Stress & Meditation
Those early days of motherhood can, at times, make even the most organized and balanced person feel like she’s hanging on by a thread. Between the sleep deprivation, constant feedings, diaper changes, and the whole keeping-a-tiny-human-alive thing, maternal stress is pretty much inevitable. I still remember what it was like with my first. One of […]
Is Awareness Enough? My thoughts on Maternal Mental Health and Self-Compassion.
My story of Anxiety, OCD and Early Motherhood is not unique. It’s estimated that around 8% of women experience symptoms of clinical Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in pregnancy and some 17% of them continue to experience it into their postpartum period. (I was one of the lucky 2-3% of the general population of U.S. adults […]
Postpartum Cardio Exercises & Diastasis Recti
At Every Mother, we teach our clients to safely return to exercise postpartum and protect and strengthen their core and pelvic floor in the process. We’ve found that postpartum cardio plays an important role in getting back into the exercise groove, for more than just its effectiveness in getting back into shape, but also for […]
Anxiety, OCD, and Early Motherhood
I had my first panic attack before age six. I dealt with what I now refer to as unpredictable “spikes” in anxiety (causing more panic attacks) on and off throughout most of my teenage and early adulthood years. I hardly slept. I lost weight I couldn’t afford to. I missed school. In 2016, just three […]
Pelvic Floor Pain: Understanding, Effects, and Next Steps
If you are experiencing ongoing pain in your lower belly or pelvic area, you may feel at a loss about what is actually happening. Especially for women, it’s not uncommon to experience pains in the pelvic area, and deciphering whether the pain is period pain, pelvic floor pain, or something else entirely can be difficult. […]
How to Put Yourself to Bed
When I was 38, I had 2 kids under 2. Man, was I tired. There are definitely parents out there with much more difficult and complicated situations than mine was. But for me and the person I am, the lack of sleep brought on by tiny humans who don’t sleep through the night, who always […]
A Guide to Kegel Exercises
What Are Kegel Exercises? Let’s talk about Kegels: kee-gels or is it kay-gels? Either is correct, so it doesn’t matter how you say it! This term means a shortening contraction of the pelvic floor muscles, just like a biceps curl is a shortening contraction of the biceps muscle. The name for this exercise comes from […]
Caring for Yourself as a New Mom
Becoming a mom for the first time was something I did later than most. I celebrated my 39th birthday just 12 days before my daughter was born. The advantage of being an older first-time mom, as I saw it, was that I’d already checked a lot of boxes in my life. I’d traveled around the […]
4 Tips for Exercise While Breastfeeding & Pumping
Returning to exercise postpartum can be challenging, and doing so while breastfeeding or pumping only adds further complexity to the process. The ACOG suggests postpartum women stay active for 20-30 minutes a day and focus on “exercises that help strengthen major muscle groups, including abdominal and back muscles.” But will working out impact milk production? Is it […]
What is the Pelvic Floor? Definition, Anatomy and More
It’s impossible to be on the journey of motherhood without hearing about the pelvic floor. Weak pelvic floor, overactive pelvic floor, pelvic floor exercises, pelvic floor physical therapy; these terms get tossed around with little explanation. Which can often lead to endless Google searches that leave you more confused than when you started. So let’s start from […]