The Therapy Edit - One Thing with Dr Sophie Brock on why it’s hard to feel like a good enough mother

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

In this guest episode of The Therapy Edit, Anna chats to Motherhood Studies Sociologist, Dr Sophie Brock who shares her one thing.Dr Sophie's advice focuses on the differences between motherhood, mothering and mother.Dr Sophie has a podcast called the Good Enough Mother Podcast which you can listen to here: https://drsophiebrock.com/podcastYou can visit here website here https://drsophiebrock.com/You can follow Sophie on Instagram at @drsophiebrock

Hello and welcome to The Therapy Edit with me, psychotherapist, 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 mums everywhere. So join with me as we hear this dose of wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. Hi, everyone. Welcome to a guest episode of The Therapy Edit. Today I have with me, Dr. Sotterophe. Sophie Brock, who I have benefited so much from on social media. I think I've been following her for

quite a while now. And Sophie is, she has a PhD in sociology and she specialises in motherhood studies. She shares so much about kind of the sociology of motherhood and drawing our attention to what it means that motherhood is a construct and how we can find our freedom and our power in challenging that. So I'm really excited to speak to her. She is living in Sydney, Australia. She's got the most beautiful accent. We've actually just recorded for her podcast, which is definitely worth worth a listen. If you haven't discovered it already, it's called the Good Enough podcast. And if our conversation isn't on there, it will be on there very soon. So, hi, Sophie. How are you today? Good to have you here. Thank you for having me. And I'm really looking forward to

this conversation, especially after after hours. So thank you for having me on. It's been good. We've just had a really good chat actually about about motherhood and the pressures that we face and how to find our voice within it and recognise the choices that we have. But now you're on mine, I get to ask you the question of Dr. Sophie Brock, if you could share one thing with all the moms listening today, what would that, what would that one thing be? Yeah, that one thing would be that there's a difference between motherhood, mothering and mother. And so what I mean by that is that motherhood is socially constructed. It's bigger than just us as mothers.

It has a social and cultural narrative. Okay. So motherhood has a social and cultural narrative and it is bigger than us. Tell me a little bit more. Yes. Yeah, what that means. Well, I know we both love an analogy. So I'll share the Bishank analogy to describe it, right?

So if we were, and this is used to help make what sometimes feels really intangible, a bit more tangible and easier to understand. So even though it's not related to motherhood, let's all imagine a round glass fishbow, right? And this fishbowl represents the society we live within. And here, that represents motherhood. So that's the world that we live within. And that tells us all of the rules of what it means to be a good mum.

And you think about a big black sharpies written all of those rules around there. She's self-sacrificing. She never gets angry. She's joyful. It comes naturally. all of the shoulds we could spend, you know, this whole time talking about them. And so where the fish inside that tank, where the mothers, the fish, and we're swimming around in this world, and we often don't know where within the fishbow, because we look around

and everything is just normal. This is just the way the world is, right? This is just what it means to be a mother. And we don't recognize that actually we're living within a really particular socially constructed version of what our motherhood means. And then the mother in is the fish swimming. And so I'm moving my hands around here that people can't see who's listening. But that's actually the doing work of mothering. So that's the loving, the caring, the tending, the holding, the changing of the nappies, the kissing of their sores, right? It's the actual doing work. And there's a distinction there between the doing of our mothering, our role as a mum and our identity and the social world of motherhood that we live

within. And that I think is so often not understood. We don't have a cultural language and awareness around that yet. You're so right. It makes me think, have you ever seen that film, The Truman Show, where he's basically, it's about this guy and he's living in this world and it's normal as he knows it. But actually, it's a TV show. His whole life, he's living within a set of the TV show. And only when he realized that can he actually start challenging what he understands to be normal. So if we start to realize, and I think you do this so amazingly through your work, is just raising our awareness that we do. We live in this, we live in this fish tank. We live in this kind of construct of motherhood. And we are that kind of fish swimming around.

But what can happen when we do start to acknowledge that reality? What might change about our experience of motherhood or what can change or what needs to change or where do we go from this acknowledgement? So the thing is, is that when we're in the tank and we don't know where within it, we can look around and running with this analogy, right, we see ourselves reflected back by the tank. And what we see reflected back, we see as our truth. This is just how I am doing as a mother. And there often is really harsh self-judgment and self-critique that I'm not doing a good enough job. I'm not living up to these ideals. But often we don't see them as ideals that our society has. Yeah, we can talk about that. Actually, the most powerful and painful ways that this affects

us is when we internalize those ideals. And we take on the shoulds on ourselves. So bringing in this language and understanding how the social construction of motherhood exists and operates actually can feel really confronting at first because it can get us to start questioning the beliefs that we've taken on as truths about our identity and how we live our lives. And so it actually requires a little bit of a rupture between the world that we thought we were living within and the world that we now see in a new way. And the reason why I think this is important, and even though it can be uncomfortable, sometimes at first, is because there are costs and consequences that we carry as mothers

from living within that tank without knowing it and without talking about it. And we cannot, I believe, we cannot fully start to take back our power, take back our agency and live a liberated, fulfilled and powerful version of our motherhood whilst ever we're living within the shadows of what the tank of the social construct is telling us of what our motherhood should be. Yeah. So taking back, starting to take that power back. And I think one of the things written on the side of my fish tank were about motherhood was that mothers would always be calm and patient. And I think there was so much guilt and shame for me in those moments where I couldn't always be calm and patient. And when I started to challenge that, I started thinking, well, have I always been calm and patient? Who do I know in my life? Well, that is always calm and patient. As a human, the experience this is a whole spectrum of emotion, is it a human thing to be constantly calm and patient? And it was like those cracks started forming in that glass.

And the less guilt and shame I felt, the more able I felt to be able to get some tips and tools and some, you know, maybe ways to repair after those moments of fracture, perhaps of that calm and moments of chaos that can feel quite destructive sometimes in parenting. So I think you're so right. You're so right in how amazing it can be to notice what is written on that tank. But as you said, it can be quite painful and it can be quite, yeah, a difficult realization, especially perhaps when people have spent so much of their energy and resources trying to attain something that then actually they're realizing that was never attainable

and all that guilt and shame that had been experienced that perhaps didn't need to be. So when you talk about reclaiming your power, can you tell us a little bit more about that, what that might look like? Yeah, so part of the example you just shared with us is a really good way to access, answering that question, because wherever we feel guilty in our motherhood can be like a little red flag and an indicator, like a little beacon, saying, look over here, look over here, let's explore this further. because what that will indicate is either the guilt is a result of a value that you have.

So it's useful, it's instructive, it's feedback for you, or it is reflective of an internalization of one of the shoulds that you've taken on that perhaps we can interrogate and let go, which is what you just described there around being the calm patient mother who's never angry, right? And so what we can start to do when we notice and we build a language and we build an understanding, ultimately it's like flexing a muscle that hasn't been used, probably since we were kids ourselves, because we've been in this tank our whole lives. It's not like we just jump in when we become mothers. We experience it in a new way when we become mothers, but we start going,

actually, what do I want? What do I actually feel like here? How do I receive this? What are the things that are really valuable and important to me in my life, not the way the world told me I should be? and connecting ultimately with our sense of self is where we find our power. And what this understanding about the social construction of motherhood can do is it's a pathway into doing that. It helps us clear out some of the stuff we've been socialized into in order to get to and crystallize who we actually are and how we want to lead our lives. So what if we get to that place where we're starting to really challenge some of these shoulds and we're starting to find, you know, that we are reclaiming some of our power and questioning some of those and living outside of that fishbowl a little bit. Yet everyone around us,

perhaps, people in our lives are struggling with the fact that they have those boundaries and they have those expectations that maybe they're kind of putting on us as well. So we're kind of living outside of their expectations. So how do we navigate, navigate that when everyone else's living to the sheds and we're starting to break house with them a little bit. Yeah, and right, we never can actually jump out of the fishbow. My analogy would work much better and be more exciting if I could say, do this and we can jump out. Like, we can't because we're still within the society.

So until our society changes, which I believe we can do, it'll probably take a few generations, but this is what we're doing, right, in having these conversations. Until that tank changes, we can't ever fully escape it. We will be part of this socialisation. We can't ever fully reclaim our motherhood. We will be subject to this stuff in an ongoing way. And so the way that I think about it, using this analogy, is that we're like these little fish who are swimming at the sides

and ramming the tack, creating those cracks, as you say. And when we do that, a couple of things can happen. One is the water changes. We create like a tide, like a rip, so to speak, right? And as we're moving towards creating change, what can that do? It can do a few things. one, it can really upset other people because they're like, what are you doing, Sophie? Stop making the waters so rough.

Get back in your place. Don't you know what it means to be a mother? How dare you? Right. And because seeing you challenge my motherhood in this way means I'm starting to question and challenge myself and I don't want to do that. Some of us aren't ready for that. Right.

So it can be really confronting for other people to witness us stepping into our power in that way. But what it can also do is that we can create pathways for change that other mothers can join us on and that our daughters and future generations can follow in the footsteps of. And so there will be ways that ultimately when we're changing norms and when we're pushing back against things that are culturally dominant as the dominant paradigm, there will be costs and consequences to that. But that's why it's so important that we're doing this in community, in connection and in conversation with other people who get it and who are curious too.

This is amazing. And I think you're right in finding those people along the way. What has come to mind is a couple of Instagram accounts. I think of mums that are just really finding confidence in their authentic experience, in their experience of motherhood and sharing that. And I see that this almost like this split between people who are finding that almost offensive. You find that, how can you say that?

How can you do that? You're a mum. you should be, you know, you should be looking like this or behaving like that. And then there's another group of people that are just finding it incredibly liberating, whether they see themselves in that experience of motherhood or whether it just, they're finding themselves getting a sense of permission to be more authentic and maybe to be more open about their experience of motherhood and what that looks like for them. But yeah, that's so helpful.

those you're creating you're creating waves and there will be people who think what are you doing it shouldn't look like that who perhaps are still just really bound in those shoulds and that that construct and maybe haven't realized that they're in that fish tank and then others that are moving with you to to help maybe create change down the generations this is so this is so helpful and what this is a personal question here but what what would you say is one of the biggest changes in your motherhood experience with this awareness of the fish tank of the social construct of motherhood? Yeah, well, what's interesting is that I completed all of this research before I became a mum.

And so I came into motherhood, aware of the tank, understanding how it operates. I had this knowledge. And as a result of that, something that I think is different about my mother in experience to a lot of the mothers that I speak with. And it feels kind of like boundary pushing to say it, right? But I don't experience much mum guilt. Like, I rarely feel guilty in motherhood. And when I do feel guilty, it's almost always really useful and instructive.

And in other words, like, I should feel guilty based on my values. I just did something that was out of alignment with them. And so my guilt is useful. But the reason why it can feel kind of uncomfortable to say that is because there's an expectation that in order to be the perfect mum and a good enough mum, you will feel guilty because you prove your love through how bad you feel about yourself. And that shows what's high standards you have as a mother. So, oh, you don't feel guilty. You mustn't love your kid as much as I do. And so that's something that I've noticed is really present for me and is quite different in my motherhood

experience. And it's something that I really wish for and hope that other mothers can get to a place where they can release the weight of that guilt that so often binds us. So helpful. And I encourage everyone to go and find you on Instagram because you're always talking about this stuff. And I think what happens when we can see the best kind of social media is that it does start getting under your skin a little bit in a good way. And it does become a bit more of that lens that you view the world through.

So I'm so grateful for everything that you do around this and all that knowledge that you so generously share and communicate, communicate with us. Thank you, Anna. Thanks for saying that. Wow. It's all very true. So to finish off, I have got some quickfire questions and you very bravely didn't want to know what they are. Some people really want to know, but you were, you were like, no, just throw them at me. So that is what I will do. What is a motherhood high for you? A motherhood high. I really get a kick out of seeing my daughter. daughter do things that I find very uncomfortable about thinking of doing myself. So she's very, very confident and speaks her mind, sets her boundaries, knows herself so well and uses her voice

in ways that sometimes maybe go, oh, I want this for you. But really, and so seeing her boldness and her bravery, I love it. I relish in it. I think it's such a privilege. So yeah, that's definitely a high in my motherhood. Oh, I love that because I think for many generations, would have almost been suppressed, wouldn't it? You know, I think with that awareness that you have, you're probably just sitting with that discomfort of, oh, that is hard to watch. But actually there's, yeah, you're not wanting to kind of make it go away.

No, and it can look like the owning of her joy and pleasure and living fully, you know, in her own life. I find really inspiring in all the ways as women where socialised to keep small and quiet and just here in the corner. Yeah. There's something on social media I've seen going around and it's, you know, it's saying your daughter, when your daughter's really sassy, you know, she's really confident, she's really just authentic, you know,

don't take that away from her. She'll need that. She'll need that in later life. She'll need that. And I think many of us and the work that you do is helping us reclaim that for ourselves. Yeah. Yeah.

So what is a motherhood low for you? A low would be seen. I mean, I'm thinking it's interesting my, the way that I'm thinking about my responses here are very much centering around my mother-in of my daughter and thinking about her, which is interesting in it of itself, right? But Lowe's would be when I see her in pain and there's nothing I can do about it.

We've had to do lots of like medical tests, blood tests, things like that over the course of her life. And that's always been really challenging, feeling that lack of controlling, being able to take away her pain, I think is challenging, yeah. It's just so much letting go of control is now in motherhood or that recognition that we don't have it. And it's hard. Yeah.

It's hard. And how, well, what's one thing that makes, this is very much about you. What's something that makes you feel good? You? Me. Well, I love my work. I love what I do. but I also recognize like, Sophie, work is your hobby.

That's not healthy. So I've sort of been like, yes, I get to relish in it and do other things. I love my friendships and my girlfriends and going out for a laugh and just the simple pleasures in life really being with those that I love and soaking up being present in the moment with them. Yeah, that community aspect of life. And finally, how would you describe motherhood in three words? Well, it's interesting.

because based on what I've just shared about the definition of motherhood as the construct, the words would be very much around it's oppressive. There's a whole bunch I want to change about the way motherhood is constructed. But talking about it more generally in how people understand motherhood and the motherhood experience, three words, you said? Yeah. Yeah, well, complex would be number one. Undervalued and sacred.

complex undervalued and sacred powerful words yeah big words yeah and true so thank you thank you so much for joining me today and i can't wait i can't wait to get this out so because i just know that it's going to be yeah it's going to just be a powerful thing to draw people's attention to that fishbow and thinking about how can they reclaim their power in ways that they need to and how can you question what some of those things that are written on the outside so thank you thank you for all that you do and thank you for your time oh thank you so much for having me thank you for listening to today's episode of the therapy edit if you enjoyed it please do share subscribe or review because it makes a massive difference to how many people it can reach

you can find more from me on instagram at anam arthur you might like to check out my three books mind over mother know your worth and my new book the little book of calm for new mums, grounding words for the highs, the lows and the moments in between. It's a little book. You don't need to read it from front to back. You just pick whatever emotion resonates to find a mantra, a tip and some supportive words to bring comfort and clarity. You can also find all my resources, guides and videos, all with the sole focus of supporting your emotional and mental well-being as a mum. They are all £12 and you can find them on anamatha.com. I look forward to speaking with you soon.