"Just a Mum", or are you?

Hello hello.

How are you??

Hope you’ve been keeping well these last couple of weeks, the cold has felt unrelenting but I’ve seen some early shoots of snowdrops which always gives me hope for the Spring that’s coming.?

I wonder if you had any thoughts around our last newsletter, talking about goals and intentions behind them.

Well, a conversation earlier this week made me think of another intention that I wanted to add for this year.?

I was chatting to a school mum, I didn’t know her that well but I had a feeling she was a yoga teacher so I asked her the question ‘what is it that you do again?’ to which she replied ‘not much, I’m just a mum at the moment - I’m taking a break from yoga’.

I know that she has 3 relatively young boys, which is a full time job in itself.? The 9-3 goes by in a flash when you’re trying to organise the house and lives of 3 small children.

So she’s not ‘just’ a mum.??

But I know that so many of us probably have a similar attitude when it comes to our roles as mothers.?

I wonder how many of us mums truly value all the work that we do - physically, mentally, emotionally AND THE REST.??

Even if we do, I’m not sure we value it to the extent to which we deserve to value it.??

Years and years of patriarchy and the cultural/societal structure has made us undervalue the role of the mother more than any other role on the planet (there is no research to back this up, but I’d be pretty confident this is true..!).

And the change needs to start with us.?

Unless we can start to fully value our own role in our family and society, we don’t have a hope in hell of changing the societal narrative that has been prevalent for so so long.

So let me ask you this question.??

Are you ready to start owning the huge value that we bring as mothers and as women??

And are you ready to start talking about our roles as mothers as the most important thing anyone will ever do, breaking generational cycles and raising the next generation of people who will shape our world in the years to come????

Is there anything of more value than this?

Maybe this should be on our vision and goals for 2025 and beyond, to change the narrative around motherhood to one that honours and respects the incredibly important and amazing role that we play.??

And from this place, can you imagine what our society would look like??

What our workplace would look like??

What our lives would look like?

Here’s to changing the motherhood narrative, in 2025 and beyond,

Takako and Jess