Startup Parent

What do we call women who experience emotions ranging from completee joy to anxiety to ambivalence in new motherhood?

In the words of Dr. Alexandra Sacks: totally normal.

In her work studying “matrescence”, or the identity transition to motherhood, Dr. Sacks shines light on the wide range of these normal emotions that tend to be hidden from public view. Some of these very normal and natural feelings include: fear of childbirth, disappointment in learning your child’s sex, not enjoying the work of childrearing, feeling disconnected to your baby or your partner (or both!) during what you thought was supposed to be a deep bonding moment, and much more. If you’re like me, this podcast will leave you feeling much less alone and much more aware of the complexity of your own experience in motherhood.  

Alexandra Sacks, MD is the leading expert on “matrescence,” the term that defines and captures the transition to motherhood that is as demanding and transformative as adolescence. She is known for popularizing the concept in her TED talk as well as the New York Times article “The Birth of a Mother.” She is the host of Motherhood Sessions, a podcast released in April 2019 by Gimlet Media, and coauthor of What No One Tells You: A Guide to Your Emotions from Pregnancy to Motherhood.

On today’s episode, we get to talk with Dr. Sacks about the range of psychological experiences that women encounter during pregnancy and new motherhood — from joy and bliss to anxiety and guilt. She also tells us why these experiences are totally natural and normal for a period of such dramatic identity shifts as well as hormonal, bodily, and relationship changes.

“Going through a diversity of emotions doesn’t necessarily mean you have postpartum depression. It’s the natural course of matrescence,” she explains.

She breaks down the harmful myths of motherhood and opens up space for a conversation full of nuance, paradox, and honesty. In our culture, it’s time to redefine motherhood and show the broad range and spectrum of emotions, feelings, and experiences that accompany this huge transition and journey in your life. Becoming a parent means that all of your relationships shift, that a new person is joining your family, and you are responsible in a way that you might not ever have been before. If it feels like a lot, that’s okay, because it is a lot.

• Dr. Sacks’ transition from studying postpartum depression to focusing on the diversity of emotions experienced naturally in matrescence.
• Matrescence as an extended phase of all women’s lives, including women who choose not to have children or who experience infertility, and Dr. Sacks focused work on the period of pregnancy and the first year of motherhood.
• The Bliss Myth and other honest stories we’re missing about motherhood.
• The harmful trope of the “bad mother” as the cornerstone of evil characters in myth and popular culture.
• The idea of the “Good Enough Mother” as permission and guiding light f

Elena Rue and Catherine Orr are co-founders of StoryMine Media, a company that creates documentary videos for mission-driven organizations. They’d been in business together for years, and were both already parents to young children. Yet they’d been able to balance being co-founders because one was always able to cover for the other one if a pregnancy came up.

This time, however, they were due within weeks of each other!

Yet instead of panic and think that business was over, they decided to talk about how to go about planning for pregnancies as entrepreneurs in a different way. They decided to use their joint pregnancies as a kick in the pants to implement changes that they’d been wanting to make as a business for years.

The intersection of entrepreneurship and pregnancy is a place I’m fascinated with at Startup Pregnant, and every interview we do shares another story of how to tackle this life design challenge in new and interesting ways. How can we make business better because of pregnancy? What if we looked at our bodies slowing down or our need for rest not as a curse on business, but as a fascinating opportunity for renovation and re-design?

None of us are saying that this is easy or wonderful to go through—change sometimes feels like it comes through with a sledgehammer—but it is, in some cases, an opportunity for growth and leveling up.

Today you’ll get to hear not just from two pregnant women, but from three pregnant women, all in their third trimesters! Why? I recorded this interview back when I was also 38 weeks pregnant, so you’ll get to hear it all from all of us. Yes, we’ll tell it like it is. Listen in to this joint conversation as we talk about what to do when you find out your co-founder is pregnant at the same time as you.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/109.

StoryMine creates documentary videos for mission-driven organizations. They capture real stories and human moments, that connect people to a cause. The greatest thing you can do to serve a mission, grow awareness, and inspire action, is to find the real people, specific m

As young women, we’re taught about our menstrual cycle in relationship to two things: our periods and pregnancy. In an attempt to avoid pregnancy, fix irregular cycles, or alter heavy periods, we’re often prescribed The Pill in our teens and twenties.

We are flummoxed when we come off the pill after years or decades of use to find our old problems return immediately – they’ve not healed themselves, only been hidden by the regulating power of the pill. By only revisiting our cycles when we decide to try to conceive, we miss out on the opportunity to come into deep understanding with our bodies and to heal ourselves rather than mask symptoms.

Today, we get to talk to Lisa Hendrickson-Jack about how in taking the time to chart, learn about and understand our cycles, we can not only optimize our fertility but gain crucial information about our bodies.  

Lisa is the author of The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility. She is a certified fertility awareness educator and a holistic reproductive health practitioner. She teaches women how to chart their menstrual cycles for natural birth control, for conception and for monitoring your overall health. Her book, The Fifth Vital Sign is all about why your cycle is one of your vital signs in your body if you are a woman and how it can play a powerful tool in diagnosing and healing our bodies.

• Being a medical advocate for yourself: why it’s extremely difficult and also crucial to your long-term well-being.
• The idea that in any examining room there are two experts: the doctor, who is the expert in a field of medicine, and the patient, who is the expert in their body and their experience.
• How a family history of painful periods, fibroids, and hysterectomies led her to seek out cycle charting from an early age
• Lisa debunks the myth that regular ovulation is only important when you want children, because we need to recognize that the menstrual cycle is part of our entire biology and physiology.
• She presents an evidence-based approach to fertility awareness and menstrual cycle optimization.
• How the body is seen as low—base, even!—and unpredictable. That means that men and women have been culturally conditioned not to experience life through our bodies. This becomes a bigger problem for birthing and postpartum women, who can experience the trauma of birth itself and then can compound that damage by feeling like they can’t or shouldn’t listen to their bodies reaction to trauma in the wake of birth.

Join us as we talk about the menstrual cycle, fertility, and the opportunities we all have to learn more about our bodies simply by paying closer attention to them.  

FULL SHOW NOTE

This week Sarah and guest Cary Fortin break down some of the most powerful takeaways from recent podcast guests and what we’re looking forward to in April. We cover what makes us laugh, cry, and get fired up in a brand-new segment called “In The News.”


IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT:

Join us as we talk about what’s impacting us most, on the podcast and in the news, this month.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/107.

Writer, author, storyteller, and co-founder of New Minimalism.

• http://www.newminimalism.com/
• The New Minimalism Book

• Amy Schumer “Growing” on Netflix

#106 — Healing from Trauma and Grief: One Woman’s Journey and Story

At six years old, Iman Gatti witnessed her father brutally murder her mother. Her father was sentenced to 25 years in prison and Iman, now parentless, spent the next twelve years in foster care.

Fast forward to today: Iman is a published memoirist, grief recovery specialist, certified coach, a wife, and a mother to a beautiful baby girl.

How did she get here? How did she process and heal all the trauma she experienced over those formative years? And how has she been able to turn her own journey of healing into one of empowering other women to heal themselves?

On today’s episode, we get to hear from Iman Gatti about her courageous journey of healing of herself after unimaginable pain. We learn how she spent a decade in therapy and other recovery and healing modalities, how she ended up starting a business, and how her business now supports women in their own journeys to healing, forgiveness, and self-love. Through her work in healing her own trauma, she found a path to becoming a courageous living coach and certified grief specialist.

In this episode, we also get to listen in and hear how Iman shares how motherhood changed her and impacted the way that she works. While she found raising a baby to be demanding, she also found the logistics of it straightforward. What she wasn’t necessarily expecting was how much the soul work of becoming a mother would rock her to her core.

Join us as we talk about what it looked like for her to heal from trauma: her journey and deep work around forgiveness, self-love, and the surprising ways that pregnancy and birth were a portal to deeper healing.

• Iman’s profound story of trauma––witnessing her father brutally murder her mother just before her seventh birthday and spending the following 12 years in foster care––and her decades long commitment to healing herself.
• How the work of healing her own trauma led her to become a courageous living coach and certified grief specialist who helps others heal their own trauma and grief.
• The surprising role of forgiveness as a cornerstone of healing trauma.
• How becoming a mother herself reignited Iman’s grief over losing her own mother at seven, but also strengthened her feeling of connection.
• The vulnerability of writing her memoir and allowing herself to be fully seen.
• How she found raising a baby to be demanding but straightforward, while the soul work of becoming a mother rocked her to her core.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/106.

Iman Gatti, author of Cracked Open – Never Broken, is an empowerment coach, transformational speaker, and Certified Grief Recovery Specialist™. Through her work, she helps people overcome self-limiting beliefs, heal past wounds, and step fully into their limitless potential.

• Cracked Open – Never Broken: A Memoir

We have a series of mini-books we wrote just for Startup Pregnant listeners: from Pregnancy Affirmations to the Pregnancy Reading List and the Parenting Reading

#105—Disruption: Managing Your Career

Whenever I feel stuck or I’m looking for a mentor, career-wise, one of my favorite things to do is to identify people whose careers I really admire, and watch them from afar. I study how they work, what they’ve done and what changes for them over time.

I learned about Whitney Johnson after I read her first book, Dare, Dream, Do. It’s about building dreams for your life, and it has so many useful applications for that time period of transition in your career after becoming a parent when you can dream up what your future life can look like. So, when I reached out and asked her to be on the show, I was floored when she said yes. It’s always a particular joy when you get to connect with someone you’ve watched and learned from for a long time.

Whitney is an innovation and disruption theorist, and an executive and performance. She was formerly a Wall Street analyst who also started an investment firm with Harvard’s Clayton Christensen. She’s also a bestselling author of three books, her most recent the book all about building great teams and using the ideas of disruption (both of yourself as well as your process) in Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up The Learning Curve.

• What the term “disruption” means and why it’s more than a buzzword.
• How pregnancy and parenting are both “disruptive forces” and how that makes them really powerful potential forces for good.
• How pregnancy gives women the opportunity to think strategically
• Her parenting journey—when and how she decided she wanted to be a mother.
• Managing work travel and an intense work schedule with parenting.
• How to hire great people and how to build great teams.
• What to do when you have underperformers on your team, or people who have outgrown a role.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/105.

Whitney Johnson, is an innovation and disruption theorist, executive and performance coach, ​and ​one ​of the world's leading management thinkers, according to Thinkers50​.

• More about Whitney

#104 — The First Weeks of Parenting: What Nobody Tells You

Why is it that so many parenting books begin with some version of this little, deceptive, awful phrase? They all say this one dang thing:

After the first few weeks...

But what about THE FIRST FEW WEEKS?

The first weeks are some of the longest and most challenging of a new mother’s life, from healing physically and emotionally processing the birth experience, to being up all night with feeding and sleeping, to raw nipples (if you’re breastfeeding), to trying to understand why obnoxiously loud shushing works for some babies to sleep, to feeling like basic things you assumed you could do are completely beyond you. For many, many new parents, the surprise of not being even able to feed oneself or eat enough food while having a baby around—a baby that sleeps, a lot!—is a shock to the system, and is really hard to figure out.

And no one told you.

Why? Why does our culture and our experts seem to gloss over this pivotal time?

Today, we get to check in with Vanessa Van Edwards, who was seven months pregnant when we last spoke and is now mother to a vibrant seven month old daughter.

Vanessa gives us a rare, genuine, unfiltered look at what it felt like to be unprepared for parenting a newborn, despite all her hours of reading and research. We learn about her plans and preparations for maternity leave as the founder of her business, Science of People, and how the leave she’d prepared for was upended by a customer service crisis at just 12 days postpartum.

Vanessa is a researcher, business owner, work-from-home mom, and author of Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People. Her comments –– “I was way over prepared for the birth and way underprepared for parenting” –– fundamentally altered how I view the newborn period and how I speak to other mothers preparing this journey.

• Why there are dozens of books and classes on the birth experience and so little attention paid to the first weeks of life with a newborn.
• What happens when you feel like you’re out of options as a new parent in light of Vanessa’s experience with an infant who would only sleep while being held. Do you sleep with your baby even though doctors tell you not to, or do you not sleep so your baby can? And why don’t we tell stories like these to help future parents prepare for the unpredictable first weeks?
• The gratitude and anger Vanessa feels toward her business. One on hand, it sustains her family financially and fulfills her. On the other, it’s unpredictable needs forced her back to work less than two weeks after having her daughter when she’d planned to take at least two months at home.
• Why running her business from home leaves her partner feeling like he’s crushing work and fatherhood while it leaves her feeling like she’s constantly making the impossible choice of being with her daughter or being a great worker.

Join us as we talk about the first few weeks: an unpredictable, challenging, rarely spoken of period that deserves much more attention.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/104.

Vanessa Van Edwards is lead investigator at Science of People, a human behavior research lab. She is also the national best selling author of Captivate -- a science based guide for awkward people to level up their social success and banish awkward silences forever. It was chosen by Apple as one of the most anticipated books of the year and has already been translated into 16 l

Childcare can be so hard! When I started looking for a nanny after my second son was born, I didn’t know how to begin thinking about the search. I reached out to a friend—who is also an amazing business mama—and asked for help with the process of hiring a nanny. Enter Anna Frandsen! Anna is a business coach and a mentor, and she’s the founder and CEO of The Heart Centered Entrepreneur. She works with people on building great systems, getting visibility for their work, and attracting clients. She is a systems pro and today we talk all about the workflows, strategies, and processes of how to hire a nanny.

First, know that the process doesn’t have to be overwhelming, and we’re here to talk you through it. This podcast episode is a one-hour blueprint for how to do the search, what to think about when you hire a nanny, and the steps we took to onboard and enroll our nannies in payment portals, tax systems, and more. We share how we set up the contracts, established the routines and expectations, and figured out payroll taxes.

When you hire a nanny, it’s just like hiring an employee—you need to think about how you communicate best, what your work environment is like, how you’ll deliver feedback, when they’ll get paid, how you talk about your goals for your family, and more.

In this episode, Anna and I talk through our exact workflow strategies, including how we decided to go with a nanny, what steps we took to do a streamlined, easy search process, and even my “pink nanny binder,” which has my family philosophy, rules and guidelines, and the contract itself.

• How to decide and ask for the childcare you need.
• Why it can be really hard as a working mom to figure out your “working” and your “mom” identities, and how to think about it.
• Why it’s okay to ask for help, and to ask for the help you need.
• Why getting clear on what you need is as important as the next steps.
• The exact hiring process Anna uses to research, find, and interview candidates to find the right nanny for her family.
• The on-boarding workflow we put together to help bring someone onto your team, and why it matters.
• How to think about having conversations and giving feedback with someone who is in your home, and also an employee.
• Why the nanny payroll taxes seem so complicated at first, and how to break it down so it’s easier to understand.

Want to use the worksheet we’ve built to go along with this episode? Go to www.startuppregnant.com/nanny-checklist to get the checklist and get on your way to hiring a nanny. It includes best-of quotes from this episode and things to consider while you’re hiring a nanny of your own.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/103.

Anna Frandsen is a business coach and mentor, a radical optimist, a green tea drinker + mama to two. She left a career in higher education to build an online business from scratch and live her messy, imperfect, version of success. To her, the life of her dreams looks like being an ultra-present mama, serving incredible clients world-wide with her God-given gifts and giving women the freedom to build a business that changes lives.

• www.annafrandsen.com

My husband and I have a joke every year that it’s not you—it’s February. February can be rough, especially for people in the Northern Hemisphere when winter, doldrums, lack of sunlight, and all-around slushiness sets in. In our household, we make an agreement to let ourselves snack a little more, pour the wine liberally if needed, and basically catch up on any shows we want to watch whenever we have a spare moment (you know, if both kids are napping AT THE SAME TIME)—because it is February.

This month we’ve been stretching and growing a ton here at Startup Pregnant, and we’re rolling out the next phase of our community mastermind, The Wise Women’s Council. We’re also running a 5-day Instagram Challenge, a scholarship competition for people who want to join The Wise Women’s Council, and building out our course roster for the 2019 year ahead. It’s been full, it’s been growth, and it’s been a lot.

This is the life of working parents. Work all by itself can be a lot. But what about when daycare starts, your nanny plans change, you’re just coming back from maternity leave, your kiddos get sick, you get sick, or someone gets injured? Or—your laptop breaks or your car gives you trouble.

It’s enough to make anyone scream. Parents, I salute all of you, because we’re all doing this together. Listen in as we take a brief pause and share some behind-the-scenes of the life of a working parent entrepreneur. Maybe you can relate? Because this—it’s February.

But it’s also life.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/102.

EPISODE SPONSOR & SPECIAL OFFER

This episode is sponsored by Splendid Spoon, a meal delivery service that creates whole, healthy, plant-based soups and smoothies that can be a great fit for busy parents and new moms. Get $50 off your first order with the link splendid.to/startuppregnant

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How will motherhood change me? Will I be different? Will I end up on the “mommy track” and never want to work again?

These are questions that people ask themselves when they start thinking about getting pregnant and parenthood. Expectant parents and people considering having kids know that parenthood will change them, but they don’t how.

Today we are going to take a look at the story that gets shoved at pregnant women (and really, at all women). The story goes that when you’re just waiting to become a mom, and once you do become a mom, you won’t be interested in working outside the home anymore. The prevailing story is that motherhood will change you, and not in a good way. The ambitions and dreams you cherished pre-kids become uninteresting to you. Because you become uninteresting.

This post-motherhood story isn’t just a myth, sadly: it’s a belief that lots of people hold, and it affects how women are treated in the workplace, and it especially affects how mothers are treated in the workplace. A study from sociology researcher Shelley Correll found that mothers in the workforce are seen as less competent and less intelligent than women without children (here’s a link to the study). In fact, Correll found that “mothers in the workforce are rated as significantly less competent, less intelligent, and less committed than women without children; and a mother is 79% less likely to be hired, and half as likely to get promoted, when compared to an equally qualified woman without a child,” writes Amy Henderson, our guest on today’s episode.

But there’s a great twist, here, and I’m excited to talk to Amy about it. While the prevailing beliefs and perceptions around mothers are terrible—they aren’t actually based in truth. That is, while we have terrible social and cultural attitudes around mothers and work, working mothers are actually discovering how much motherhood makes you better at work, and how motherhood can strengthen your resilience, ability, and leadership skills. We previously touched on this phenomenon in our episode with Sarah Lacy, and today we get to dig in even deeper.

Today I talk with Amy Henderson, CEO and Co-founder of Tendlab, all about this phenomenon and what leaders are sharing about the reality of working motherhood, and how it’s far different than the stories we scare people with. Tendlab’s mission is to help companies unlock the power and potential of parenthood in the workplace in a way that benefits every employee and maximizes productivity.

• How parenthood has the potential to transform mothers and fathers for the better in all aspects of our lives, but particularly in our careers.
• It’s not just mothers, but—yes, fathers!—that receive a positive impact on career performance IF, and only IF they actually spend a significant amount of time care-taking.
• We are entering an era where the skills developed while parenting are not only relevant, but necessary, for success in the workplace.

We also talk about what working moms should know, and wh