The Good Mother Myth with Nancy Reddy

This summer we have been introducing you to the speakers of the Mental Health and Motherhood Summit.

Today I’m excited to introduce you to one of our 24 speakers,

Nancy Reddy

. She is the author of The Good Mother Myth, an award-winning poet and essayist committing to unpacking the bad ideas that steal the joy from mothering.

Watch our quick video and say hello by following her or registering for her talk on the summit site!

Transcript For All The Noise Sensitive Moms Like Me:

Chanel Riggle (00:00)

Hello everyone, this is another meet and greet with one of our 24 speakers of the Mental Health and Motherhood Summit. I'm the founder and organizer, Chanel Riggle. And today we have Nancy Reddy, who is the author of The Good Mother Myth and is speaking on that topic. If you want to join us, the summit is going to be October 10th and 11th this year. But Nancy, I'd love if you could just introduce yourself.

Nancy Reddy (00:27)

Sure, I'm so happy to be part of this summit. I am a mom, as you probably guessed. I'm a writer and I'm a writing professor. ⁓ my previous books have all been in poetry. And then I had my first son and needed more space and more words to try to figure out what had happened in that experience and ⁓ wrote the Good Mother Math to try to figure that out.

Chanel Riggle (00:55)

I love the cover by the way.

Nancy Reddy (00:56)

Thank you. I'm just gonna show it one more time, because I am also so pleased about it. I love that they're like, they are going somewhere. Like they are on a mission, which makes me really happy.

Chanel Riggle (01:07)

For sure. So your talk is actually going to be titled The Good Mother Myth as well. Could you give us a little bit of background on what your book is about or what your talk is going to be about the summit?

Nancy Reddy (01:19)

Sure, so my book is kind of half memoir and half research and reporting. It follows my own pretty difficult entry into early motherhood. ⁓ Part of the reason why I was so excited about this summit is that I had some pretty significant postpartum anxiety that I didn't even know that's what it was. I just thought, I'm pretty bad at this, I should try harder. And it took me years to understand what had happened and I'm so grateful for the way that conversations about maternal mental health have changed since I had my first son.

And then the research strand of it really tries to unpack, like, where did we get all these bad ideas, like the good mother myth? Like, where did we get these bad ideas about what it means to be a good mom and that a good mom can just do it all on her own and instinctively knows what to do and doesn't need help and like she didn't even mind because she just loves her baby so much.

And those are ideas that I realized I had really absorbed without even kind of knowing where they had came from. And they were really damaging for me. And so part of the project of the book is to try to figure out like, where did those ideas come from? And what can we do instead? How can we rethink what it means to be a good mom in a way that is more generous and kind to mothers and also better for kids and families.

Chanel Riggle (02:48)

I totally agree. I also had some very severe postpartum anxiety and I didn't even define it as that I just internalized all that like I should be able to manage this. I remember I took a picture of myself. I don't know what compelled me to do this. But I took a picture of myself like within the first week my daughter being born brushing my teeth while putting a hand on her.

I just felt like I need to document this. I'm so glad I did because every time I look at that picture, I think about how hard I was on myself. I had an emergency C-section and I really struggled to heal and still I was just internalizing these narratives and I don't even know where they came from and I had to really start unpacking them.

The photo mentioned by Chanel, 2021

Nancy Reddy (03:20)

Yeah. Yeah.

Chanel Riggle (03:43)

I'm still unpacking them.

Nancy Reddy (03:45)

It is a lifetime process. That image, I think, captures that so clearly, though, right? That you're both doing the thing. You're brushing your teeth. You're caring for the baby. You're the one doing it. And I think also speaks to the way that the idea of self-care has really been kind of weaponized against moms. Like, look, I'm still doing it. I'm brushing my teeth. I'm washing my face. I can do everything.

Chanel Riggle (03:47)

Yes.

Nancy Reddy (04:13)

man, babe, you know, somebody else could take that baby or like, I don't know, maybe your teeth don't get brushed, you know, like, who knows? ⁓ But yeah, that's a really powerful image. I think of these like bad ideas that a lot of us come into motherhood with and oftentimes don't really know they're there. I found until they're causing problems.

Chanel Riggle (04:32)

Yeah, know, looking back at that and now it's funny, we're talking about this. So my daughter is four now and I came into work today and I actually had a few people say like, wow, you look really nice today. And I wanted to brush that off and be like, ⁓ whatever. But then I finally paused and I told someone, I said, thank you. The reason I look so nice today is because I only had to take care of myself, because my husband was able, he's on swings right now and is scheduled and wild.

I said, he was able to take my daughter to school. He's the one who packed the lunch. He's the one who got her ready. And I only had to take care of myself. And so thank you. I do look nice. But when you talk about self-care being weaponized, I think that just clearly comes to mind. It's like, am I a good mother if I only take care of myself and I explicitly say like, I need you to drop off today.

Nancy Reddy (05:34)

Yeah, yeah. And that's such a powerful thing, I think, to say to other people, right, to actually articulate the way that you are putting down some of the ideas that we have about being this kind of all powerful, omnipotent mom. You know, I hope that the people that you work with, I don't know who they are, but if they're young people who are maybe thinking about becoming parents, right, that they're able to hear that and be like, ⁓ I could get my husband to make the lunch and do the drop off and everything else, you know.

Chanel Riggle (06:03)

Nancy, thank you so much for popping in today and talking with us about the Good Mother myth and what we have to look forward to hearing from you at the summit. ⁓ Is there anything else that you'd like to add before we sign off today?

Nancy Reddy (06:17)

I'm just so excited to get to be part of the summit and talk about our bad ideas about how to be a good mom and how we can be a little kinder to ourselves and ask for more help.

Chanel Riggle (06:27)

Absolutely. It is definitely designed for mothers to be as low barrier as possible. So if you are on a budget, it's going to fit your budget. If you are low on time, which I'm sure you are, because I am, you can watch the recordings up to a week or you can get a VIP pass and watch them up to a year.

It's really designed with mothers in mind. So I hope you guys can join us at the Mental Health and Motherhood Summit, October 10th and 11th.

Thank you so much, Nancy.

Nancy Reddy (07:00)

Thank you.

If you’d like to hear more from Nancy and our other speakers on the topic of maternal mental health, please subscribe for updates and more conversations!

Please also share this with mothers you know so they can access mental health resources at the summit. Tickets start at $25