The Complexity of Motherhood

Major funding for The Pulse is provided by a leadership gift from the Sutherland family. The Sutherland support WHYY and its commitment to the production of programs that improve our quality of life. This is The Pulse, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott. When I was pregnant with my first child, I remember trying to imagine what life would be like as a mom. How would I feel? Would I be good at it? Would I like it? What if I hated it? And of course, I had no idea just what a wild ride I was in for. I think this catches many moms by surprise. Motherhood has changed me in so many ways that I did not see coming at all. The most overwhelming feeling I had was that I could do anything. It grew my heart about 10 sizes. I never thought that I could love another human being as much as I love my daughter. So much love and also so many challenges, big and small. Raising humans is a tough gig. As a single mother, I have not entirely prepared for what my life would look like once my sons started their young adult lives. I used to be a night owl. Now I'm a morning person. I can no longer watch any Disney movies without crying. I cannot hear live music without crying. Feeling too full of emotions? I don't know what it is, but since I've become a mom, live music just does me in. I get very weepy. I used to be anxious about myself and my future, but now I'm anxious about my children and anxious that my anxiety has made them anxious too. I'm constantly concerned with what will my daughter's future look like. I don't remember who I was before her. I was very different prior to having my daughter. I just remember floating through life with no purpose. It's brought out the best in me and the worst in me. It's been lonely and it's been overstimulating. Clinical psychologist and researcher Oralee Athen wanted to capture the nuances of motherhood. What were the big challenges, the personal growth, the newly discovered strengths? She searched for materials across disciplines, anthropology, nursing, cultural studies, social work, And she found there wasn't much out there. So she started doing her own research. Long interviews with mothers with open-ended questions. What I heard was that it was both the most crippling and empowering experience. And they felt quite stretched by the experience and deepened by the experience. And also they started to sound a lot like anyone who has gone through a life transition, in which there were changes in all the dimensions of their life, all of the domains, in their bodies, in their body image, in their peer group, in their feelings and moods that were fluctuating, in their ability to participate in the economy or politics. These larger questions, existential questions about who am I in this world and is there anything sacred that I hold dear? Much to Orly's surprise, many of the mothers she interviewed had never really talked about this in such depth or been asked about it. They felt that motherhood had shaped them in so many ways they were yet to understand. They were both disoriented, these mothers. They were confused. They were saying, why didn't anybody ever tell me that this is what I was going to experience? But most of all, they were trying to understand what was happening to them. How do you sum up the experience of motherhood and all of the changes it brings? It's a major transformation that affects hormones, emotions, body image, relationships, finances, career, even answers to larger existential questions like, who am I in this world? What is my role? On this episode, the complexity of motherhood. First up, let's listen back to my conversation with clinical psychologist Aurelie Aethan. She was trying to capture the massive changes that the mothers she interviewed were describing. And then one day she came across a word that seemed perfect, matrescence. And you pronounce it like adolescence. and it was then when the penny dropped. It was a huge aha moment. The term made so much sense. Because the minute I say matrescence like adolescence, a light bulb should go off. You should remember everyone has had an adolescence and you should remember what that felt like. And if you were an adolescent 100 or more years ago, you would have thought that you were going crazy on the way to adulthood. They did not even have the term adolescence to talk about the storm and the kind of ironing out process that happens. So the way I describe it is think of your adolescence when there are changes in your body, your identity, your peer group, your political and economic status. So I say show me a mother and I'll show you someone who has completely transformed their worldview. you. The term matrescence was coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s. She also popularized the term doula, by the way. But Dana used matrescence more to study how motherhood changes somebody's social status. Orly broadened it out to look at the entire experience of mothering. Matrescence is not tied to giving birth. It is tied to taking on that role more so than the biological effect of having given birth to a child. Yes, I would have to agree with that, that in my experience in interviewing mothers of all kind and parents of, you know, all sexualities and genders, those who carried a child through pregnancy or through fostered a child or through adoption, however their child came into the world through surrogacy, with their own genetic material or not, their mind went through this transition. That is to say, however, that the biological reality of, you know, carrying a child and giving birth to a child has its own unique experiences that also play just as important an impact as any of those other dimensions. You know, we have things like birth trauma that now is also being, you know, highlighted as something that a woman can be still processing, you know, years and years after. But when I do an assessment of a parent, I really listen for the pain points and the growth points. And you never know where they're going to come from. For one parent, it might be that they got passed over for a promotion at work. And they really felt that they hit the maternal wall, you know, economically. and that's where they felt the pain. Or there was a rupture in their partnership and in their marital life right at the same time. Or they felt a sudden growth in their creativity. I think, by the way, creativity is a wonderful word to talk about this holistic change. Mothers come out more creative. As we know, the mompreneur is another example of that. I was thinking about how we prepare for motherhood, generally speaking. So if you are carrying a child and you are preparing for birth, everything is geared toward birth and giving birth. And then after that, there is nothing. So it's like if we were competing in a sporting event, it's like, let's say there's one hurdle in the beginning and we get prepared to get over that one hurdle and maybe we clear it just fine and maybe we get bruised. But nothing at all prepares us for the race. And that is like so odd if you think about it. That is just so wrong. I completely agree. I mean, how narrow of you, how myopic. So when I inherit mothers in my clinical practice, after they jump the hurdle, not only are they saying, oh my gosh, there's so much more, but why didn't anybody tell me on the way in? I would have made different choices. And so this lack of education is my major platform, I would say, because I think it is doing such a disservice to anyone. We haven't prepared folks to really think about their participation in family life. And so we've done a great disservice. And that's why you hear the most common refrain, why didn't anybody tell me? because the changes that you go through are so profound and then you know you don't really realize them until years later it takes a long time I was talking with a friend the other day and she asked me about how my pandemic was basically and I said you know it's a little bit like parenthood you get thrown in there and you adjust and then years later you're like oh wow That was all a really big change, but I still don't know what to make of it. It's like we can't process these things while we're doing them. That's right. So I don't think we can ever prepare fully, but we can educate. And then on the other side, we have to process it. And it's not going to, you know, it's not like debriefing immediately after a crisis. it's going to take time and returning to the subject over and over again. So spaces have to be created for mothers to digest, reflect, and make meaning of their experiences. And even in my class, all of my students go and interview a mother, whether it's their own or someone else. And you'll find, or grandmothers, and you'll find that even with experiences that are 20 or 30 years behind a woman, this is the first time anyone has asked them about it. I find that very troubling. So we've rendered this deep subject invisible for the mothers themselves because I think it's so ubiquitous. But it's going to take a curiosity in the culture to really look at a mother differently and to look at parents differently and say, you know, this may be happening behind the scenes, but it doesn't mean that it isn't a remarkable, remarkable life story. In my experience, mothers are and were also a bit reluctant to talk about those struggles. I eventually found some with whom I could be very open, but there is a lot of pressure. There is a lot of pressure to perform in some way and to just like adjust. And then you're pushing a stroller around and everything is fine. And I found the conversations were often not very deep. They were totally focused on the baby. Like, what does the baby do? Is the baby doing this? Is the baby doing that? But it was never about us. Yes, agreed. I don't think that safety was built into the experience. to be able to disclose that you having a mixed experience or a hard time or even not enjoying it at all and regretting it all along that continuum It really starts with just cultural ideals right What the ideal mother should be experiencing And so if you're not loving every minute of it, it's really hard to check in and say that out loud. It takes courage. That's a deep conversation that goes beyond, you know, what are you purchasing for your baby. And in terms of the baby-centric ideology, I mean, that was the thing that really got me, that the empathic thrust is always on the child. I understand why, because it's our most vulnerable of the two, right? It lacks the power. But the feminist psychologist will say, but women are also experiencing motherhood in a system of their own oppression. So they are gifted with the role to raise children, which is considered one of the most central in the survival of the human species, but it's done during their own disempowerment. So they feel very trapped and stuck. A powerful picture I have in one of my papers is of a Victorian portraiture in which the mother is cloaked in a rug and the child is on her lap so that the baby can be central to the frame, but she's completely cloaked and rendered invisible. When mothers hear this word, matricence, how does it help them shape their experience and make sense of it? Well, that question gives me chills because I have literally the voices and faces of the mothers before me whose shoulders just go down and a sense of relief washes over them. and I think it's our job to really unpack why would they feel so relieved by that I think one of the first reasons is that it takes the pressure off of getting this perfect and right under a certain time constraint because the time that it's going to take her to developmentally transition to the other side if there is one is so unique to the individual person And so that takes the pressure off there of performing and being already in that identity before a person is actually subjectively ready. I think the second thing that it does is that it normalizes many of the struggles to understand that we give compassion and patience to an adolescence when they're in this upheaval. We do not expect an adolescent to do this overnight or to do it even elegantly or well. And I think that takes that pressure off. And then lastly, it gives them a positive growth mindset, which has always not been made available to them to say that actually you can make of this experience something wonderful. When we enter adolescence, we tend to not have a fully formed identity in a way that we think about a lot, you know, and then we become adolescents and it's forming this identity. When we become mothers, we tend to already have an identity. And then we are forming this new identity, whether we are realizing it or not. And often there is this desire to go back to be more like the person we were before. You know, there's all this pressure just speaking about bodies alone to get back your body the way it was before and to be just as effective and to do all the things. But I do think there's this wish to gain back your old identity. Agreed. I mean, these are the cultural memes. When are you going back to work? When are you going to fit back on those old jeans in your size? There's a lot of going back. And so matrescence also goes against the grain on that one because it is about forward. But it is absolutely natural that once you've, you know, gained a hard-won identity, right, all gone through adolescence, found your social circle, your professional, you know, identity for it to go undergo a 52-card pickup again. No, thank you. But the joke's on us because identity formation doesn't stop at adolescence. It's a lifelong process. And so we also got sold this idea that it's one and done. When really we are born again, again, again, and again, and we have to practice this experience. Of course, some of these turning points are more rough than others. So I would say, you know, do away with the one and done thinking. But along with that, I want to tell mothers, you haven't lost yourself entirely. There's a through line in you, right? It doesn't get severed. And that you have to remember and recall along the way, not only, you know, where you're going, but where you have been. And that's why it's a narrative process. The hero has turning points. The heroine has turning points and great adventures. But they bring their selves with them along the way. So I hope that's the new mythology of motherhood for the future, is that we remember who we are through the process and we only deepen it. You know, as I was reading your work, so much of this made sense to me. And, you know, I'm not prone to theatrics. But when I think of my early experience as a mother, I have this image of myself like running toward the bus with my stupid breast pump and my lunch and all this stuff. and then sitting on the bus and then just having like tears roll down my face and not even knowing like why am I crying. And every time I think about that now, I still have tears coming to my eyes and I can't explain like why, what the sadness is. I think I'm just sad for myself, you know, like having not understood that it's okay to feel like that overwhelmed. If that makes any sense. It makes so much sense. And you're not alone. You weren't alone at the time, but you were made to feel alone. And I think that there's nothing more sad than feeling isolated in the mess of life without any support, without anyone to hold you. So we often say, who's holding the child? And I say, who's holding the mother holding the child? and you're being thrown into an experience that has as well like a really steep learning curve right think about even the breast pump um or god yes i'd rather not i'd rather not um you know or the you know every every stroller has its own way of opening and that frustration and you had to sort of come into singing your own tune on your own you know where you were able to carry that stroller and that pump and you finally mastered it. But you did that all on your own. And, you know, maybe you got a pat on the back for having some grit, but I'd rather leave the grit at the door. I'd rather have help. I'd rather have help and education and compassion and love during this time. And to also, you know, hold my ego that is being really hit this whole time. It's extremely disempowering and confusing. So I would send a lot of love back to that person at that time. Thank you. What can people do to support mothers, especially those who are just getting into the game, so to speak? Well, I think being curious and turning them into people and really asking time and time again, how is this for you? So don't rush in and say congratulations or how wonderful, you know, really sit and take a beat and check in and say, how are you feeling? How has it been going for you? And ask for concrete suggestions of help. You know, Can I come in and wash the dishes for you, especially in the early period so that you can sleep? So it's both social support, practical support, and most of all, curiosity. So many mothers are far more alone than any other generation. There's been a lot of dispersion of family or kin geographically because people move around a lot more in a globalized society. They might be delaying their entry into parenthood, so they might be older parents, and so their extended family might be older than they can to participate. So there's a lot of isolation and gaps in, you know, this holding system for the mom. So I would really try and help fill the gap for a mother. Arlie Aethan is a reproductive psychologist and a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City. We're talking about motherhood. Coming up, being a mother changes the brain. Neuroscientists are documenting the effects and why they are happening. And the pattern they found there is that in the early postpartum period, the brain regions that become really highly activated by baby's cues are related to our motivation and our sense of vigilance and salience or meaning making. That's next on The Pulse. This is The Pulse. I'm Mike and Scott. we're talking about the many changes that come with motherhood. When Chelsea Connoboy first became a mom, it was not at all what she had expected. Things were not going according to plan. She had heard so many messages about what motherhood was supposed to be like. We developed the sense that our pregnancy has to go a certain way, our birth has to look a certain way, with that like golden hour after the baby arrives has to feel a certain way and then those newborn months we have to do certain things like for example with the golden hour we sort of have this like idea that a baby will arrive you'll hold them and you'll be flooded with oxytocin and your baby will be flooded with oxytocin and they'll latch on and your bond will be sealed right and we're made to feel like if that doesn't happen or any other thing within the lineup of like the perfect transition that motherhood. If it doesn't happen, then, oh, we've screwed up. So there she was sitting in her living room next to her newborn son, feeling inadequate and wondering why her maternal instinct wasn't kicking in. This sense of certainty and groundedness and kind of like that deep well of all-knowing mothering wisdom, like where was that for me? Throughout our culture, we have these mama bird, mama bear mythology of how we nurture and protect our children. And I was feeling, you know, really worried, overwhelmed with worry, and not only worried about my son's well-being, but really, like, worried that something had changed in me and that it was somehow interfering with what I was supposed to be feeling. This sense of certainty and groundedness and kind of like that deep well of all mothering wisdom like where was that for me This experience led Chelsea to investigate some of our long beliefs about motherhood and how they influence our ways of thinking and behaving. She's a health and science writer and the author of Mother Brain, how neuroscience is rewriting the story of parenthood. There have long been terms that seem to hint at changes in the brain that come with motherhood, like mommy brain, but the field of studying any actual changes is still pretty new. The research into the parental brain, particularly in other animals, goes back about 50 years. And so we have this pretty strong animal literature. And then the brain imaging in humans really comes from the past 20 years or so. And it still is like a relatively young field, but it's really strong enough at this point where we know some things about what it means to go through this developmental stage of life that is new parenthood. Are there structural changes that can be observed in the brains of people who've given birth in the time after birth or during the most active times of caring for an infant? Is there anything we can see in the brain that's different? Yes, absolutely. So just beginning with structural changes, since you asked, there are some really key studies that have come out in the last few years that look at the brain imaging of mothers before they're ever pregnant and then directly after the childbirth and then again two years out and six years out. So we're starting to get that longitudinal picture. And what they found is that there is significant volume loss across that period from before pregnancy to the postpartum period. And that much of that loss remains even at the six year mark. And it's really important to note here what volume loss means. Yeah, please do. So the loss in this case is... Chelsea says the volume loss happened in areas that are responsible for how we read and respond to people's social cues. Volume loss is usually associated with degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. But not in this case. This is more like what happens during adolescence when the brain is also going through some changes. And it's really recognized that that's like a fine tuning of the brain. It's a strengthening of synapses that are relevant for the next stage of life and a pruning of those that are less so. And they think that that's what's happening in the postpartum period, too, that we're strengthening the connections in our brain that we really need, and particularly probably in the social cognition, you know, regions. And we're pruning away the ones that are less important. So it doesn't mean like your brain is shrinking or you're losing function. It's more like you're changing what you're doing. Absolutely. You're changing what you're doing. You're adapting to a new role. And was that the biggest noticeable change that has been found so far? It's a really significant one. There's also a lot of work that's been done to look at functional changes. So how brain regions change in their activity and their connectivity, specifically as parents interact with their children or hear responses to cues like cries or baby's faces. So that's kind of a different set of studies. And the pattern they found there is that in the early postpartum period, the brain regions that become really highly activated by baby's cues are related to our motivation and our sense of vigilance and salience or meaning making. And the idea is that this activity really kind of propels us into this state of hyper responsiveness to our babies. it really compels us to give our children our attention and to do so sort of over and over again, even when we might not have any practical skills to really care for them. And, you know, that function is sort of twofold, I think. One is to keep our babies alive. They need our attention in order to survive. But also it really sort of pushes us into this period of really intense learning. And it's thought that over time, that intense attention on our children, that practice of reading and responding to their cues really helps that process of fine-tuning our social cognition. And at the same time, we get better, it's thought, at regulating our own emotions in response to things like our baby's distress. And what is thought to bring about those changes? Is the thinking that it's hormones that change it, or is it the act of taking care of an infant? In other words, I'm wondering, do we see similar changes in people who did not give birth, in the other partner who is taking care of the infant, so on and so forth? Yeah, it's both things. It's thought that it's hormones and experience. You know, we talk a lot about hormones during pregnancy and how, you know, we have these major shifts in estrogen and progesterone and oxytocin and other things, too. things like cortisol, and that those all serve to kind of keep the pregnancy going to advance the gestation. But it's also thought that those things are acting on the brain too, and kind of priming our brains to be ready to receive our babies. And babies are really incredibly powerful stimuli for the adult brain. And it's thought that it's really time and exposure to them, that that's what ultimately shapes the parental brain. And it's really important to say here that other parents also go through hormonal shifts. And it's thought that those shifts shape the brain. Fathers, for example, likely experienced drops in testosterone as fatherhood approaches. They experienced changes in their prolactin system, which is something we often think of as a milk making hormone, but it's also involved in bonding. And they experienced spikes in oxytocin as they interact with their babies. And those things are also thought to prime them for this stimuli. And it's expected that we don't have a lot of research in other parents, adoptive parents and others, but it's thought that similar both hormonal and experience-driven changes happen in them as well. I want to get back to the issue of anxiety. You mentioned that you felt worried a lot when you were a new mom, and that is certainly something I think a lot of parents can relate to. But in some cases, the anxiety becomes overwhelming. And that's something you describe in the book. You talk to several parents who felt that way. Yeah, I think that that hyper responsiveness, that hyper vigilance is almost like deliberately colored by worry in the postpartum period. So it is hard to like sort those who are having an adaptive experience to those who are struggling. But I do think that for me, you know, I had this really overwhelming worry, anxiety in that postpartum period and I had no framing for what was happening to me. And I really feel like it was made worse by not understanding kind of the neurobiological changes I was going through. And I felt like the simple fact that I was so worried was a sign that like I had failed my son somehow already. And it really compounded my experience. And once I found the science, I really felt like, oh, it reframed that whole experience for me and made me feel like this is something I have to face and I have to deal with in a thoughtful way. But also maybe it's productive. You know, maybe it's helping to shape me into the parent my son needs. And I think more parents deserve that information, both to recognize what the transition they might be going through and to see when it's gone too far, you know, when it's more than they can manage and that they should seek help for it. One of the reasons Chelsea was so worried and anxious as a new mom was because she didn't feel a maternal instinct kick in. And she wondered where this concept originated. The idea really comes from our moral ideas of motherhood, our religious ideas of motherhood. Someone who is self-sacrificing and whose mothering becomes kind of all-encompassing. And then some of that is really echoed in Darwin's theory of evolution. I mean, he writes about the mother bird sitting like so satisfied upon her eggs day after day. But what his work did really was to, you know, tear down this wall between humans and other animals. And naturalists in the late 19th century and early 20th century had begun writing about animal instincts and also had very much like written our ideas of gender into their writings about the natural world. And so when instinct theorists started writing about humans in the early part of the 20th century, they included in a long list of human instincts parental instinct, which they said was strongest in mothers. So the idea that women instinctively know how to be mothers became more accepted. Later, Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz documented instinctual behaviors in birds and how newly hatched birds attach to the first creature they see, usually the mother bird. So Konrad Lorenz, he's most famous for his articulation of imprinting in birds and this idea that birds will relate with the first species that they see or even the first moving object that they see. And he really developed that idea into this kind of lock and key theory of energy building up and key parts of our brain. And then once they interact with a specific key, it unlocks a particular kind of behavior. And in his theory, essentially like mothers and babies were these sets of locks and keys. And his expertise really was in birds, but he used it to talk about human bonding as well. And that concept that the brains of mothers and babies function basically in tandem, just clicking into place and activating instinctual behaviors, it spread. And it places a lot of responsibility and pressure on mothers. Mothers need to behave in a specific way, not only behave, but feel love in a specific way towards their children and act on that love in order for their child to develop appropriately. And it's this kind of rigid idea of a maternal instinct conveyed through new language, I think. Chelsea says that in truth, things are much less rigid, for example, when it comes to mothers bonding with children. One of my favorite researchers in the book said that parenting is so essential to survival of our species and to our evolution that there will be redundancies. So like you don't start the bonding in that moment. There will be lots of other opportunities for that to begin. And so, of course, there's many ways that it can go and for it to be healthy and for you and your child to like move into this new time of your life together. And for me, this science has allowed me to like give myself a lot more grace and patience and belief in the process because it is a process. It's a process of growth. It not a fixed pattern of behavior But it is in a way liberating to think about parenthood as something your brain learns as opposed to something that you are born with and you immediately should know how to do so much of it. Absolutely. And I think it's really liberating. It's certainly been liberating for me as a parent to know that I don't need to know how to do it all, that I'm like growing and changing with my child. And I also think it's liberating if we consider just how dramatically we've underestimated whose biology can make them into really good caregivers. It's really like anyone, not only gestational mothers, but anyone who's really fully engaged in this process and kind of prepared to grow with their babies. Chelsea Connoboy is a health and science writer and the author of Mother Brain, how neuroscience is rewriting the history of motherhood. You're listening to The Pulse. I'm Mike and Scott. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Also, subscribe to our newsletter to stay in touch with us and find out what we're working on. You can sign up on our website at whyy.org slash the pulse. Coming up, a new play confronts ideas about motherhood and maternal instincts. Jennifer's excitement about the choice to be a mom and to take this on, you know, it ebbs and flows throughout the play. And her fear is that as a mother, she's going to end up living life for someone else. And so it's her trying to figure out what her identity is and, you know, wanting to be a mom but not getting lost as just a mom. That's still to come on The Pulse. This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. What does it mean to become a mother? At 37, Jennifer is out of work and living in her sister's basement when she realizes she's pregnant. And suddenly finds herself navigating a minefield of outdated standards, her less than ideal baby daddy, her overbearing older sister, and obviously a health care system that seems designed to work against her. That's the premise of Plan C, a new play by writer and actor Andrea Peterson. So it is a dark comedy. It's funny at the top and then it gets really heavy and serious towards the end. I always like to tell people, think fleabag mixed with Aaron Sorkin. It has a heartbeat, which puts it at about 12 weeks. That is the longest relationship I've ever had with anyone aside from those required to be by blood. Feeling a lot of feels right now. Jennifer's excitement about the choice to be a mom and to take this on, you know, it ebbs and flows throughout the play. Sometimes she's like, okay, this is exciting. But then other times she does feel like she's going against her feminist bone of jumping into motherhood. And her fear is that as a mother, she's going to end up living life for someone else. And so it's her trying to figure out what her identity is. She doesn't have the innate sense of, I can do this. And this is in sharp contrast to her older sister. And her sister, we've written her as more of a stereotype of a mother who has five kids and has a job and has things put together. And they have these conversations. And Jennifer's sister confronts her and says, some people are meant to nurture and some people are meant to be nurtured. So Jennifer isn't sure she's cut out to be a good mom. And on top of that, she experiences some serious health complications. She's diagnosed with preeclampsia. She confronts the doctor and the doctor's like, well, you know, it's a common complication. And Jennifer asks, if it's a complication, why is it still common? Like, why are we OK with saying, well, this is just normal, this is just common? And, you know, she even has a monologue, you know, about a trolley bearing it on the tracks. And she's like, if there's something wrong with the tracks and this has been happening for years, why have we not invested more money? Why are we OK with just watching these trains come bearing down these tracks with people standing in the middle of them with their lives on the line? And so I think for Jennifer, she's not comfortable just sitting back and being like, well, OK, this is what we do. in fact, she's challenging society, she's challenging health care, and she's challenging just being a woman in general. Andrea says the play delves into the gray areas of life that most women face, and she hopes that the play opens the door for more nuanced conversations about women's health, pregnancy, and becoming a mother. Our bodies are so incredibly complicated. We have this ecosystem in our bodies that we have to deal with from puberty through pregnancy into menopause. And I want women to say, I'm pregnant and I'm feeling things that's uncomfortable and to be able to feel safe talking about it and to able to feel heard by the medical system, the healthcare system, and for things to be seen proactively, not retroactively. And so I think for me, it's to make women's health more normal and less pushed to the side. Andrea Peterson is a playwright and actor. Her new play, Plan C with Pygmalion Productions, is currently running in Salt Lake City, Utah. Parenting is something we learn over time, a role we grow into. And while maternal instinct is perhaps not something that happens for people right from the start, we often develop a certain sense of intuition for the children we care for. The saying, mom knows best, certainly does seem to have a lot of truth to it. Katie Pratt spoke to her mother about this a few years ago. Can you just quickly introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Wendy Pratt. And what else am I supposed to say? I'm sorry. They talked about a difficult time in their lives when Katie was still a toddler and facing some serious health issues. Here's Wendy. When you were three, you kept pointing to your forehead and just telling me that you have your head hurt. Periodically. It wasn't all the time that you complained. It was just that you would complain periodically. I said, you know what, I think I need to take her to the doctor. The doctor suggested an MRI. As they were doing the MRI, the technician noticed that your cerebellum, she described it as like it's the quark of the brain, has grown outside of your skull, and that's called a Chiari 1 malformation. She said, well, it could be a problem. It's nothing that we have to deal with it right now, or we could, but you will have to deal with it because your spinal fluid wasn't getting down your spine because this cerebellum, the piece of brain that grew outside your skull, was blocking the spinal fluid. At first, Wendy and her husband decided to wait on the operation until Katie was a little bit older. So that was the diagnosis. What happened between the diagnosis and operation that led to brain surgery at three? You were running around and all of a sudden you just fell. And you didn't fall over anything, you just stopped and you were on the ground. And he looked at me and said, Mom, my legs don't work. They just stopped. And I said, oh, okay. So we contacted Children's Hospital Boston and we got the doctor. And he was world known. He was, he was very good and showed us the x-ray. And he said, what they do is they go in and they remove the back of your head like the skull will be all removed and what they do is they move the cerebellum and they redirect your spinal fluid to go back into your spine and I said to him I said don't you um don't you need to cut the cerebellum and he looked at me and just said, excuse me, that is the brain. You never cut the brain. The brain, we don't even know all aspects of the brain, but the brain is never to be cut. I think we went back like in two weeks to do the operation. And your dad and I were waiting downstairs, and I don't know, maybe four or five hours went by. I'm not sure. Feels like a lifetime. We're just waiting. And then finally the doctor who did your surgery comes through the doors and he just beelines right for me. He gives me this eye stare and he walks right towards me. He just looks at me and he said, how did you know? And I said, how did I know what? He goes, how did you know that I had to remove some of her brain? and he said the cerebellum, the growth that was out of your brain was so compacted. It was so compacted in there that it had rotten and it was black. He had to remove it and he said, I've been doing the surgery for so many years and I've never had to remove any one cerebellum before and you knew. At one point you said mother's intuition. Do you think that mother's intuition is a thing? As moms, like we are the kids, we are our kids' first line of defense, first line of love, first line of everything. We have the amazing ability to have these beautiful people entrusted to us. Sorry. so I just feel like that we are so in tune to our kids and then I think we are led by the the amount of love that we have to to just kind of go go beyond what's the obvious sometimes there's just something powerful about mom's love and I just think like you just know sometimes I just know when you might be having a hard day you're not even nearby I can just I could just feel it sometimes and I'm I send you a text or it's just these amazing connections so yeah I totally think there's mother's intuitions and I think so many times I look at my life and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, thank you. Thank you that I kind of knew that or I had that feeling. That was Wendy Pratt talking to her daughter Katie, our former intern, about a surgery Katie had to get for a condition called Chiari 1 malformation. Love you. Love you too, buddy. That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tong. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lizarski. I'm Mike and Scott. Thank you for listening. Behavioral Health Reporting on The Pulse is supported by the Thomas Scattergood Behavioral Health Foundation, an organization that is committed to thinking, doing, and supporting innovative approaches in integrated health care.