Deconstructing the Myth of Perfect Motherhood: Insights from Dr. Sophie Brock

In this episode, I am joined by Dr Sophie Brock, a Motherhood Studies Sociologist and Mother who offers education on the sociology of motherhood and how our broader society shapes our experience as mothers.

Here's a summary of the main points discussed in this episode:

• Sense of Self and Identity: Mothers of multiples, particularly those with children who may have additional needs, grapple with the challenge of maintaining their sense of identity outside of their role as mothers. 
• Grief and Othering: There's a grieving process experienced by mothers of multiples, especially when their experiences don't align with the idealised version of motherhood. This can be compounded if one or more of their children have disabilities. Mothers may feel othered within the community of mothers of multiples, particularly if their children have additional needs.
• Individualization Theory: The individualization theory, which prioritizes individualism and independence, doesn't fit well for mothers, especially those caring for children with disabilities. It invisibilises socioeconomics, trauma, and the realities of marginalisation and privilege. Instead, interdependence and vulnerability are important aspects of human relationships and should be acknowledged.
• The Good Enough Mother: The concept of the good enough mother, coined by Donald Winnicott, emphasizes that there's no perfect mother. It's about embracing the reality of our humanity and acknowledging that tolerable failures are beneficial for both mothers and children. We discuss how mothers can examine their internalised ideals of motherhood and define motherhood on their own terms.
• Dealing with Judgments: Mothers, including those of multiples, often face judgment from others and themselves. Building tolerance for discomfort, connecting with personal values, and disentangling social scripts can help mothers navigate these judgments and find acceptance in their own mothering journey.

How to connect with Dr Sophie Brock:
Website:
https://drsophiebrock.com/
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/drsophiebrock/
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/drsophiebrock/

Thanks for listening! If you are a soon-to-be or current parent of multiples, be sure to head over to my website http://www.fiercekindmama.com to get my FREE resources designed specifically for you!

Be sure to follow me on Instagram and Facebook too.

Credits:
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/aylex/with-you
License code: YLMJTQCPKRANEOVB

Transcript

00:00:06 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Welcome to the Fierce Kind Mama of Multiples podcast. This podcast is for anyone raising multiples, twins, triplets or more. I speak to inspiring parents of multiples who have healed from unexpected pregnancies and birthing experiences and who candidly share the highs and lows of raising multiples.

00:00:27 Dr Cristina Cavezza

I also speak to the professionals that work with multiple birth families. Together we cover the practicalities of raising more than one baby at a time, as well as enhancing the emotional well being of caregivers and children alike.

00:00:41 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Come join us as we laugh, cry and share our personal and professional wisdom on all things multiples. I'm your host, Dr Cristina Cavezza, and I am a fierce kind mama of multiples.

00:00:59 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Welcome to today's show. Today I'm joined by Doctor Sophie Brock. Sophie is a motherhood study sociologist and mother who offers education on the sociology of motherhood and how our broader society shapes our experience as mothers, covering topics and concepts such as the perfect mother myth, the care career conundrum,

00:01:19 Dr Cristina Cavezza

the anger, guilt trap and more. Sophie's work contributes to changing the cultural construction of motherhood to create a world where mothers feel empowered, supported and valued. Sophie's offerings include self study courses for mothers.

00:01:36 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Mentoring for mother supporting professionals. Her podcast The Good Enough Mother and the Motherhood Studies Practitioner certification online training. You're going to hear Sophie and I talk about her expertise in motherhood studies, why motherhood studies is an important area worth.

00:01:56 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Exploring, we do spend some time talking about the institution of motherhood, what that means, and the implications for us as mothers. And we also focus on the findings of her PhD research, which I think will be particularly relevant to many multiple birth families.

00:02:13 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Where Sophie focused on the experiences of mothers with children with disabilities and additional needs. So I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Sophie and before we get to the interview, I just want to remind you of my free resource. For those of you who are expecting multiples.

00:02:31 Dr Cristina Cavezza

This is a guide to help you prepare.

00:02:34 Dr Cristina Cavezza

physically, emotionally and financially, and you can find it at my website fiercekindmama.com. I'll pop the link into the show notes for you too. Welcome, Doctor Sophie. Lovely to have you here.

00:02:47 Dr Sophie Brock

Thank you so much for having me.

00:02:49 Dr Sophie Brock

I'm really looking forward to this chat.

00:02:51 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Yes. So we would have mentioned in the bio that you're a sociologist and your expertise is in motherhood studies. Can you please share with us what motherhood studies is and why is it an area of study worth exploring?

00:03:09 Dr Sophie Brock

Yeah, well, motherhood studies is an interesting discipline because I'm sitting in the space of sociology and motherhood studies is interdisciplinary and also multi theoretical. So it means that it draws from a diverse area of areas of interest and research and scholarship and discipline. So I'm in the strand of sociology.

00:03:29 Dr Sophie Brock

And the person who coined motherhood studies is Professor Andrea O'Reilly in around 2006 to 2008, and it's an interesting area of study in that it was named kind of decades after work within the discipline.

00:03:45 Dr Sophie Brock

Even began so part of what Professor O'reilly's intention was in, even naming motherhood studies as a field was an act of kind of resistance in and of itself, to name a place for maternal scholarship. Because part of what is a consequence of a couple of things, one being that it's multidisciplinary. So when you have all of these different disciplines and you have a specialty.

00:04:07 Dr Sophie Brock

Area in maternal scholarship and research. It can be hard to find the spaces and the conferences and the opportunities.

00:04:13 Dr Sophie Brock

To speak to other people who have a focus on the maternal but who are from a completely different discipline and the other part of it was being able to name it as a discipline, as an act of resistance, because so often focus and research on mothering and motherhood is marginalised within our different areas of study and within academia more broadly. So it came about.

00:04:34 Dr Sophie Brock

As a response to that, and then Professor O'Reilly has founded to Demeter press, a press dedicated to focus on mothering and also Journal of the Motherhood initiative. And there are other organisations that have.

00:04:45 Dr Sophie Brock

That have grown in the last decade or so to help connect maternal scholars and people who are working in this area in academia, but then also outside of it as well in spaces of of activism. So that's like a little bit of a synopsis or a summary of what motherhood studies is.

00:05:01 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Yeah. Great. Thank you for that explanation. And one question that came to my mind when you were speaking. And I'm I'm wondering if some listeners will have this question is

00:05:11 Dr Cristina Cavezza

I think some people can make the argument we should be looking at fathers experiences as well, like we're not being inclusive when we talk about motherhood studies. So why do you think it's important to focus on the experiences of mothers specifically?

00:05:26 Dr Sophie Brock

Well, I would argue that our response to talking about motherhood studies the response of being we need to talk about fathers is a a very example of the patriarchal conditioning that we are living with.

00:05:35 Dr Sophie Brock

Because whenever we have space to talk about women's experiences to be asked, a question of what about men's experiences is a decentering of mothers. And that's part of what we need to fight against. We absolutely need to talk about fathers experiences. There's an area of study called fatherhood Studies. There's areas of study that is dedicated to exploring masculinities hegemonic.

00:05:56 Dr Sophie Brock

Masculinities, absolutely. We need to look at parenting as a concept, but if we invisibilise, the work of mothers and invisibilise the data that shows the majority of people who are caregivers are.

00:06:07 Dr Sophie Brock

Mothers and the majority of people who are holding the responsibility for the emotional mental load and the invisible labour that's involved in unpaid care work that keeps our GDP running in the way that it does. If we invisibilise all of that by using the terms parents, then we're actually contributing to some of the very things we're trying to deconstruct. So that's part of why I believe it's important to be able to name the work of mothers and motherhood studies.

00:06:28 Dr Sophie Brock

But

00:06:30 Dr Sophie Brock

Other people would disagree, though, and would use different language.

00:06:34 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Yeah, right.

00:06:36 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Can you speak

00:06:36 Dr Cristina Cavezza

A bit more about that what? What would other people? What is the argument to use different language or to not use you know the language that we're talking about here.

00:06:46 Dr Sophie Brock

Yeah, I mean, probably I'm not the best person to encapsulate that argument because I disagree with it, but I guess the argument would be a sense of we need to degender our language in order to promote equality. And so part of what I think is important here is to first name the differences between gender and sex. And when we're talking

00:07:03 Dr Sophie Brock

about the experience of being a mother, we're talking about something that is both a sexed experience and a gendered experience. And when we're talking about breaking down patriarchal motherhood and all the shoulds that come along with what it means to be a mother, we're actually talking about breaking down the gendered aspect of it. So that's the idea of this is how we mean this is what it is to be a woman.

00:07:23 Dr Sophie Brock

This is what it is to be a mother and a whole bunch of constraints and constrictions that come with that, so that if you fall outside of that, you're not seen to be good, you know, you're not seen to be as able to adhere to that label of what it means to be the good mother. And so part of what we're doing in this space is actually pulling that apart. But it's also really important.

00:07:43 Dr Sophie Brock

to recognise that it's a sexed experience and a lot of the time, not always. It involves experiences of the body as well, and so you know, some people may argue that talking about experiences in that way contributes to the division between the sexes. And I suppose we need to talk about parenting in order to promote equality within parenting.

00:08:03 Dr Sophie Brock

But, I mean, that's a completely different space to the area that I work

00:08:06 Dr Sophie Brock

in.

00:08:07 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Yeah. And I think it's important. Maybe we deconstruct a little bit because we've talked a bit or you know you've mentioned a couple of times, patriarchal motherhood. And I think for some of the listeners on this podcast, they might not be familiar with that term. So I'd love for you to speak a little bit more about what we mean by that.

00:08:26 Dr Sophie Brock

Yeah. So patriarchal motherhood can also be used in the language of the social construction of motherhood.

00:08:32 Dr Sophie Brock

So I talk about it as the tank and I can explain the fish tank analogy. If you want Christina, but it is a way of referring to how the system of motherhood, socially, culturally and institutionally exists. So it was first articulated by Adrienne Rich in her book Of Women Born. This was in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and part of the distinction that Rich made and that others have built upon.

00:08:54 Dr Sophie Brock

Since is the distinction between motherhood as an institution and mothering as an experience, and so the way that I've encapsulated that as part of my work is for us to be able to name and understand.

00:09:06 Dr Sophie Brock

the implications of theoretical concepts on our everyday lived experience, because it's all well and good for us to say, well, patriarchal motherhood exists and there's a whole bunch of research to support that, and we live within a patriarchal society and. And, you know, these are all of the ways that it can make our lives harder. But, well, how does that actually happen and how can we make that a little bit more tangible to see

00:09:26 Dr Sophie Brock

The impact of social systems and structures and ideologies on our everyday

00:09:30 Dr Sophie Brock

 lives and part of that was through I created this fish tank analogy to ask us to imagine that we have this round glass fish tank and that is representative of our of our society and generally we don't know when we're within the tank right until we put language to name it we think this is just the

00:09:49 Dr Sophie Brock

Way things are.

00:09:50 Dr Sophie Brock

Anything that is being seen as normalised, or that's just what it means to be a mother, that's what we need to problematize if we're looking at it from a sociological perspective, and if we want to make visible patriarchal motherhood.

00:10:01 Dr Sophie Brock

So this tank that we're living within, we're the fish inside, you know, mothers specifically or it could also be anyone else. Actually everyone is living within the tank, but for the purposes of this conversation, mothers are inside the tank and we're born into the tank. It's not as if we just jump in there when we become mothers. And So what we're doing is we're swimming around in this water.

00:10:22 Dr Sophie Brock

That fills up the tank and the water represents our culture.

00:10:26 Dr Sophie Brock

And so the structure of the tank is made up by our institutions as well. So we're talking about here the medical system, the maternity system and the family as the system actually as well. We're also talking about the health system, the schooling system, our political system and also our economy.

00:10:46 Dr Sophie Brock

And that that impacts our culture, our culture also impacts systems, so it's dynamic.

00:10:52 Dr Sophie Brock

But part of what culture is referring to, which is the water that we're swimming within that comes from our relationships, the conversations that we over hear, cultural scripts, things that are said to us when we become mothers, for example, also our media, marketing, advertising, social media absolutely now pop culture.

00:11:12 Dr Sophie Brock

And what happens is that we are socialised, which means we are swimming around within that tank and we're absorbing messages about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be

00:11:22 Dr Sophie Brock

a mother for all of our lives in one way or another. And what patriarchal motherhood refers to is the way that that structure of the tank flavours the water in a particular way, so that not only have we breathed in and absorbed particular norms around what it means to be a mother, but our experience is also structured by those norms. So how we

00:11:43 Dr Sophie Brock

So.

00:11:43 Dr Sophie Brock

Talk about what it means to be a mother and how we live our lives. It's too simple to say that it has to do with personal choice. We need to look at our socialisation and then we also need to look at the world that we're living within and social social policy and the the structuring of our work paid work.

00:12:03 Dr Sophie Brock

And maternity leave and all of these things hugely shape what our experiences are going to be as individuals, so patriarchal motherhood is, you know, without it's a complex term, obviously more than I can go into in the the context of this podcast. But in a simplified way, it's talking about the tank the way that the outside world sets.

00:12:22 Dr Sophie Brock

Up an idealised image of what it means to be a mother and has particular rules that come to shape our experience and our belief systems.

00:12:31 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Yeah, that's fantastic that, that explanation. Thank you for, you know, deconstructing that for us and explaining that. I just

00:12:40 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Want to talk a little bit

00:12:41 Dr Cristina Cavezza

About your PhD research, because I know that it was focused on mothers with children, with disabilities and the majority, as you already know, the majority, if not all of my listeners.

00:12:52 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Are or will be parents of twins, triplets or more who, sadly, are more likely to experience

00:13:01 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Giving birth to children who have disabilities or illnesses or develop them. So we know that the rates of certain physical and mental health conditions are higher sadly in multiple births. So I was wondering if you could help us understand what your research revealed.

00:13:20 Dr Cristina Cavezza

In terms of the lived experiences of mothers who were caring for children with disabilities.

00:13:28 Dr Sophie Brock

Yeah. So in terms of going back to that tank analogy that I just described, part of how that relates to being able to respond to your question is understanding that we live within a social and cultural environment that pedestals and idealises and writes, the script of what it means to be a mother. And part of that comes out through.

00:13:49 Dr Sophie Brock

The concept of the perfect mother myth, it's called also a bunch of other things. Or the good mother concept and part of what that involves as kind of prescriptive things that is baked into our image socially and culturally, and then often into our belief systems, is that the perfect mother is well, for a start, she's usually painted as white middle class.

00:14:10 Dr Sophie Brock

Heterosexual, financially stable and is in a monogamous relationship, more likely married and she chooses to become a mother. She's within a particular age range and she gives birth effortlessly and.

00:14:24 Dr Sophie Brock

And falls in love with her baby and part of the painted picture of the perfect mother myth, which is extensive, is that she has a child who isn't disabled, who doesn't have disabilities, who doesn't have additional needs. That's not set up as being part of the narrative that we come to expect, or that is even given much platform for visibility.

00:14:45 Dr Sophie Brock

Or a discussion in our society and so.

00:14:48 Dr Sophie Brock

Part of what my research investigated with the mothers who participated was actually centering their experience first and foremost, because too often we actually look at mothers and we say, what about everyone else, right? As the question goes back to what about fathers? We go, what about everyone else? Well, no, we need space to actually say what about mothers? What is their

00:15:09 Dr Sophie Brock

Experience as individual and holistic people who are worthy and valuable of interest and scholarly inquiry in and of themselves, and part of what my research looked at were three strands. Their experience of motherhood. So with the tank, their experience of their relationships and their experience of their sense of self and identity.

00:15:28 Dr Sophie Brock

And so, in a summarised way, and without being able to go into all of the findings of that part of what I found was that mothers who have children with disabilities face intensified pressure, scrutiny, judgements when it comes to self sacrifice in motherhood.

00:15:47 Dr Sophie Brock

And that's complicated because oftentimes they're put in positions where they're the primary carer for their children and they are advocates for their children. And so in many, many circumstances as well as well, one participant described needing to be a voice for.

00:16:02 Dr Sophie Brock

her child. And so this obviously differs as well. According to somebody, the disability that a child has as well as their age, but one part of the research found that actually there was a lot more pressure on these mothers and a lot less space for them to be able to talk about their experiences honestly with things such as maternal ambivalence.

00:16:22 Dr Sophie Brock

Or feeling multiple ways at once, or sometimes actually really struggling and finding it really hard to find spaces to voice that where it wasn't dismissed and you aren't just given the label. Oh well, you're a super mum. I don't know how you do it. You're amazing. And when people offer.

00:16:39 Dr Sophie Brock

Social scripts like that, it's generally coming from a well intentioned place, but what a lot of participants in my research told me was that comments like that actually felt very othering and made them feel very isolated and alone. And so this platforming and pedestal thing of the mother as a self sacrificial.

00:16:59 Dr Sophie Brock

Martyr

00:17:01 Dr Sophie Brock

Was actually very toxic in a number of ways and very marginalising and served to be very stigmatising for that mother and her family related to that, their experiences of fitting in or not with normality and I'm using that in inverted commas. So there was a lot of discourse around what is seen to be.

00:17:21 Dr Sophie Brock

Normal and so.

00:17:23 Dr Sophie Brock

That connects with grief and a lot of other things. But you know, one mother spoke to me and said, you know, you grieve the child that you thought, that you would have, and then you grieve for the child that you have. And it's not as complicated. It's not as it's not as simple as.

00:17:43 Dr Sophie Brock

Saying that you wish that you could take away your child's disability because you don't want them to experience pain or stigma. Because in many ways the mothers that I spoke to, at least in this research and everyone has different experiences of this. But a big thing that came through was that their lessons that they have learned through their mothering.

00:18:03 Dr Sophie Brock

Experiences and through caring for their child and that their child has taught them.

00:18:07 Dr Sophie Brock

Were at the core and at the fundamental level of getting to know ourselves and our humanity, and that they wouldn't trade that for anything, and it and it prompted them to live their lives in a different way and have a a different perspective on the meaning of life and purpose and big, bigger kind of existential questions.

00:18:28 Dr Sophie Brock

An identity, but it's also we have to be really careful not to valorize the experience and say, well, because this happened, I now appreciate life, you know. So it's being able to hold actually nuance and complexity and having spaces to talk honestly about their experiences.

00:18:46 Dr Sophie Brock

And connected to that was grappling with sense of self and identity with the the term normal that I just mentioned.

00:18:55 Dr Sophie Brock

We in in the data analysis participant participants both situated their experiences within frameworks of normality and contested frameworks of normality. So on the one hand, you've gotta try and find ways to fit in. You've got to try and find places for belonging in your community and in your relationships and in society.

00:19:15 Dr Sophie Brock

Because so often you are othered and.

00:19:18 Dr Sophie Brock

So it's with great intentionality and sometimes a lot of fight and struggle and advocacy to carve out those spaces and find places where you can quote unquote, fit in and quote unquote be part of what is normal, even sometimes with rituals such as birthday parties. Was one example, one participant offered. At the same time

00:19:38 Dr Sophie Brock

They, the same participants would rebel against normality and say actually I don't want normal and that's not what we have here. And I wouldn't sign up for that. So again, being able to actually wrestle with two competing things seemingly opposite.

00:19:52 Dr Sophie Brock

At once and that is relevant to identity and how they experience that. And so this is the last point that I'll make Cristina, because you know, obviously there's a lot that could be spoken about here. But in terms of how participants reflected on or spoke about their sense of self and identity, really, really varied across participants and some would.

00:20:12 Dr Sophie Brock

Very much talk about themselves as being mothers first and foremost, and that was all encompassing of who they are and that felt like a for some.

00:20:24 Dr Sophie Brock

It was framed as a very empowering way to think about their sense of self. For others, it felt as though they had experienced an invisible, invisibilizing of themselves. So one spoke about the way she's referred to as you know, say her child's name, which she isn't. Is Jane. It's like you are Jane's mother. So my name and identity has been erased.

00:20:44 Dr Sophie Brock

Some referred to as her mother.

00:20:45 Dr Sophie Brock

And that came with a lot of pain and grief and related to relationships as well and other participants, particularly those who were able to maintain engagement in paid work because for many, they they couldn't for various reasons. But for those who were able to, that served as a really important marker of sense of self and identity outside of the mothering.

00:21:06 Dr Sophie Brock

Role and so I spoke about that and the literature talks about that as subject position.

00:21:10 Dr Sophie Brock

And you know another way is different hats. You know, you you put on your work hat, you put on the friend hat, you put on the wife hat, you put on the mother hat. And so they spoke about it in that way. But of course, there's juggling and tension there as well. So that's a little bit of a synopsis of some of the.

00:21:25 Dr Sophie Brock

Things Cristina that came out of the research.

00:21:28 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Hi there. Fierce Kind Mama. Sorry to interrupt the discussion, but I have something to share with you that I know you're going to love. We're often told that parenting can be hard, and whether you're soon to be or current parent of multiples, there is going to come a time when you will probably feel stressed, overwhelmed, 

00:21:47 Dr Cristina Cavezza

or even worried about the future.

00:21:50 Dr Cristina Cavezza

That's why I've developed a free guide for parents, just like you with my 5 top tips for handling stress and overwhelm, you can download it now from my website fiercekindmama.com.

00:22:06 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Yeah. Well, thank you, Sophie. That was. I can see how much richness there was in your research and we could probably spend a podcast just on, you know, one aspect that you've touched on. So thank you for summarising that for us. One thing that you mentioned.

00:22:24 Dr Cristina Cavezza

That powerful statement about grief that the participant said.

00:22:29 Dr Cristina Cavezza

To you, that came out of your research. I was thinking, you know, I think almost when I think about the experience of mothers of multiples, I often hear mothers of multiples talking about this grieving process, like grieving the.

00:22:43 Dr Cristina Cavezza

The the loss of an imagined relationship that they would have with one baby. So when they find out they're having twins or triplets or more.

00:22:52 Dr Cristina Cavezza

There's this grieving process that happens straight away and.

00:22:55 Dr Cristina Cavezza

You feel kind of othered.

00:22:57 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Because most of the people around you, not all, maybe, but most of the people around you don't have multiples. And then if you end up having children with disabilities or one of your multiples has a disability, then it's almost like this.

00:23:12 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Yes.

00:23:13 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Double whammy if you like a feeling like and I've had people on my podcast before speak about this.

00:23:21 Dr Cristina Cavezza

That they are mothers of multiples with additional needs and they really thought they had to find their tribe because they found it really hard to connect with even the mothers of multiples who had who didn't have children with disabilities or with additional needs. So I think that's a really important point that you've raised there about that

00:23:42 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Grief that can come from not having this idealised version of what

00:23:48 Dr Cristina Cavezza

I guess we're supposed to have when we become mothers. Also one thing, one of the concepts, you know that I've spoken about in this podcast before is independence versus interdependence and how our culture seems to stress the importance of raising independent.

00:24:08 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Children, you know, children who can settle themselves to sleep, for example, and eventually have complete autonomy and.

00:24:16 Dr Cristina Cavezza

And.

00:24:17 Dr Cristina Cavezza

In an earlier episode, I I challenged that notion, and I know from one of the outcomes from your dissertation as I understand it, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that you looked at individualization theory and it's inappropriateness for women who care for children with disabilities. Can you expand on this and explain this to listeners?

00:24:38 Dr Cristina Cavezza

First of all, I guess what what do we mean by individualization theory and why it doesn't fit well for this cohort of mothers?

00:24:46 Dr Sophie Brock

Yeah. I mean, I think that individualisation theory doesn't fit well for any of us, not just mothers who have children with disabilities. And so part of what individualisation refers to as a theory is it is one of the isms, like globalisation or neoliberalism, even looking at capitalism as a a social force in the ways in which it.

00:25:07 Dr Sophie Brock

Operates as an ideology and plays out on individual lives.

00:25:10 Dr Sophie Brock

And it's in a simplistic way, I mean you kind of encapsulate it. Some examples of it there, individualism really prioritises and celebrates the lone hero. You know, the individual who climbs the mountain with grit and determination, and they do it on their own and they reach the top and they're triumphant and they're celebrated for doing so. And there's this myth that.

00:25:31 Dr Sophie Brock

Essentially, we're able to achieve levels of what is deemed socially as success through.

00:25:38 Dr Sophie Brock

Sheer determination and will, and that is part of what lies at the foundation of many of our Western kind of capitalist systems and and has been critiqued by lots of people who have more expertise specialising in that area. But part of what individualism can look like and the way that it can impact mothers so.

00:25:58 Dr Sophie Brock

So detrimentally and even more so for mothers of children who have disabilities.

00:26:03 Dr Sophie Brock

Is that two things amongst probably many one is that it doesn't tell the truth. It's, you know, no one is completely self made. No one makes it to the top of the mountain on their own. And so it isn't actually painting a picture of realities and it invisibilises

00:26:23 Dr Sophie Brock

Socioeconomics, it Invisibilises often trauma and it invisibilises the realities of the context that people face when it comes to marginalisation and

00:26:34 Dr Sophie Brock

privilege and the other thing that it does is that it not only invisibilises all of those things and platforms the celebration of what we can actually break down has been a pretty toxic narrative. This sense that we are the lone wolf who gets it, right? Because we're social creatures, we're social beings, and we need each other. And part of that interdependence.

00:26:54 Dr Sophie Brock

Comes not only through the fact of our humanity and how we operate as human beings, but it also comes from being able to grapple with and acknowledge our vulnerability. Because part of what interdependence.

00:27:08 Dr Sophie Brock

Recognises that we need each other and having needs can be a vulnerable place to be and all of us started as infants who had needs and were very vulnerable. And if we're lucky enough to get there to old age where a lot of the times we will have a need to be cared for in some way, through death as well, and also through disability.

00:27:28 Dr Sophie Brock

And through illness. And there's a theorist. So I can't think of their name. But she talks about us being all temporarily able bodied.

00:27:37 Dr Sophie Brock

Or temporarily not disabled right? In a sense, we are all we need each other and not just.

00:27:42 Dr Sophie Brock

When it comes.

00:27:43 Dr Sophie Brock

To disability and vulnerability. But in terms of relationship and connection as well. And so for mothers who have children with disability, is a really big theme that came out from the research and something that's really prominent from many, again depending on what disability, their children.

00:27:56 Dr Sophie Brock

Have is the sense that there's this language in motherhood.

00:28:00 Dr Sophie Brock

With that, you know you get 18 summers with your kids or you know, you've gotta get them to school and then to graduation and teaching them how to drive a car. And there are these milestones that are embedded into our cultural language if this is what you get to certain endpoints. And it's very painful and you feel.

00:28:21 Dr Sophie Brock

Completely invisibilised in your experience of mothering when your experience doesn't fit that story, and not only that, but it's not about raising your child until 18, and then you see them fly off and you're an empty nester. It's grappling with fears around a sense that you can't die because who will look after your child then?

00:28:42 Dr Sophie Brock

So.

00:28:44 Dr Sophie Brock

Massive things that mothers who have children with additional needs and disabilities are living with every day that so often is not recognised by others. And so, as you mentioned, with the with the experience of needing to go and find a community, that's exactly right. You need to connect in with other people.

00:29:05 Dr Sophie Brock

Who get it, who understand and who can support you to grapple with some of those huge challenges that you are facing as an individual who has caring responsibilities

00:29:18 Dr Sophie Brock

That is not adequately supported, respected or valued. But you're doing so within a hyper individualistic society. And so when everybody celebrates the independence of our children and see that as a marker of our status as a good mother, where does that leave mothers whose children won't be able to fit that narrative?

00:29:38 Dr Sophie Brock

And who are not striving for the same set of cultural mandates that we're surrounded with?

00:29:44 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Yeah, that's really powerful and I think you know we've talked a little bit about or you've mentioned a couple of times that phrase the good mother and and that concept. And I know you know, I don't want to end this conversation without highlighting the the fact that you are the host of the brilliant podcast called The Good Enough Mother.

00:30:05 Dr Cristina Cavezza

And the good enough mother as a concept or theory as we know was coined as some of the people listening might know as well that it was coined by Donald Winnicott. 

00:30:13 Dr Cristina Cavezza

a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, but can you tell us about the importance of that concept and the implications for modern motherhood and parenting?

00:30:24 Dr Sophie Brock

Yeah. So the good enough mother is an interesting one because I'd, I'd be curious as to how listeners react when they first hear that term, because I think it can often be misinterpreted because it can sound as though it's a settling. So a sense of or you want me to be just a good enough mother.

00:30:40 Dr Sophie Brock

That might be OK for other people, but I will not settle for just, and so there can be this sense of that it is a giving in or it's a complacency or it's a sense of, well, if I can't be perfect, I guess I'll settle for good enough. And what Donald Winnicott and others in the space of being able to explore and when we draw on their work, part of what we're saying is a couple of things.

00:31:01 Dr Sophie Brock

One just making it really clear that there is no perfect mother and that the ideals that we have and hold up as being celebrated in our society are always incomplete.

00:31:10 Dr Sophie Brock

pictures and sometimes projections and deliberately manufactured it would, depending on where we look. And so there is no mother that meets all of those idealised traits that are are revered. So it's a recognition and a kind of a shattering of that myth that can haunt so many mothers. But it's.

00:31:30 Dr Sophie Brock

Also looking at drawing on child development as well as looking at development of maternal identity as well. So Rosica Parker talks about maternal ambivalence and actually grappling with.

00:31:45 Dr Sophie Brock

A grappling with the reality of our humanity, which means that we're going to be or don't quote flawed in some way. There are going to be ruptures and repairs that happen with our children and there are going to be ways that we feel as though we've failed them or that we're not enough. That is actually really beneficial for us and.

00:32:05 Dr Sophie Brock

For our children, and you could probably talk about this more than I can Cristina, in terms of the kind of psychological development of children, but part of it is actually really important for them to have experiences of being mothered in a good enough way, which means.

00:32:21 Dr Sophie Brock

Being able to experience tolerable failures on behalf of our mothers, because that's an important opportunity that opens for differentiation and development of sense of self, of the child, independent of their primary caregiver or their mother. And so being able to experience some of that is really important in terms of identity development for children.

00:32:45 Dr Sophie Brock

It's also really important in terms of identity development from others, and so the way that I would talk about the good enough mother in, I suppose the simplistic way that hopefully people can take away with them is.

00:32:57 Dr Sophie Brock

Looking and examining, looking at and examining the shoulds that you've internalised around what it means to be the good mum, riding them out, making them really visible and actively interrogating them to ask where did each come from? Are they part of your values, or have they been handed down to you, either by your family of origin or by your culture?

00:33:17 Dr Sophie Brock

Probably both. And what are you wanting to keep as part of your values and what would you be willing to release and?

00:33:26 Dr Sophie Brock

The next part of that is actually allowing ourselves to change our mind too, and sometimes we need a little bit more information before we can make decisions about what is important to us and that we value as part of our mothering. But when we go through that process of breaking down our internalised, idealised mum or our internalised perfect mother myth that we've absorbed from swimming around in that water.

00:33:47 Dr Sophie Brock

What it opens way to is the good enough and another way we can phrase it is motherhood defined on my terms that acknowledges the reality of my humanness.

00:33:57 Dr Sophie Brock

And knowing that it is a gift to our children, to breakdown illusions of perfection, because that's exactly what they're going to grapple with in their own life too. And so that is ultimately what I am trying to get at when talking about good enough mothering as a concept is to talk about being truthful about the reality of our humanity. And that's a gift.

00:34:18 Dr Sophie Brock

Not a settling. 

00:34:19 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Yeah, that's amazing, really powerful. And I think you know, when you were speaking, I was thinking a lot about the programme that, you know, I developed for mothers of multiples where I speak a lot about values. I'm I'm I I I do that a lot with, you know, a lot of the work that I do both on my online programmes, but even in my therapeutic space around, you know, what's important to us, what what?

00:34:41 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Matters to us. And where does that come from? You know where and kind of disentangling a bit of that, as you said, you know, some of those social scripts that we might have picked up along the way. And the other thing that I was thinking about that I've talked about on this podcast before.

00:34:57 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Is around the judgments that we might face.

00:35:00 Dr Cristina Cavezza

As mothers specifically. But this idea that you know, we good mothers raise good children and bad children are raised by bad mothers, and the sense that we might we might have of that, you know, that comes just from our experience of being in the world being a human. And the messages that we would have received around that. Do you have any

00:35:20 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Final tips for mothers of multiples, maybe specifically around some of this stuff that we've just spoken about.

00:35:30 Dr Sophie Brock

I think where

00:35:33 Dr Sophie Brock

What can be really useful is I'm thinking about just one piece of research that looked at experiences of guilt for mothers who have multiple children, not mothers of multiples, but mothers who have more than one child and looking at at in in some research. Anyways, the more children they had actually, the less guilt that they felt because there was a reconciling with the reality that they were not.

00:35:53 Dr Sophie Brock

able, they were not going to be able to meet all of their children's needs when they have five of them there in front of them, right? So part of what I think where my mind goes from response to that question is acknowledging that the breaking down of the.

00:36:05 Dr Sophie Brock

those idealizations and they're getting really clear on what our values are and what our context is. So what choices are we supported and able to make in this current season of our mothering experience? And when we are able to do that, it's not only freeing for us, but it's also freeing for our children and I'm sure.

00:36:26 Dr Sophie Brock

All of us. Well, I won't say. I'm sure all of us. I have definitely experienced this and most people that I've speak to have experienced this in when your mothering in public and your child.

00:36:35 Dr Sophie Brock

Is having a tantrum or you have an older child and they swear or they say something really rude to you or somebody else, or they, you know, you've got a toddler and they rip their clothes off and their screaming wriggling around on the floor and you can't pick them up and they're slipping out of your arms. And like you have experiences in public where there can be a heightened.

00:36:56 Dr Sophie Brock

Sense of judgement that I am supposed to be the parent here who is supposed to be able to know how to deal with this, who is supposed to have control over their child.

00:37:06 Dr Sophie Brock

And my child being labelled in this particular way reflects back on who I am as a parent and a lot of that response is around shame, right? And a sense of I am insert whatever we want there. You know, in terms of self judgement and so being able to grapple with and come into connection with our values.

00:37:27 Dr Sophie Brock

And then to be able to do the same sort of deconstruction around our children and what is expected of them, not just by us potentially, but also by others, there is a an extent to which I think we need to.

00:37:40 Dr Sophie Brock

Build tolerance for discomfort with ourselves and in being in public situations, and I wonder, I don't know this, but I wonder if that's the case for mothers who have multiples with a sense of sometimes just being literally outnumbered and having a sense of surrender to that, and acknowledgement that actually this is.

00:38:01 Dr Sophie Brock

It it it is what it is and it there needs to be some level of disconnect between what other people may perceive and what we internalise that to mean and what we may make it mean about ourselves and our mothering so connection with values, interrogation of judgements from others and from ourselves and.

00:38:20 Dr Sophie Brock

Being with the gifts actually that your children and your experience of mothering can offer to you.

00:38:27 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Oh, that's amazing. Sophie, thank you so much for.

00:38:29 Dr Cristina Cavezza

That, that, that.

00:38:30 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Those final thoughts and words and words of wisdom, really, it's been such a pleasure connecting with you. Where can people find out more about you and your work?

00:38:40 Dr Sophie Brock

Yeah. Thank you for having me, Cristina. And for your, your really thoughtful and interesting questions. So you can find me at my website.

00:38:47 Dr Sophie Brock

drsophiebrock.com, it's all pretty repetitive. Instagram love to Sophie Brock, Facebook the same. And you've already mentioned my podcast, the Good Enough Mother.

00:38:57 Dr Sophie Brock

I have, you know, really interesting conversations on there to do with a whole diverse range of topics related to this. I have some free training and resources on my web page and the majority of the work that I do now is in supporting practitioners who work in Mothercare. I have some self study courses for mothers who might be interested in that.

00:39:17 Dr Sophie Brock

As well, but my main programme is the motherhood study certification that practitioners can come in and take to get a full complete training in the sociology of motherhood and motherhood studies. So that's where you can find me.

00:39:29 Dr Cristina Cavezza

That's wonderful. Thank you so much Sophie. We will definitely put those details in the podcast show 

00:39:33 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Notes. Thank you again. It's been lovely connecting with you today.

00:39:37 Dr Sophie Brock

You too. Thanks, Cristina.

00:39:41 Dr Cristina Cavezza

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you like what you've heard, then please follow and leave a review so that other expectant and current parents of multiples like yourself can find this podcast and the valuable information it contains. I'd be so very grateful if you left a review.

00:39:57 Dr Cristina Cavezza

And shared this with anyone you think could benefit from listening. If you have a particular topic you'd like me to cover on this podcast, feel free to reach out to me via my website fiercekindmama.com.

00:40:09 Dr Cristina Cavezza

New episodes are released every second Wednesday, so see you back here real soon. Any advice and information on this podcast is general only and has been prepared without taking into account your particular circumstances and needs for tailored, individualised advice, please consult with a qualified professional.