best choice for you, your child and/or another family member based on ALL of the options that YOU KNOW to be available and not just the options that you have been told are available to you (these can vary drastically between care providers and hospitals).

Not being informed gives someone else that power – your care provider for example – and takes away your own power to choose from all options and make the right decision for you out of all of those options.
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Being informed gives you the power - the power to choose, the power to make your own decisions and the power to make the right decision for you and yours.

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Does any of this resonate with you? Want to work with me on your pre-birth mindset? Send a message to arrange a no obligation interview to find out if I'm the right doula for you!
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What are your feelings surrounding your upcoming birth?

Are you scared? Worried? Excited? Feeling ambivalent? Feeling on top of the world and ready to face everything and anything that comes your way?

Your feelings surrounding your upcoming birth (and even about your previous birth/s) can have an impact on your body, and also on your labour itself.

Fear for example can make labour slow down or speed up depending on how your body chooses to react to the fear, it can make it feel more painful, and can stop your body from working effectively to birth your baby.

In comparison joy, love, excitement and happiness can make labour feel less painful, make it easier to cope with the contractions of labour, can make your body work more effectively and can even make labour progress faster for many.

So I ask you again, how do you feel when you contemplate your upcoming birth and everything that could happen during it?

What are the predominant feelings that are coming to you? And if they are negative (angry, fearful, worried etc) how do you think that they could be changed?

Are any of these feelings important to you? Is there a reason that you feel they are important to you?

Look deeper into the reason for feeling them. What is the reason/s, and why has it affected you so much? Is this reason (or reasons) helping you or hindering you?

If they are hindering you, what can you do to change that?

If they are helping you how are they helping you?
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When you know what your feelings are, where they are coming from and WHY you are feeling that way you have taken the first step towards being in control of them and can now start to make them work for you, and prevent them from working against you.

It's not quite as easy as just saying "I am going to feel THIS and won't feel THAT!" but when you put in the work early, before the birth itself, it can make the whole experience feel different than it could have otherwise.

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Does any of this resonate with you? Want to work with me on your pre-birth mindset? Send a message to arrange a no obligation interview to find out if I'm the right doula for you!

I often contemplate the question "What Do You Want From Your Birth?"

It's a very important question, and because every single birth is different and unique, and we only get to experience each birth once, this makes it an extremely important question to ask ourselves in the lead up to our births (and even in the lead up to our pregnancies as well for many) to figure out what we want, what we don’t want, what we are willing and not willing to compromise on AND what the hidden emotions, memories, thoughts and feelings are behind each of our decisions so that we can understand WHY we are making the choices that we make and choosing the specific options that we desire – do we make them based on fear? Or do we make them from an enlightened and informed position that doesn’t involve fear? Or maybe we’re making our decisions from somewhere in between the two?  I want you to take this a bit further than that though, to look deeper into it, and come out the other side knowing and feeling more than you did previously.

In fact I'm currently writing a workbook based on this very question, what is written above and below this particular paragraph are excerpts from it that I FEEL are very important to share with everyone. So, I ask, let's imagine for a bit - and let your imaginations run as wild as you'd like - and picture what our IDEAL BIRTH would be like.

HOW would you feel if your birth went exactly how you imagined it?

WHAT would your birth look like if it went exactly how you imagined it could?

Add in anything you want, no holds barred, whatever you have ever dreamed of, even if it doesn’t seem likely, include it in what you are imagining.

Write this all down, this is your “dream birth”, your IDEAL BIRTH, what you KNOW would happen in an ideal world where everything happens exactly as you want it to happen.

Some may think “what’s the point of this? It’s not real!”

The truth is that our reality is built on wishes, hopes and dreams - you wish for something to happen and you either work towards achieving that something, or you give up on a dream and it never happens and you never even try to achieve it because you gave up on it.

​Without hopes and dreams and wishes and plans and people working to achieve them very few things would ever actually be done – aspiring singers wouldn’t make records and be on the radio, actors and actresses wouldn’t be in the movies or on TV, authors wouldn’t write any books, many babies wouldn't be born with the help and assistance of fertility specialists and IUI/IVF etc because people who otherwise couldn't conceive together wouldn't be dreaming of starting a family and people wouldn't be dreaming or hoping of finding their Mr or Mrs Right... And that would be an extremely BORING, sad and lonely world where no one really does anything exciting or new or important, and never tries to achieve anything.

So we are using this, our deepest desires and wildest dreams, to show ourselves the background of where our plans and wishes for our births are coming from.

What did you think up? What would your ideal birth be? And what do YOU want from your birth?


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Have you ever reached that point where if you get touched by another small mini-human, get asked to do one more thing for someone else, have to pick up crap off that floor once again for the 1,000th time today, that if you don’t get just 5 MINUTES OF TIME TO YOURSELF FOR ONCE ON THIS PARTICULAR DAY that you’re pretty sure you’ll scream, flip out, lose your marbles and go absolutely batshit crazy insane?

I’m pretty sure that the words above have struck a raw nerve with most who read this blog post, they definitely have with me as I read back through them to double check that I haven’t missed anything important (I have, but what is there is enough for now and you don't really need to hear the rest of it here, I'm sure many of you can fill in those omissions yourselves) and I’m the one who wrote them.

The truth is that most parents will feel this way at least once during their parenting journey.

Many will feel this way multiple times, sometimes for days, weeks and/or months on end.

And it’s because we’ve been burned out as parents.

We’ve spent so much time focusing on everyone else, doing everything for everyone else, that we’ve forgotten that we need to be taken care of as well.

It’s harder for single parents in some ways as many single parents don’t have much, if any, support around them, but it can be just as hard in other ways (and sometimes in the same ways as single parents) for partnered parents too, especially if one partner doesn’t help much or thinks that it’s the stay at home parent’s (or the parent who works the least’s) job to do everything from the housework to the child rearing to the cooking ALL while still trying to do everything else on top of that with very little or no personal time to themselves to relax, de-stress and recoup some of their energy while still being themselves and not just “the parent who does all the parenting stuff”.
 
Parental Burnout is real, and it can cause so many problems mentally (mental breakdown, anyone?), physically (yes your physical health can suffer from it, ever wondered why you’re so physically drained and tired and/or getting sick at the drop of a hat even after a full night’s sleep? If you’re lucky enough to get a full night’s sleep that is...) and emotionally (who ordered the emotional breakdown? I’d like a refund please!)... Burnout isn’t something that you can fix right away either, it takes time, effort and A LOT of support from the right people (the right people will be different for everyone) and some changes in your everyday life.
 
According to Psychology Today ‘Parental burnout is defined as a "unique and context-specific syndrome resulting from enduring exposure to chronic parenting stress." Its primary symptom is overwhelming exhaustion relating to one's role as a parent. Other symptoms include:
- Emotionally distancing from children
- Feeling fed up with parenting
- Losing one's sense of accomplishment from parenting’
Psychology Today also estimates that somewhere between 1 in 12 and 1 in 3 parents around the world will experience Parental Burnout. What's really shocking is that even with such high numbers experiencing this there is nothing, medical or government arranged, in place to help support parents get through it and recover from it.
 
What does this mean for those of us who are living with it? Well, not much on its own.

We’re already living it.
We know what it feels like.
We know what we’ve tried to make it better.
And we know what has and hasn’t worked.
And what has outright failed for us when we tried it before*.

(*Please note that that last part doesn’t mean that it will always fail every single time that you try it, it might just be that when you last tried it that it wasn’t the right time for doing it THEN and THAT was why it failed, because the other background work/things to support it so it could work hadn’t been done yet)
 
Empowering Parents has some really good tips on helping to prevent and reduce burnout throughout your parenting journey, not all of them will work for everyone (because we are all unique and act/react in different ways) and you may have to do them in different orders and ways in order to get them to work for you but they will give you an idea of what you CAN DO on your parenting journey to keep everything on a more even keel so it’s not becoming so overwhelming that you can no longer cope with it all.

Some may be wondering what brought on this specific topic for a blog post. It was a number of things: - first and foremost because I have personally been struggling with parental burnout BECAUSE I’m parenting an extra needs child. It’s extremely stressful most days (worse in the mornings) in my house with an extra needs 10 year old that has the emotional age of a toddler (Bloody Hell! I swear his meltdowns weren’t this bad when he was 2!) combined with the inquiring mind of an older child who is interested in everything science and sensory processing issues making every little random touch or odd sound a major issue and ADHD on top of that making his brain go a million kilometres a minute so he forgets what he was meant to be doing the moment something else catches his attention and can’t stay focused on anything until his medication kicks in AND... this morning’s meltdowns were over a freshly washed and dried school shirt “smelling bad” (it smelled like laundry powder) and his ankle socks (that fit him perfectly) being too tight and too small and not feeling right and not reaching all the way up to his knees... It’s so exhausting coping with that kind of thing every morning, my girls are so much easier to cope with than he is. I think I need a holiday! And then another holiday to recover from the holiday! *keels over from parental burnout*

- AND secondly, another mum, with kids the same age as my oldest two, reached out in one of the local parenting groups on Facebook to ask for help because her children wouldn’t listen to her and she was struggling to cope with that (and didn’t realise it was normal behaviour for kids to push boundaries and not listen) without yelling at them. She reached out for help, which is pretty darn awesome if you ask me, because many don’t reach out and she did, and she found out that she isn’t alone in this and that others have the exact same problem with their kids and she found some really good advice from other parents on how to make it easier to cope with and to get her kids to listen more often.

I want all parents experiencing this to know that YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

It’s not just you struggling with this.

There are many of us out there struggling too.

And there is hope.

There is light at the end of that seemingly dark tunnel.

And it CAN, DOES & WILL get better if you put in that personal effort to make it better (yes I'm working on this myself, it is helping, but it's taking time and going slowly and we humans can be very impatient and want everything to happen RIGHT NOW).

Because without you, the real you, your family won’t be the same. And your children need you to be the best, happiest, most content, relaxed and most energetic YOU that you can be, even if the house is a pigsty because the kids didn’t clean up after themselves once again.