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Many first-time mothers ask "Is motherhood going to ruin my life?"
Cathryn Monro hopes her book Spilt Milk Yoga will be a guide to finding wisdom, joy and purpose in motherhood.
She joins Colin Peacock to answer tricky questions like; 'What happened to my body?', 'What about my career?' and perhaps most importantly 'Am I doing it right?'
“I think spilt milk happens. The spilt milk is just the stuff that happens in your day, whether it’s external spilt milk – accidents or other people’s behaviour – or the internal spilt milk, which is the feelings we have about ourselves as mothers and how well we’re doing, comparing ourselves to other people or feeling conflicted about the tedium of being with little kids or repetitive mundane tasks. Feeling like ‘Gee, I had a career before this. And now I’m doing this job, it’s unrecognised, it’s unpaid, it’s invisible’. That’s a really difficult place to be, particularly when you’re tired or you’re stressed. Tired and exhaustion is part of that. So that’s the spilt milk.
"And the yoga part is how we respond to that... It’s not about doing physical yoga – this is yoga on the inside, which is about conscious living rather than reacting all the time. Because as mothers we really care about our kids and we want to do our best by our kids, it’s a really good opportunity to take those challenging moments, the ones that we fall into time and time again, and go ‘Actually, this is a habit that I’ve got. And I could probably get another habit, I could get a better habit. Or I could get myself some new options here'.
"Most of us are hearing about things like appreciation and gratitude – those things can actually lift and rewire our brains to look for the positive things in our day. And the more positive we are the better relationship we’re gonna have with our kids, the better time we’re gonna have being a mum, being a parent, being a partner” - Cathryn Monro.
