Integrating Me in Motherhood

By Shaw-chin I Chiu

Becoming a mom is such a special moment in our lives. We get a lot of support for keeping our babies alive and healthy, but we receive minimal support to keep ourselves well. Moms need nurturing too!

Right after having a baby, give or take three months of maternity leave, society expects us to get our act together, regardless o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manuscripts LLC
• Release date: Jul 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889267126

Book preview

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Integrating

Me in

Motherhood

Integrating

Me in

Motherhood

A Mom’s Guide to Preventing Burnout and Unleashing Her True Essence

Shaw-chin Ioana Chiu

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2023 Shaw-chin Ioana Chiu

All rights reserved.

Integrating Me in Motherhood

A Mom’s Guide to Preventing Burnout and Unleashing Her True Essence

ISBN

979-8-88926-711-9 Paperback

979-8-88926-712-6 Ebook

I dedicate this book to my daughter, Sinapioa Naomi Chiu-Smith, and my dad, Tsai-Kuei Chiu, who passed away on May 14, 2022. Sinapioa, you inspired me to become more than I thought I was capable of. Dad, your sacrifices were not made in vain.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1

Birthing

Chapter 1

Who Are You?

Chapter 2

Reimagining You

Part 2

Becoming

Chapter 3

Releasing Your Untapped Potential

Chapter 4

Unleashing Your Inner Superhero

Part 3

Trade-Offs

Chapter 5

Work

Chapter 6

Spouse

Chapter 7

Motherhood

Part 4

Integration

Chapter 8

Making the New You a Lifestyle

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction

Becoming a mom is such a special moment in our lives. We get a lot of support for keeping our babies alive and healthy, but we receive minimal support to keep ourselves well. Moms need nurturing too!

In fact, if we don’t pay attention to our needs, the impact on not only our well-being, but most importantly, our sense of self, is significant. According to a 2018 longitudinal study of 85,000 pregnant to postpartum women, a mother’s self-esteem decreases during pregnancy and, after the first six months postpartum, gradually declines over the following years. It worsens with more kids (van Scheppingen et al. 2017). Findings like this can deter any logical person from starting a family.

But we shouldn’t be discouraged. A lot of research speaks to the contrary, specifically, motherhood brings extraordinary power. As Kimberly Johnson writes in her book, The Fourth Trimester: A Postpartum Guide to Healing Your Body, Balancing Your Emotions, and Restoring Your Vitality, childbirth can expand a mother’s energy field, allowing access to greater wisdom and strength (2017, 107). Furthermore, childbirth gifts us with a whole new meaning in life and can lead us to reach self-actualization, or becoming everything we are capable of, almost instantly (Maslow 1943). I know this sounds way too good to be true, but I am here to tell you it is highly possible with the right focus and attention.

What usually happens to the best of us, which creates the rapid decline we often see in self-esteem, is the following. Going into motherhood, our days are already filled to the brink. Work, spouse, extended family, and community commitments can make it challenging to find time for ourselves. If you’re like me, you may also have preexisting insecurities such as a negative self-image, financial instability, a shaky relationship, or a physical or mental health condition. The compound effect of these commitments and insecurities leads to a life on the edge, waiting for something to tip us over. And then comes motherhood. Over nine months, we become an entirely different human, from physical and hormonal changes to mental and emotional changes. Furthermore, we are handed, overnight, a whole new set of childcare responsibilities that somehow often fall on us.

Right after having a baby, give or take three months of maternity leave, society expects us to get our act together, regardless of the fact we just pushed a little human out of us. We have new changes happening to our bodies, including breastfeeding and hair loss. To top it off, we have a nonrefundable, at least eighteen-year commitment to a codependent human who requires twenty-four seven love and attention and will impact our finances. It’s no wonder moms often lose themselves throughout that journey.

This book is a guide to help moms, new or experienced, prevent burnout and connect or reconnect with who they are meant to be in order to become extraordinary in everything they do in the motherhood chapter of their lives. The first step to becoming unstoppable is letting go of who you were or thought you needed to be. Instead, embrace motherhood as an opportunity for ultimate healing and transformation.

Postpartum means bringing forth or after birth in Latin. This term means who you were before died when you gave birth, and you now have a higher reason for being. Anthropologist Dana Raphael, PhD, in his 1975 essay, Matrescence, Becoming a Mother, a ‘New/Old’ Rite de Passage, first coined the transition to motherhood, matrescence, as the physical, emotional, hormonal, and social changes we undergo to become moms. In other words, changes to our bodies and minds are essential and expected but regularly perceived negatively. According to psychologist Alexandra Sacks, postnatal depression is often mistakenly used to treat a new mom’s condition instead of matrescence (2018). Once we acknowledge the motherhood transition is normal, and we accept we are no longer who we were before motherhood, we can begin creating and integrating a new identity.

According to Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation, to reach the state of self-actualization, we need to first address our basic needs—physiology, safety, love and belonging, and esteem (1943). This focus will enable us to live healthier, happier, and productive lives.

In this book, I hope to provide you with an easy-to-follow guide to achieve self-actualization in motherhood. I will apply fundamental growth concepts from works by Abraham Maslow, Brené Brown, Stuart Brown, Dan Siegel, James Clear, Bessel A. van der Kolk, and Jim Rohn, to name a few, and illustrate the journey through my personal story. This book is based on real events, so with this in mind, the names and facts have all been changed to protect those involved. As you’ll learn, the approaches discussed in this book can be applied at any point of your motherhood journey.

The book has four parts that walk you through the transformation process—establishing an awareness and understanding for who you are today, defining who you want to become, resolving trauma to free up growth capacity, shifting your mindset with clear goals and objectives, cultivating your inner superhero, and creating balance in your work, home, and social lives. If you’re a self-improvement junkie like me, the concepts I cover should sound familiar. The value will be realized through a lot of practice and intention.

Part I: Birthing centers on connecting with your why, the fuel for your transformation. It takes you into the heart of how it all started for me and should resonate for most moms. It was the moment when my identity before motherhood collided with who I needed and desired to become for my daughter, myself, and my happiness.

I was beyond overwhelmed and needed to find myself again. It introduces you to the fundamental concept of trauma and techniques to address it. You will learn foundational concepts for optimizing growth that I will illustrate and apply throughout the book. These concepts include identifying your current state of self and defining your future self.

Part II: Becoming focuses on creating a growth mindset and direction to guide your day-to-day choices and actions. You will learn to reshape the things that make you who you are and what makes you tick through the practice of trauma resolution. This practice will not be an easy undertaking, as it includes identifying trauma intentionally kept in our subconscious, re-experiencing it in a safe and supportive environment, and then implementing self-regulation techniques to prevent its arousal or address it at the onset. You will also learn how to cultivate your superpowers and rewire your brain to enhance performance, happiness, and, ultimately, wholeheartedness.

Part III: Trade-Offs focuses on creating balance by establishing productive boundaries across key dimensions of happiness: work, spouse, and motherhood. We spend most of our lives tending to these commitments. They can lead to a compromise of our needs and, ultimately, unhappiness or under-fulfillment when we let others dictate the priority of our lives. Here, you will learn how to assess trade-offs where it matters to support growth.

Part IV: Integration concludes with an action-packed recap and tips to help create and maintain balance in your life. As you know, your external environment will ebb and flow. Knowing who you are and what you are capable of will give you the confidence to embrace the natural imbalance around us. Integration is a lifestyle.

I wrote this book for moms, aspiring moms, and even dads looking to make their years as parents the best of their lives. I hope you will walk away with a new appreciation for the importance of embracing the multiple dimensions of your lives beyond and inclusive of parenthood. When we accept that our happiness stems from our multidimensionality, which is the manifestation of who we are at the core, we will unlock more love, connection, wisdom, strength, and energy to do anything.

Part I

Birthing

ONE

Who Are You?

To have more, you need to become more.

—Jim Rohn

Have you ever lost yourself somewhere along your journey to motherhood? If you’ve talked to other moms, you’ll know you’re not alone. This feeling is highly common in moms (O’Doherty 2018). Although reassuring, if not addressed, this will ultimately lead to a void, like you’re missing something in your life. I get it. You know you need to pay attention to your needs, but you now have a child to take care of, on top of everything else you had before, such as work, your spouse, or social and community commitments. It is so much easier to put your needs off than to go through the process of finding yourself. Frankly, most moms do not know where or how to start. In this chapter, you will learn the most important starting point for your journey—identify your why . This why will keep you going when the process gets challenging. Let me take you to my starting point, which is the moment I had no choice but to find myself again for my and my daughter’s long-term happiness.

When Nate and I got married in 2018, I decided I had everything in place to successfully raise a child, or so I thought. I was tough as nails, and my accomplishments spoke for themselves, from innovation and leadership awards in every job I held. Even when I was in college, both undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, I made it a point to leave a legacy, including an undergraduate honors thesis on Samoan identity and the dean’s award in graduate school. Financially, I was secure. Physically, I was fit. I thought I was a badass. But mentally and emotionally, I was on the brink of falling apart. I did not realize how fragile I had become over the years until the next set of events.

It was a beautiful, warm, sunny afternoon in Santa Monica, with 72 degrees in March of 2022. I dressed to impress with a white tank top and jean shorts, showing off my tiny waist and perfectly sculpted shoulders. I had my four-month-old daughter, Manamea—Mana, for short—in my arms as we stood in the middle of the Boardwalk’s arcade. As I watched my husband, Nate, and my sixteen-year-old nephew, Tana, playing a game, I smiled from ear to ear as I reminisced about the last time all three of us were in an arcade. Nate and I had just met four years prior. I introduced him to Tana at a similar arcade to test whether my family would accept him. They hit it off, confirming Nate was worth a shot.

So much had passed between Nate and me since that day. We moved to San Diego so that Nate could start his business. He grew his company, and I made partner, becoming the first female Samoan technology executive for a fortune 100 company in the US. After almost three years of trying in-vitro fertilization, we finally had a beautiful daughter in October 2021. We had a perfect life, or so it seemed.

Next up to play, I got ready to hand over Mana to Nate when she got fussy. My breasts were engorged, and I knew I had to find somewhere private to feed her quickly. I briskly walked away, waving goodbye as I hurried to the hotel.

I plopped onto the bed, and as I fed Mana I detected something in my back pocket. I reached for it and realized I had accidentally taken Nate’s phone. When I glanced at the phone, I noticed an exchange between him and another woman.

As I pulled it up, my heart dropped. The blood quickly drained from my face, and my fingers shook as I scrolled through the messages. W.T.F. Nate was proclaiming how much he despised my personality and had left me in his mind and heart years ago. Nate walked in as soon as I finished reading the history of messages. He saw my face and knew. Nate has a great poker face. He had also perfected a habit of staying calm in the face of danger, but I knew him well enough to see he didn’t have a backup plan. He looked at me and said, What’s up? in a matter-of-fact, almost authoritative tone.

I took a deep breath to calm myself. Still in the middle of breastfeeding Mana, I raised his phone to show him the texts and said, I can’t believe you have been cheating on me. My heart raced faster as the tears suddenly streamed down my face. I furiously wiped away the tears as they dropped, fearing the moment they fell on Mana she would know my world, her world, was turned upside down. I was upset with Nate’s infidelity but even more so for showing him how much he was hurting me.

His first response, typical of every scene from a movie where the wife catches her cheating husband, What are you talking about? He quickly realized how cliché he sounded, so he switched gears. Nonchalantly and arrogantly, he said, Listen, sorry you had to find out this way, but I had already planned to move out. I just signed a lease for the apartment right down the street from you.

At this point, my heart jumped