THE GOOD ENOUGH MOTHER PODCAST

The Good Enough Mother podcast cover featuring Jessie Harrold and Dr. Sophie Brock with text "The loss and emergence of identity in motherhood." Jessie Harrold is a women's mentor, coach, and doula. Background includes podcast branding elements.

Identity shifts in motherhood

October 24 , 2022

MATRESCENCE, IDENTITY, MOTHERHOOD IDENTITY, RITES OF PASSAGE, MOTHERING, MOTHER SELF, TRANSITIONS IN MOTHERHOOD, PARENTING PODCAST

with writer, teacher, coach and doula Jessie Harrold

Today, I talk with doula, coach and mother, Jessie Harrold. 

Jessie is passionate about navigating the transition into motherhood with trust and confidence. 

She talks about the experience of both losing and finding ourselves in motherhood, and how bounce-back culture overlooks the hard work of navigating huge identity shifts. She shares what happens after the first 40 days of motherhood, how to reorient our lives around newly defined values and priorities as parents, and ways to make sense of pivotal moments. 

We dive into the shifts that occur in our relationships, and how we can take responsibility for creating our place of belonging in our communities. 

Jessie shares her work supporting mothers to lean into the liminal nature of postpartum, understanding it as a slow yet profound process of stepping into our motherhood identity, with all the meaning, joy and grief that comes along with it. She encourages new mothers to ask themselves, at many points along the journey  ‘who am I now?’ And to continue asking questions of ourselves as we become, and continue to evolve, as mothers. 

  • "our culture really deifies the idea of having resolution, having goals, having outcomes, having a place to go, knowing what's next. And the liminal space is the exact opposite of that. It's a real sense of not knowing. And there's not a lot that you can do in the liminal space, which, again, is really uncomfortable for many of us. It's a time of being overdoing, again, really challenging."

    — Jessie Harrold in conversation with Sophie Brock, Ep #82 The Good Enough Mother Podcast

  • "we know is that matrescence happens, we don't necessarily know how it happens. And so that's kind of where I think the growth edge is both in our academic or professional understanding and then also in our individual on the ground, mother-to-mother understanding of how this happens. And I've been describing my interpretation of how this happens and sort of the arc of the matrescence journey because I still think that we have still so much bounce back culture."

    — Jessie Harrold in conversation with Sophie Brock, Ep #82 The Good Enough Mother Podcast

  • "our culture might make it seem wrong in some way that it's taking so long that you still haven't figured it out, that you still don't maybe feel like a mother or identify in that way, but it takes time and there's so much permission and validation in that. And normalization."

    — Jessie Harrold in conversation with Sophie Brock, Ep #82 The Good Enough Mother Podcast

  • "You can think of the richness of the liminal space as being akin to thinking up our best ideas in the shower. It's in these times of spaciousness, that we're actually the most creative, that we actually have this opportunity to learn to listen to our inner knowing."

    — Jessie Harrold in conversation with Sophie Brock, Ep #82 The Good Enough Mother Podcast

LISTEN UP.

“In that moment where I realized that I was going to have to surrender a lot of my expectations and what I knew to be true about myself and my life up until that point and step into something new.”

— Jessie Harrold in conversation with Sophie Brock, Ep #82 The Good Enough Mother

Getting the right support makes all the difference.

The Radical Transformation Quiz

The MotherSHIFT program

The Village program

Meet

jessie harrold

Jessie Harrold is a coach and doula who has been supporting women through radical life transformations and other rites of passage for fifteen years. Jessie works one-on-one with women and mothers and facilitates the internationally-acclaimed matrescence support program MotherSHIFT and its sister program for postpartum professionals, The Village. Jessie is the author of Project Body Love: my quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead, as well as the forthcoming title, Mothershift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage. Jessie’s work has been featured in Spirituality & Health, Green Parent, Today’s Parent and mother.ly.com. She is also the host of The Becoming Podcast. Jessie lives on the east coast of Canada where she mothers her two children, writes and tends to her land.

“Motherhood has been socially constructed and [that] there's this difference between the social world that we're mothering within and our role as a mother and then the mothering work that we're doing.”

— Jessie Harrold in conversation with Sophie Brock, Ep #82 The Good Enough Mother

connect with jessie.

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Website - Jessie Harrold

Instagram - @jessie.es.harrold

Facebook - Jessie.ES.Harrold