Resilience as a working mother: Starting a conversation

Resilience is a hot topic in our household. Over the last seven years that my husband Rowan has been researching, writing and working on resilience with clients, we have been experimenting with what helps us individually and as a family to be resilient. 

I am particularly interested in cultivating resilience as a mother. What does this mean? What does it look like? Feel like? Who are my role models? How do we/ I do it? Where do I have choices? What agency do I have within the systems I’m in? What support do I need? There are possibly more questions than straightforward answers! 

Like many mothers/ parents, my resilience has been massively tested since having children. A classic case of too many things hitting at the same time - two young kids as an older mum, losing my mother to cancer and a best friend to suicide, Covid, work, Rowan being away with his psychotherapy training, moving plans thwarted by the cladding crisis. For probably the first time in my life the challenges and curve balls were coming thick and fast, and it felt relentless. When resourcing myself to be resilient was really important, at times it has felt like the hardest thing to do. 

While being a particularly challenging stage of life, it has led to a lot of personal learning and growth. As I reflect on World Mental Health Day, what I’m beginning to see more clearly about resilience is how it’s dynamic and context specific. Meaning our resilience - and ability to be resilient - is constantly changing in relation to different life stages, what’s going on in the world and what resources we have available to us. 

When motherhood - a period of big change and uncertainty - coincides with multiple other life changes and responsibilities, it can be a time when the resilience strategies that served us in the past no longer work so well. It can highlight cracks in our coping mechanisms which may feel uncomfortable. And it can leave us feeling stuck or a bit lost. I definitely found this.

So what can we do? This excellent article from Selda Koydemir is a great reference point on resilience offering lots of tips. I could quote many parts of it including: “Resilience is not only about bouncing back, but also experiencing some sort of growth” and “Resilience requires us to tap into our inner strengths and resources, as well as our external resources, such as social support from others.”

The key for me though in relation to motherhood is having a range of resilience practices and deploying them flexibly. This may mean we need to be creative in finding new coping strategies that work in the context we’re in. We may need to be willing to try new things that perhaps we’ve avoided before. We may need to be more aware if a practice isn’t working, accepting of what we can and can’t control, and switch strategies to the one that’s most helpful in the situation. And we may need support in doing this. Above all we must be compassionate to ourselves.  

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences of motherhood and resilience. I hope this is the start of a conversation.