TONTS. - Matrescence Festival with Dr Sophie Brock

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

Welcome to first episode of TONTS Season 5 Matrescence Festival edition, join us as we look back through our Melbourne festival from March 2025.In this episode you'll hear from Dr Sophie Brock, a sociologist with a focus on Motherhood. With a PhD from The University of Sydney just before becoming a mother herself, one of the main results from her research was a conceptual theory about the way Motherhood is socially constructed and individually experienced. So much of her work is about giving voice to expectations, to constructions, that are created as part of what it means to be a Mother in our world. "To connect to the authenticity of who we are, we first have to deconstruct who it is the world expect(ed) us to be." For more from Dr Sophie Brock, you can head to her website: https://drsophiebrock.com/Then after Dr Brock's talk, you'll hear from her again in a Q&A along with Jane Hardwick-Collings and Michelle Hall from our previous episodes. For more from Claire you can head to: https://www.clairetonti.com/ or her instagram @clairetontiFor more from Lizzy you can head to: https://www.lizzyhumber.com/ or her instagram @lizzyhumberAnd to keep up to date with past and upcoming Matrescence festivals you can follow @matrescencefestival on instagram or go to https://www.matrescencefestival.co.ukOriginal theme music: Free by Claire TontiEditing: Maisie JGSocial Media: Surabhi Pradhan Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I create, speak and write today. There are wondry people of the Kulin Nation and pay my respect to their elders past, present and merging, acknowledging that the sovereignty of this land has never been ceded. I want to acknowledge the people who have given birth on this land, raised children on this land for generations connected to country and spirit. Welcome back to a very special edition of Tons for Season 5. My name is Claire Chonte. And I'm Lizzie Humber and we are the co-founders of Matressens Festival.

Listen along with us as we share live episodes from the Metrasence Festival Australia that took place across two days in March 2025. I have the deep pleasure of introducing you to our speaker for this episode. Her name is Dr Sophie Brock. She is a sociologist, identity, expert and advocate for the authentic self. Sophie helps us explore the layers of motherhood, identity and societal expectations. As a sociologist with a focus on identity, Sophie examines how we construct who we are based on societal pressures and the narratives

we're told to follow. Her work is all about breaking down those expectations to reconnect with our true selves, the ones not defined by labels, but by authenticity and real connections. After Sophie speaks, we also have a panel with Sophie Brock, Jane Hardwick Collings and Michelle Hall. Okay, we're ready to get going, Lizzie? Let's go. Wow. I'm feeling so moved by that performance from Michelle and thank you so much for the invitation to be here and for all of the familiar faces that I see here and the new ones too. I first want to acknowledge Natasha's welcome from this morning if she's still here and to also acknowledge and pay my respects to the one Jerry Hoy wrong people of the Kulin Nation

and extend my respect to anybody here who is the First Nations person. So I'm here today from the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. I've moved just this week into a new home which I am sharing with my mother and my daughter. I have a seven-year-old daughter and I am a motherhood studies sociologist which usually when I share that as a job title I get blank stairs from people who are not mothers and curiosity and questioning of what does that mean and why are you so interested in mothers? I first became a sociologist right on the cusp of when I became a mother myself. I studied this in my early 20s and became a motherhood study a sociologist and got that email saying my PhD she was granted the week that I gave

birth to my daughter. And part of what I found really interesting was the reaction that people had when I told them what I was studying before I became a mother. And often what people would say with curiosity is, is it because you really want to be a mother? What is it about mothers? So when I was studying my bachelor's degree, I found a footnote in a reference for an essay I was writing and I saw the word motherhood studies. And I thought, how is it that I've come through three years of a degree majoring in gender studies and taking a keen interest in women's inner lives? And I've never even heard of this term, which is a discipline. And it was created by Professor Andrea O'Reilly. It's interdisciplinary. I'm coming out from a sociological perspective, but there's lots of different

areas of study that intersect with motherhood studies. And unsurprisingly, motherhood studies is marginalized. Why is it that this space that has been created here for us today, why is that this is so radical? Why is it that we've had to go to this extra thought and care of creating and designing spaces that include changing tables and include spaces for children and include ways for you to be able to access being here and being present? It's because part of what we're doing is we're creating space that needs to be created because it was taken from us at some point. And so part of what I discovered when going about my research in motherhood studies

was I focused specifically on mothers who have children with disabilities. That stemmed from my own experience of growing up with my dad who had disability. And I thought, if I can see the impacts of caregiving on my own mother, in my own family, what must this be like for those who have children who have disabilities and additional needs? And so that's my entry into this space. And part of what I want to share with you in this snippet of time is, acknowledging that if this is the first time you've heard about motherhood studies and sociology of motherhood, part of what the intention is, it's a new paradigm and way of thinking, seeing and seeing yourself

and understanding how the world sees you. And shifts in perspective, take time. And so allow yourself to be with that. And if things feel big, which they probably will, because look at the context that we're here and look at what has been shared, it's okay for you to take time. to allow those things to land outside of this space too. When I was doing my research, I really grappled and struggled at the point at which I needed to write my findings because here I am projecting my own analysis that is shaped from my own lived experience and my own perspectives onto these women's stories and trying to make meaning from them.

And I said to my supervisor at some point, I just wish I could get all of the transcripts and just put it together and that's the thesis. I just want these women's stories to be heard. And so there was a real grappling with that. And what ended up coming out of that grappling after a long process was a theory and a concept. And that's what I'm going to share with you here today. And it's important to say that theories and concepts are just that,

and they're born from lived experience. And that if you don't see yourself in a theory or a concept or whatever it is, it's not because you don't fit. It's because it doesn't fit what your lived experience is. And so coming back to the truth of what it is that many of you are already connected in with, part of what can be so powerful about motherhood studies is that we get to use language in a way to accurately describe our lived experiences as they are. And so three distinctions that can be important and powerful to make

are the differences between the words mother, motherhood and mother in. So motherhood is a structure. It's an institution. We can talk about this as patriarchal motherhood, the social construct of motherhood, the system of motherhood, and Michelle's performance brilliantly demonstrated what that system is and what the consequences of it are. And motherhood was first defined as an institution by Adrian Rich in her book of Woman Born in the late 1970s, and she made this distinction between motherhood as institution and the experience of being a mother.

Part of what's powerful about making this distinction is that we can talk about all of the ways that the system of motherhood marginalises, oppresses, invisibilizes, cuts us off from parts of ourselves and our own experience, while at the same time talking about the ways in which our experience as a mother, the practice of mother-in,

can be a catalyst for enormous transformation, a catalyst for stepping into our personal power. So when we become mothers, we can feel both. We can feel both more oppressed than we ever have been before and feel this intersection of power, powerlessness, and then we can also feel like we're stepping into a version of power

that we'd never had access to before. Adrian Rich speaks about this as powerless responsibility as mothers. So sharing with you a little bit of an analogy and concept that I hope you can take with you and explore a little bit more in the future. Some of you will already know this because you've studied with me, but it's called the fish tank of motherhood model. And so what this is, is in Michelle's talk, and part of the threads of what we've been talking about here today is the invisibility

and the rallying against what and the sense that I'm feeling all of the impacts of what it is that surrounds me but I'm also kind of gaslit socially to expect this is supposed to be the most amazing time of my life and I'm meant to be grateful and if I demonstrate any sort of frustration, dissatisfaction, discontent, anger with how things are then that is equated with ingratitude for my children and that I'm not appreciating this powerful role of what it means to be a mother. So if we were to all imagine

a round glass fish tank or a fish bowl, what this represents is the motherhood piece. That's the structure. That's the thing that's invisible, but that shapes our everyday lived realities. So the tank represents motherhood. The water inside represents our culture. That's what we're living within.

we're the fish inside and all humans in society are the fish inside so others are raised in this tank as well but how it impacts you depends on where you're positioned and what your role is so we're born into this tank

we don't just jump into it when we become mothers we're born into a culture of motherhood that prescribes a particular way of how we were supposed to be of who we're meant to be as mothers and when we're in this tank we're swimming around and that's the mothering.

That's the feeding of your babies. That's the holding space for them. That's the learning, the growth, the socialisation that we do of our children. That's the act of caregiving. This is work from Professor Sarah Ruddick, who talks about mothering as practice. So we've got motherhood, the structure, the tank,

mothering, the practice, their caregiving. The culture is the water, and their fish are mothers. Now, what's important to recognize is that there's both this universality and sense of individuality of what it means to be a mother. Because that tank changes across culture. The tank is made up of our systems. Okay, so the maternity system, the health system, the schooling system, our economic system, our political system, the system and structure of the family.

These are all things that impact and shape our everyday lives. impact and shape the extent to which we have choice in our mothering experiences but too often they do feel invisible. So part of what we do in naming the tank is naming the presence of those structures to explore the impact they have on our life. Do we have access to paid maternity leave? It's a structural issue that comes to shape how we individually live and experience our mothering. The other factor that it's important to consider is where you're placed in the tank. So following this analogy, because I love an analogy in imagery, I think of it as there's kind of seaweed and rocks and crevices in this tank.

And if you're a mother who is not privileged in our society, if you're a single mother, if you're indigenous or black mother, if you're a queer mother, if you're a disabled mother, if you fall outside the norm of what is perfect motherhood and idealised motherhood and what we'll talk about is the perfect mother myth in any way, You face great obstacles. So whilst we're all in the tank together, we will be positioned in different ways and we'll be resourced in different ways. This is one of the reasons why comparison in motherhood becomes so problematic,

but it's another reason as to why we're set up for that comparison. So when we're inside this tank and we're seeing this round glass fish bowl and we're making that visible, what I want us to now imagine is getting out a texter and writing out all of the rules of what it means to be the good mother. on that tank. And we've seen these demonstrated and performed today, right? Who is she? She's self-sacrificial. Sherrys puts others first. She came into motherhood in a particular way. So she yearned to be a mother, wanted to be a mother, desired to be a mother. She had a certain experience of pregnancy. She had a certain birth. She had the moment of love at first sight with her baby in order to validate this maternal instinct that's meant to kick in and she's meant

to know how to do it. And breastfeeding looks a particular way. And she does it to be the good mother, but then she doesn't do it too long, but then she introduces a bottle so others get to feed her baby too, so she's not selfish, she's self-less, but she always makes sure to centre others. So she's both denigrated and revered. We're told this is meant to be the happiest time in your life, and then we set you up to struggle. We strip away support systems, and we tell you that you're meant to be grateful, and if you're not, and if you're struggling, and if you're feeling very predictable emotional responses to the systems and context that you're placed within, then it's your fault.

Okay, so the system of motherhood as it exists, it individualizes your experiences. It asks you to place and sets you up to place blame on yourself. And this is where a lot of mum guilt comes from. So the guilt keeps us in the tank, it keeps us self-blaming and self-questioning. Sometimes that is productive when it connects us with our values. but a lot of the mum guilt that exists in modern motherhood is a mechanism of oppression. It's a tool of self-surveillance.

And so where you feel most guilty are often the access points to which you're able to explore possibility for freedom. And the ways in which you're most marginalised, the ways you fall outside the perfect mother myth or you jut up against things in that tank can actually be your keys to freedom. Okay, we have research that looks at this, for example, teenage mothers who already fall outside of what is expected of them need to pave their own

path because the spaces won't build for them. And we could go on and on talking about this perfect mother myth and what I would love you to do in your own time is to actually write this out. What is the ideal of the perfect mother? Who is she? She certainly doesn't feel rage or anger. She certainly doesn't feel regret or resentment or boredom. She feels blissful, contented, lit up. She's always present. She has a thriving career, but she never puts her career before her children. The perfect mother is a two-dimensional image. It's a caricature. It's not real. And it's contradictory. No matter how you can taught yourself, you can never quite fit. And so part of what we can do is when we introduce new language and we introduce consciousness to these processes and to the water

that we've been swimming within, we can start to take the cloak off, unmasked motherhood, that's what Susan Mosshart would say. And part of what we do when we do this is we need to connect with others and be in community as we do so. And that's why spaces like this can be so radically and powerfully transformative because every time you recognise that your experience isn't one that you're carrying alone, it breaks shame. and a lot of the time what happens with this mum guilt

is that it functions not just as guilt as the stick for us to beat ourselves with but it functions then as shame if you're not a good enough mother I'm not a good enough mother maybe I just wasn't cut out for this my children deserve better and this leads to what I call the anger guilt trap because what happens when we tell ourselves we're not enough we try harder we sacrifice more we're already doing so in the context where we're depleted and under-resourced and unsupported, and eventually our anger arises as a truth-teller

to ask us to listen and to make sure we don't completely lose ourselves in the ways that we cut pieces of ourselves off in order to try and be the good mother because we love our children so deeply and so fully. And this starts when we are children. It starts with, we have research, looking at babies in utero when we find out the sex of the baby,

the way we speak about that baby changes. The things we celebrate in little boys and little girls are different. Our compliance is rewarded from early on. We're asked to be quiet. How small can we get to move over to create space? And so sometimes an awareness of this can provoke anger, validation, betrayal. Also, sometimes we can go to a place of hypervigilance and self-assessment of how much have I internalized the perfect mother myth.

And so how can I be the best detoxer? How can I be the best liberated mother? How can I be the most empowered version of who I am? And that just ends up being another cage that we place ourselves within from the very one we're trying to escape. And so be gentle with yourself when you're doing this type of self-exploration. Know that it is best done in community and in connection. But that ultimately, unless we bring consciousness to that water,

unless we understand the processes that we have been through since we were children ourselves, we aren't able to tell the truth of our lived experiences, especially if we don't have the language and the spaces to be able to do so. So what Professor Andrea O'Reilly says, she's the person who kind of founded and created motherhood studies as a discipline, she says we can mother against motherhood. So if you think about this tank,

we call it in some of my coursework, ramming the tank. So you imagine these little fish jutting and hitting the side of this tank and creating cracks and changes, or what happens when you do that alone, it's hard. It takes a lot of work and a lot of energy. But if we do that alongside others who are mothering, that is a form of activism. That is a form of social change. Existing as you are is in process of creating and raising the next generation. That's a radical act in and of itself.

And so part of what we can do is draw on our metrescence experiences as yes, a place of personal revelation and of power and of exploring parts of ourselves that have been brought to the fore that we may have had locked away. It can also be a radical portal for social change. So what I hope you can take from this little snippet that I've shared with you are the distinctions between mother, the structure that you're living within,

mother the individual role, mothering the practice, and an awareness of what the culture tells you. about who it is you're expected to be. And that's with a purpose not of gaining, gaining, gaining, more knowledge, and I need to change myself. It's actually about releasing and letting go and detoxing and attunement to the messages that you will and are

and are going to continue to be constantly fed by your culture about what it means to be a good mother and to have a filter there and to know that it's not about, you, it's part of a cultural process that you are living within and acknowledging all of the research and work out there that has been done by maternal scholars. Obviously, I haven't been able to do all of my referencing in this as I would usually like, but there is a lot, a lot, a lot of research that we have now and we have tons about the impacts of the perfect mother myth, the impacts

of patriarchal motherhood. The reason why suicidality is the number one reason for maternal death in the first 12 months after birth. Maternal mental health, it cannot be disconnected from an understanding of patriarchal motherhood. And until we start building this understanding into our language and into our own stories, I don't believe we'll see the social change that we need. So I hope you can take what you need from that talk. Thank you for listening. So as I mentioned, my mum is here today and I want to ask Jane this question.

first. I want to know why you think it's important that we create intergenerational spaces like we have. And I'll get Michelle to pass the microphone over to Jane. Thank you. First of all, I'm just going to say that as a postmenopausal woman, it's really helpful for me to have had a thought about this before. So I've actually got some notes that I want to refer to. And that's okay. Notes are fine. Yes. I think that in terms of the importance of intergenerational spaces is so many things, like bring babies into the mix and everything changes.

No, the oxytocin begins to flow. And honestly, babies, and I'm speaking babies specifically, because I'll get to children in a minute, but babies and our children are the VIPs, the very important people, the people that we just go, oh, well, look what they're doing, and just, you know, celebrate their beingness. I feel like bringing them into the mix is very important. And as Winnie said yesterday, it's the way for younger women to watch and learn.

You know, many, like you said yourself, you hadn't even held a baby before you had your own. So in intergenerational spaces, it's normal to help each other. And then younger women can get the experience of that learned behavior. And that children accept it. it's actually our natural habitat to be fair to be in intergenerational spaces and older women love it because it just feels right and more than anything I just think it puts us all

in right relationship with each other and that's something that's very important and for anybody who has a problem with it it's an opportunity to unravel your childhood trauma absolutely let's click to that yeah for sure someone said to me yesterday that this feels like how the world should be, it just flows because we're all in it together creating that village space

and we're, as Amira said from the bookstore, we're catering to both our heads and our hearts today. And I think that that's really spot on. Thank you, Jane. I'm going to direct this to Michelle now. Could I ask you about the role of creativity in moving through your metrescence? I'd probably be locked up if I didn't have creativity.

Creativity is, to me, a way of creating a map to take myself through my own personal, quite deeply private rights of passage through matressants, through all of life. And everyone's different. Creativity has talked about a lot. I actually just think every single human being is innately creative. I really believe that because I've worked with babies and children a lot and I've never met one baby that's not creative or one child that's not creative. It doesn't mean making a piece of art or a song.

It just means inquiry. It means questioning. It means enthusiasm. It means interest and attention. It means the impulse and the urge to collaborate with others and with the space you're in. So with that in mind, for me, I think because I did probably spend a lot of time on my own as a kid

living on a very isolated property. I said in my piece that my dad's a Vietnam veteran and one of the things that they often do is seek places of isolation because there's a lot of things that trigger their PTSD. So I spent a lot of time on a 40,000 acre property in the wheat belt of Western Australia and that space was incredible

because there was so much to create. with there so many creatures and textures and space to dream. And so very early on, it was just a way of being. And again, it's not that I'm really secure in this understanding. I can talk to you about it now, age 50, but through my life I've sort of just done it unconsciously because I've been desperate, quite frankly, with feeling very different to a lot of other people in the mainstream

around my gender identity, around my sexuality, around my relationships, around work, money, class, all kinds of things. I've felt I don't fit, and I know probably everybody feels that way to some degree. What I've done when I've felt the despair of that is I've sat with my creativity or my creativity has spoken to me in that it's led me to something, it's led me to the ocean, or it's led me to a book, or it's led me to a song. and then that inquiry takes me further and further,

and it might take five years, but that five-year process will be the rite of passage that I am improvising myself to take me through that evolution of me. Thank you. That's such a beautiful answer. And as I said before, I do think the role of creativity is just so underrated and such a powerful force. I'll ask you to pass the microphone over to Sophie now.

Thank you. Sophie, thank you for your beautiful presentation. to fascinating, even the fact that motherhood is studied, I think, and sometimes in that way, that it's an academic topic. And I remember I released my album and a friend said to me, I didn't know that motherhood is worthy of honoring in that way or in-depth study in that way, which is so special. I wanted to ask you, you talked about the perfect mother,

myth and I know we've heard so much today about the complexities of mothering now when we leave today could you give us some advice on how we can shift or change or metamorphosize our motherhood experience in little ways not necessarily big giant leaps but little ways that we can shift that to bring more joy more freedom into our lives yeah thanks for the question Claire and I think it's a good one because it's taking what is actually quite big theoretical topics and ways of thinking and trying to make them tangible. So I would encourage everybody as a first step to just get out of sheet of paper and write on the top of it, whichever one sentence I'm about to say resonates most. A perfect mother is. A good mother should. The ideal mother does. And just

start writing and see what falls out. You're not writing to be observed. It's not anything that you're going to share with anybody, but see what comes out. Another exercise you can do is a thought experiment of imagining someone has dropped in from out of space and says to you, please paint me a picture of who the ideal mum is. And part of what this exercise does is we're trying to get out what you have absorbed about the message of who the good mother is.

The purpose of that is for you to get clearer on what matters to you, what your values are versus what the shoulds are that you've been fed. And so write out that list until you get at least 20 or 30 things and some of them might be things like a good mother doesn't let her kids jump on my couch. It doesn't have to be deep. But write out that list and see what comes and there will be a lot there that connects with your own upbringing, with the witnessing of mothers and mothering around you,

with expectations that have been placed on you, maybe judgmental comments that you've absorbed, things you judge yourself about. and then go through that list and for everyone either right across next to it to go actually I really don't care about that. That is not important to me or my children or my family and I'm releasing that. Maybe you already have. Do a tick next to the things that feel really valuable for you,

really important to you in your mothering experience. Not everything on the perfect mother myth list is bad. Some of it will be integrated into our lives. and then circle the things you're unsure about because I think too often we're asked to make these final decisions and we have so many decisions to already make in our experience we don't want this to be another that contributes to pressure so allow yourself to be uncertain and unsure

and circle those things and that's why we need others too so I would do that exercise first and after doing that we can then go through our daily life and any time you feel guilt and that pain just ask yourself the question of why is this so and does this connect to anything on that list. And that's just something tangible we can do to begin the process. Thank you, Sophie.

I really appreciate that. I think I can hear in that this notion of self-compassion in the end, right? That seems to me to be the first step of self-compassion and kindness. So often I know Amy's workshop this afternoon, she talks about the inner mean mama, and this narrative we often don't even notice, oh, I'm not good enough, oh, I haven't done that right. I didn't bring the sunscreen, all of these things.

And actually giving ourselves love, I think, in that just really deeply loving ourselves and saying we are enough. There's a beautiful painting out there or image that says something like every sunrise, I am enough from Rochelle, our artist, and you can wander around and have a look at some of her paintings and art later. Jane, I'm going to finish with you. I'll pass the microphone back. As one of our elders here, our sage, what would you like these beautiful humans in this room to take away from today?

What advice could you give them when they leave? Well, it's different out there. So be ready for that. And the oxytocin that's been generated in here simply by being together and the singing and... We'll stay with you for a while until the antidote appears, which is fear. So just remember that that's just a simple kind of hormonal thing. And so if you've been up and we will come down. Can't stay up, must come down.

And down doesn't mean bad and up doesn't mean good necessarily. So be gentle with yourself. Be gentle to whom you arrive home to. They're probably going to sniff you to see whether you're still you. Did you learn something that means it's all over? You know, like, be wary of that. So there may be people who need reassurance when you get home. And integration is obviously a really important aspect of this.

And, you know, doing the thinking that Sophie just suggested. And you probably all have ways. that you do this kind of thing, but journaling and talking to each other, what did you remember, what was your favorite bit and all that kind of thing, and to connect back to the land where you live, you know, take your shoes off,

put your feet on the ground, breathe up the energy of the earth, and it's a new moon today. So that's an, yeah, awesome, auspicious experience to be sharing. Like yesterday was the dark moon, and that's about letting go, Today's the new moon, so whatever you do at the beginning of something affects what unfolds.

So essentially we are making a group new moon prayer, intention, wish, and it's about metrescence and all the things that have been talked about today and yesterday. So that's kind of like our collective spell, if you like, on the new moon. And that's step one, step two, three, four and forever is to notice all the ways you can support that spell, that prayer, that wish. my big suggestion is to go home and share the love and spread the word. Oh, yes, yes, yes to that. Thank you so much, Jane.

Well, can we give a huge round of applause to Michelle Hall, Jane Hadwick Hollings, Dr. Sophie Broth. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. For more for Matresson's Festival, you can head to Instagram at Matresson's Festival or you can head to matressenspestepestival.com for the Australian version or matressenspestival.com.com for the UK for the UK version. You can also find more from me at Claire Tonti on Instagram or Clairetonte.com.

And for more from Lizzie Humber, that's like number that said Humber, you can visit lizziehumber.com or go to Instagram at Lizzie Humber. And we will speak to you next time. Thank you.