The Therapy Edit - One Thing with Clover Stroud on embracing the hidden sides of motherhood

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

In this episode Anna chats to Author Clover Stroud on the darker and less discussed side of motherhood that involves frustration, loneliness and rage. She talks about how accepting rather than denying this side of us can be life changing.Clover is a mum of 5 and a Sunday Times Bestselling author of My Wild and Sleepless Nights, The Wild Other and the recently published The Red of My Blood.You can follow Clover on Instagram at @cloverstroudYou can purchase all three of Clover's books here https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=clover+stroud&crid=WEGSHFXMTS0A&sprefix=clover+stroud%2Caps%2C108&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

Hello and welcome to The Therapy Edit with me, psychotherapist's mum of three and author Anna Martha. Every Friday, I invite one guest to tell me the one thing they would most like to share with moms everywhere. So join with me for the next 15 minutes as we hear this dose of wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. Hello and welcome to today's guest episode of The Therapy Edit. and I'm really privileged to have the wonderful Clover Stroud with me today. Clover is a writer. She's a journalist.

She's a mother of five with kids spanning from young to kind of 20s, really. So the whole range there. And her most recent book is The Red of My Blood, a Death and Life Story, which is quite profound, actually. I think death is something that many of us have a lot of fear around. And Clover has no qualms in just exploring. it for what it is and it is a real journey of incredible hope actually in in in in the journey of grief so yeah I really encourage you to have a look into that especially if death is something that is a really sticky or scary topic for you so welcome welcome clover thank you anna it's

lovely to it's lovely to hear your voice and see you so clover is on instagram as clover dot stroud where she shares really openly about motherhood life, just literally inviting us into her home and all the chaos that comes with having five kids. So I'm just really grateful for that space on Instagram, to be honest, to go and just, yeah, feel like I'm not alone in the chaos of it all. So welcome, Clover. How are you today?

Yeah, I'm good. I'm good at talking about the chaos. I almost wasn't able to make it, you know, onto this recording because the children had taken my computer. And so I spent about 15 minutes before we were due to meet running around the house, swearing at myself, looking for the computer, which was lost. But that's a very, very normal kind of occurrence in the usual sort of chaos of a big family, really. Yeah, hunting for things.

I'm always, always feel a bit nervous when one of my kids say, Mommy, where is? And I know that it's just going to, yeah, there's often a lot resting on whatever that thing is. Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you for joining us. So Craver, the question that I ask, I guess, is if there was one thing that you would like to share with all the mums, what would that be? Well, my youngest is five, my kids are five, seven, nine, 18 and 21. So I've been a mum since I was in my 24 and I'm now 46. I've been a mum for quite a long time. And when I look back on my elder children being small, and actually my younger children, as well, because I think, oddly, I found it, I kind of found it harder having children a second time around in my late 30s and early 40s. It's possible because of the sheer quantity of children that I was then dealing with, whereas, you know, when I had them in my 20s, I only had

two. But I would like to, I mean, the advice, I guess, would be to reassure mothers, to reassure parents and have faith and have confidence in what they are doing and have faith in in themselves as human beings, really. We put so much pressure on ourselves. And parenting without that pressure is incredibly difficult, and it stretches you and tests you and takes you to places that you kind of couldn't really have imagined or foreseen. And it brings up emotions that we don't like to associate with motherhood.

We don't like to think of mothers as enraged or bored or frustrated or unhappy. And knowing that those emotions are absolutely normal, they're totally part of motherhood. It doesn't mean that you've failed. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. It doesn't mean you're bad to your children. There's that real sense of kind of badness around,

I shouldn't be feeling this because I've got these lovely children. I'm so lucky to have these kids. But it is very, very difficult. So I think reassuring my younger selves, That the stuff that was going wrong or what I thought of was going wrong, it wasn't actually, it's not actually going wrong. It's just part of what it feels like. And it's part of the way motherhood, parenthood tests you and takes you to quite dark places. And I suppose with that reassurance, therefore, comes a sense that as a parent that you should have confidence in what you're doing, even when it feels as though it's utter chaos and kind of unmanageably difficult, just kind of know that you're probably not making such terrible mistakes. And most of us are doing our best. You know, most of us are trying to give our children a stable, happy, if happiness is ever possible in life, I'm not sure

it is, but like we're trying to give them stability and love and look after them and care for them. And to have faith, yeah, in the way that you're doing that, even when it feels completely chaotic and completely impossible. And I suppose I kind of look at my elder children and I went through a lot with them and my second book was about parenting, well, it's about my experience of motherhood and it was inspired by my now 21 year old son when he was in his mid-teens, he got expelled from school and got into all the usual kind of teenage boy. with trouble, teenage trouble, you know, boy or girl. And the book's called My Wild and Sleepless Nights. And it was about having a teenager and my youngest was born at the same time. And

I felt like I was crashing into adolescence with him. It was really nerve-wracking. He got expelled. We had the police around. We had all the kind of things that you don't imagine are going to happen when you've got your newborn baby. You don't think, I'm going to be dealing with the police and drugs and like a child that never talks to me. And I suppose now I look at him. And I look at him. He's a fantastic boy. I'm really, really close to him. He's at university at the moment. We're really, really good allies and really good friends.

And kind of knowing that you can go through those massive bumps on the road. And I remember when he was expelled, just thinking, I've totally failed as a mother. I've failed him. I've failed him. And I hadn't failed him. It was just part of his growing up and he's growing away from me and him testing all the boundaries.

and that's okay. So I wish I could kind of put my arms around my shoulders as a younger person, that way of holding somebody with your hands around their shoulders saying, it's okay, you know, you're doing really, really fine. This is completely fine, and it will all be all right. As long as you keep communicating, it will all be right. And I think also that communication is absolutely key.

So reassurance, confidence, communication would be, I know that's three things, but they're all kind of past the same. woven together, aren't they? Yeah, I think you're so right. There's so much in that, isn't there, that almost the gratitude and the privilege of, and the joy of having children is that sometimes we expect or we place the expectation that that should be enough to like a ticket out of ever feeling rage or resentment or boredom or loneliness or those feelings that we might class as bad, but actually it's the wholeness of that experience of all of those different feelings that is motherhood. Yeah, definitely. And in a way, that's what makes it satisfying, and that's

what makes it a beautiful experience, the really hard bits. And, you know, every mother will have experience points of complete despair. But that sense of it being, it is so far removed from the image of the kind of yummy mummy, which, you know, thankfully has now just been, is kind of consigned to the past anyway. But that idea of the selfless, well-turned-out, calm mother kind of cooking cupcakes, that's all such bollogs. And the actual reality of the whole round experience is the light and the dark, is the absolute extremities, the complete highs and the low in the, you know, in the course of a day, often in the course of like a few minutes you can go from complete despair. The roller coaster, yeah, the highs and the lows can be very close

together sometimes, can't they? Yeah, yeah. And that's, and that can be quite, I think maybe that's one of the things that makes it emotionally deranging is the feeling of how can I be, you know, if you were doing a job, if you were going into work, you were pushed to the places in your working day that motherhood pushes you, you'd think there's something really quite, you know, that you would really question whether you should be doing that job, wouldn't you? You'd question who your boss was and question what you're being asked to do and question why you were feeling, you know, trapped and raged, confusing, confused, despairing and also sudden joy and sudden delight and sudden kind of laughing about something.

So it's quite as a human being. It's a lot of emotions to hold in the space of a day, I suppose, or a space of a period after school or breakfast time, that as a mother you're having to kind of navigate, I suppose. Yeah, so just that reassurance of this is motherhood. You're not doing anything wrong in feeling these feelings. This is the wholeness of motherhood. Yeah.

Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I think that's just really affirming, just really affirming, especially coming from someone who has been a mum for 20-something years. So thank you. So much for that. Yeah, I think that reassure. I've got a friend who's got three young children and she's been finding it difficult and we talk about it quite a bit. And I just really always, you know, want to, I think of her and want to reassure her. It's really hard. You've got a newborn. You've got a toddler. You've got a three-year-old. That's really, really hard. You're going to have anxiety. You're going to find it.

really difficult and that's completely normal don't judge yourself for that so um yeah i think that's i think as women i think kind of communicating that to one another is is a is a powerful gift i guess that we can give each other of like the solidarity of it as well isn't it yeah you're right and it's that it's that actually don't judge yourself for that and i think that's often what we do isn't it we cover these feelings in shame and then they all just feel quite we just feel quite stuck and alone in them. Absolutely. Yeah.

Thank you. Thanks for that. Clover. So to finish off, I ask our guests some quickfire questions. So what would you say that a motherhood high was for you? I have found watching my elder children grow up who are 18 and 21 and knowing that the three little ones are coming up as well. And when I'm with my son and his friends, you know, they all come to the house and they

and they like being here and they like hanging out at our house and that feeling of having got through the whole thing with Jimmy having like he's 21 he's he's he's he's he's on his track in life and I think the feeling that yeah I've got there with with one of my children and knowing that knowing that the others are are coming as well is is for me I feel a massive sense of privilege to be his mother and a massive sense of kind of joy in having been through the whole path with him. And it's very moving and very sad as well because you sort of feel he's not my child anymore and he's not the little, of course, he's like a great big bloke now. But it is and it's sad, but it is also really, really beautiful. Yeah. And what is the motherhood low for you?

The motherhood low is getting the children out of the house in the morning. I just posted about this a few days ago and I got so many responses because I get up really early. I often get up at like half past five. I do some work. We've got lots of animals. I sort the animals out. Or I just sit in the kitchen and make off tea and just scroll on Instagram or read the

news or something. But I like being up early. But every single morning, you know, that rush. we have to leave at half-past eight, which is quite late. You know, we're not leaving early. But to get the three younger children out of the house with their shoes on and their lunchboxes and their coats and their bags is an impossible task. And I find it, when the first lockdown happened, we're really lucky.

We live in the country. And I actually just felt a massive sense of relief because I didn't have to get the children to school anymore. And it really makes me feel, I mean, I feel, I'm talking about like the shame of motherhood. feel like sometimes when I've got them all in the car and I've absolutely lost my shit with them before then and shouted at them or I feel really bad as a human being and really a sense of shame that I can't do it in a more orderly way. And I think that's definitely a low and it seems to happen every single day. It's a very regular battle, isn't it? Yeah.

The thing that redeems it is knowing that it's a very, very familiar place. for many other parents as well, I suppose, that that's just, as we were saying earlier, that's just what it's like. You know, it's very rare that they all just slip into their coats and trot out the front door. Yeah. Yes.

Stuff. That would be an event, a shocking event in our house if that happens. So what's one thing that makes you feel good? For me at the moment, my writing is a really, really amazing source. It's an amazing place to go into, to escape to, Like I feel as I get older, I'm 46 now, I'm loving the fact of kind of gaining in confidence, I suppose, and this feeling of my creativity is growing and is developing. And that's what makes me feel.

Having time to really be inside my work is a place of great joy and be inside my writing. And because the kids are getting slightly older, you know, I have got the school days. So there's a tiny bit more time, that makes me, I can guarantee when I'm feeling depressed or anxious, if I can work, I'll feel better and it will like bring some kind of meaning, I suppose. And you feel like you're really achieving something. I think with motherhood, you often feel like you're going around the same, the same, you know, you're doing the same early morning trying to get them to schools, getting it wrong every day. And when I'm working, I feel like a sense of achievement. which sometimes as a parent, you don't feel it. You know, you feel like you're making mistakes.

But I love writing. I love being a mum as well. I'm not saying I don't love being a mom. I really do love being a mom. I love my children. But it is so fraught with kind of anxiety as well. Whereas my work is like my place of retreat. You know, it's a really yummy, amazing feeling

when I'm sitting down to write something is that creativity. I think actually as a parent trying to find tapping into whatever your creativity, whether it's writing or sewing or the way that you decorate or cook or whatever it is, the thing that brings you singing, I don't know, the thing that brings you joy, finding a space to do that, even if it's just for a really short period of time, is as a kind of retreat from parenting, I think is quite a valuable thing to try and identify. Yeah, and a valuable thing to make space for,

these flow activities where we kind of almost lose ourselves in that creativity. It's really therapeutic and so, yeah, so beneficial. So to finish off, Clover, how would you describe motherhood in three words? I'd say that motherhood is extremely exhilarating, absolutely terrible and completely brilliant all at the same time and with the exhilaration

comes that feeling of it's a bit like white water not that I've ever been white water rafting but it's a bit like or riding a roller coaster there's that like oh my God here we go

I can't do that you know that sort of ups and downs and that exhilaration is negative as well as positive you know it's that got the kind of the thrills and the spills And it's terrible.

Motherhood is terrible in some ways. But it is also just, you know, it's brilliant. And I think that kind of sense of the love and the spiritual kind of nourishment of their brief moments amongst the times where you're shouting for the lunchboxes and the lost shoes, not those times, but then there are other moments when it just all makes a special kind of sense that's difficult to kind of describe really. yeah and that's what i was holding out for yeah those moments i call them the the caffeine of motherhood that you spur you on those moments that you can really draw on yeah in the lunchbox and the morning yeah the chaos of the morning so thank you so much for your just generous and affirming words clover really grateful well it's been lovely really really lovely talking to you and i think this conversation is an important one i think you know the way that we can

support each other as parents is a really, really important one. So thank you. Thank you for having me on. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye more. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you enjoyed it, please do share, subscribe and review. You can find more from me on Instagram at Anna Martha. You might like to check out my two books called Mind Over Mother and Know Your Worth. I'm also the founder of the Mother Mind Way, a platform full of guides, resources and a community with the sole focus on supporting mothers' mental and emotional wellbeing. It's been lovely chatting with you. Speak soon.