Burn Out, the Invisible Load and Maternal Mental Health
Episode 52: Burn Out, the Invisible Load and Maternal Mental Health with Erica Djossa @momwell
This week Rachael speaks with Erica Djossa- a registered psychotherapist, founder of Momwell and author of new book Releasing the Motherload- all about the challenges of postpartum and beyond, including burn out and the “invisible load” of motherhood.
Here’s what they discuss inside this episode:
Erica shares her personal journey with postpartum depression
How Erica’s postpartum journey led her to create Momwell and write her new book
The concept of the invisible load and the different beliefs that shape the motherload
The “invisible load” moms carry, and strategies for sharing the mental load
Navigating social media and comparison traps
Insights and resources for supporting moms' mental health
Finding your community as a parent to feel supported
And so much more!
Erica Djossa is a registered psychotherapist specializing in maternal mental health with over a decade of experience, and the founder of Momwell. As a mother of three rambunctious young boys, Erica understands first-hand the challenges of motherhood. After her own battle with postpartum depression, Erica realized how difficult it is to seek support, care, and mental health services. She founded Happy as a Mother, which has now evolved into Momwell, to provide mom-centered virtual therapy services and mental health literacy for moms at every stage of their motherhood journey. Erica is also a regular media contributor. Her work has been featured in the Toronto Star, Breakfast Television, Scary Mommy, Medium, Pop Sugar, and Romper. Her graphics have been shared by celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Ashley Graham, Nia Long, Hilaria Baldwin, Christy Turlington and Adrienne Bosh. Erica is passionate about maternal mental healthcare and putting moms back on the priority list.
Mentioned in this episode:
Erica’s Instagram @momwell
Momwell website for Values Sort Exercise and Worksheets to go along with the book!
Erica’s Book: Releasing the Mother Load
Erica's podcast episode: Protecting Maternal Sleep
Momwell Podcast: https://www.momwell.com/listen
If you enjoyed this episode, please rate 5⭐️ and write us a review! ⬇️
✨For sleep support and resources, visit heysleepybaby.com and follow @heysleepybaby on Instagram! 😴☁️🤎✨
Rachael is a mom of 3, founder of Hey, Sleepy Baby, and the host of this podcast.
Listen to the full episode
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Welcome back to the No One Told Us podcast where we tell the truth about parenting and talk about all the stuff you wish you knew before having kids. I'm your host, Rachael, and today I'm talking with Erica Djossa, a registered psychotherapist specializing in maternal mental health with over a decade of experience. Erica is also the founder of Momwell, the mother of three rambunctious young boys, and Erica and firsthand the challenges of motherhood.
And after her own battle with postpartum depression, Erica realized how difficult it can be to seek support and get care and mental health services. So she founded Happy as a mother, which has now evolved into Momwell to provide mom -centered virtual therapy services and mental health literacy for moms at every stage of their motherhood journey.
Erica is also a regular media contributor and her work has been featured all over the place. She's also now an author and thank you so much Erica for being here. I would love to start with just having you give a little bit more of an introduction about yourself and about this new book. So I'm super excited to talk about the mother load today.
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here with you and your community. A little bit more about me. Well, I'm a registered psychotherapist by designation. And usually that means that you go into private practice or maybe work in a hospital or community setting and work with clients when you're done, your schooling. And that was the track I was on. I was working in a group private practice with children and families. And then I went through my own postpartum depression and anxiety, which really kind of flipped my whole life on its head.
Because as a clinician, I teach these skills for living. I should know how to cope and I should know how to do these things. I felt like a lot of mixed feelings about that but also I was put on to the fact that I had never heard of maternal mental health before my own experience. In my years of training, in the clinical setting, it had never been something that came up. So I didn’t know it was such a high risk time and I didn't know to be on the lookout for myself, but also for my clients that I was working with at the time.
So that really kind of set my path on a whole different direction, creating the social platform, happy as a mother at the time, which really grew because this resonated with so many people. Like we know we're struggling in our adjustment to motherhood. We know we're carrying the weight of an invisible backpack that we can't quite articulate because we don't know exactly what it is, but we feel the heaviness and we feel the struggle.
So as people really related to the content that I put out there, they wanted to work with me as their therapist because they felt seen and understood. And momwell just started to grow and be born out of a need to fill this gap in care. And one of the series that we And one of the series that we have become most known for on our IG is the Invisible Loads series. Four years ago is one of the only voices talking about it at the time. And it was always such relief, I would hear from people.
Oh my gosh, you're right. It's not just laundry. It is all these million other things that are under this iceberg of laundry that maybe to themselves don't feel like a lot, but when you back out and you look at them all together, you can see, oh my goodness, this is actually a lot of work, an invisible work and mental work. And so the book was born out of really diving into and specializing in the invisible load, mental labor, inequality in the division of labor in the home, why that happens, and really personally for ourselves as mothers, how to break out of those default patterns that we end up back in.
Because I don't know about you, but I've sat and done the cards and fair play system with my husband before. We've had really great intentions and then somehow default back into where we were to begin with. And my question when working with clients and trying to understand this problem was, why is that? And what way can I bring my therapeutic lens to this topic to break some of those patterns?
Right. Yeah, I love that. And I'm so excited to kind of dive into the book today and to hear more about it. And I find it so interesting, too, that you said you had never really heard or learned about maternal mental health, even though you were like a trained therapist. Why is that? Why is it not something that's taught or at least discussed?
It's like you have to laugh or you will like burn things down. Like it's just like so enraging.
I'm just like, wait, what? Like how can that be possible? We have like Half of the population is women, and 46 % of the population, so 86 % of moms will go on to be mothers. And this is not built into our curriculum at all. So 60 % of clinicians, whether they are like a general physician or a therapist or anyone who sort of works with mom in that birthing and postpartum time, 60 % of them have not had maternal health training.
Oh, my God.
And that was my experience. Like, I lived that. And for something that is so prevalent, we know 46 % of women are going to go through this transition, how in the heck do we not know the risks that they're up against or even like how these things present postpartum clients come to me and they're like, oh, welcome to motherhood. You know, this is like, they go to their doctor. They work up the nerve. And they're like, you just need more rest. Like, welcome to motherhood.
Oh, yeah. Good luck with that.
Yeah. You know. And that's so ultimately the business side of my platform, aside from like the content and end book mission side of it is like we're going to fill this gap in care. We have a team of specialists who know and are not going to gaslight or minimize or dismiss because this is so prevalent and it's so real. And it really impacts our satisfaction with our role. We end up resenting our role and really maybe even regretting or having lots of different other mental health challenges because we don't get the support we need.
Yeah, absolutely. So let's dive in and talk a little bit about the mother load, which is coming out. I believe by the time this episode comes out, it will already be available to purchase, which is so exciting. Congratulations. I know it's such a huge deal. In the book, you talk about five beliefs that shape the mother load. Can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by that?
Yeah. So when we're talking about default patterns that cause us to carry this load to begin with, there's a lot of things that contribute here. Because I don't know if this is your experience or if you find that you're the default that carries the load in your home, but I certainly didn't stand up and say, I want to be the one that shoulders all of this, right?
No, yeah. And certainly my partner didn't say out loud either, you're going to be the one that is the default or that owns all of these tasks. But it was kind of subtly assumed for a couple of reasons. One being gender roles and traditional norms in the home that we have not unpacked or unlearned or critically evaluated. And then another is something called intensive mothering. Now, with each generation or each culture or country and environment, we have something called a constructive motherhood.
Like sociologists talk about, it's like a set of norms or beliefs that are ingrained in that culture in what it means to be a good mom to them. And right now in North America, we are mothering in a time called intensive mothering. And it has five core beliefs to it. And I'll just go through those. And I want to like, I want you to think about how much these resonate and if it feels like these are true for you.
Being a good mom means that I should be the primary caregiver to my child. So like I am best biologically suited. It should be me. Being a good mom means finding all of my fulfillment in my motherhood role. So to desire things outside of motherhood feel selfish because I should be completely satisfied and happy with the role that I'm in. Being a good mom means placing my child's needs, wants, and well-being above my own. Being a good mom means I have to give all of my emotional energy, time, and resources to my child. And being a good mom means I have to always be on or always be available for my child.
And it really paints a picture of a self-martyrdom type of motherhood where our child's needs and wants, desires,, development, sleep, feeding, everything is so much more important than our needs or what is important to us that they are completely centered and we are burning ourselves into the ground in the background.
Yeah. Oh my gosh. And I'm so glad that you brought this up and that you're talking about this more because one thing that frustrates me is this constant pitting of mom and baby to each other where it's like it has to be the baby's needs or it has to be the mom's needs. How can we as a community and as a society make sure that both people in that diad have their needs being met? Like it shouldn't be, we shouldn't have to choose between mom or baby, right? So how do we reconcile that? Like how do you get out of this like self-martyrdom where you do allow for support to come in and help you or, you know, you do allow for things to be done in a little bit of a different way than maybe you would do them so that you can have a break or have some rest. Where do you start with that? When these beliefs that you just talked about are so deeply ingrained.
Yeah, it's interesting. I take readers on a journey through the book of calling out these assumptions because they show up in different loads in different ways. So calling out the assumptions and really working on the reframes so that we can identify this belief, unpack it, and like really put a more healthy belief back in its place or more realistic or well -rounded belief.
And one of the things I hear when it comes to moms and needs and babies' needs and stuff is like, oh, you need to put your needs first. Like you really, you need to make sure your needs are met so that you can meet your baby's needs or your child's needs. And I find that that is too far of a pendulum swing for a lot with moms, if we've really been operating out of a place of, you know, prioritizing everybody else in our family, it almost feels like a little bit of, like, toxic positivity to be like, put your needs first, you know?
Right, right.
So I really advocate for moms to, can we just like bring our needs and give them a chair at the table with the rest of our family? Like, can they be on equal playing field and seen as equally valuable and necessary and important as everyone else? So, like, if our child needs to be prioritizing their social skills and development and relationship building and we sign them up for activities, how are we also prioritizing our own social, emotional needs? You know, if a baby needs to have a bath every day or every other day or whatever, like, like am I taking care my own basic hygiene needs and just like really seeing that it's not a one or the other but how can we accommodate everyone's needs at the table sort of as you were saying and if it's not possible to do that then I think like we have to reevaluate and triage what the priorities are then and and there will be a time obviously especially early postpartum days where,
like, everything is anchored in trying to get sleep and focused on baby.
But it's so, like, crucial to understand that that should just be, like, for a season. It shouldn't be setting up the default patterns then that, like, carry forward till they're, like, 30-year-old adults and we're dropping everything still to, you know, to go and support them. And obviously, we will. We're moms. But I don't know, it's just an an important fundamental time we're laying those patterns. So to be aware that our needs need to be factored into the equation.
Yeah, I love that. Bringing in our needs as a seat at the table is such a good way to think about it. And I think you're right that there has been this like toxic positivity message around self -care for moms for such a long time now, especially on social media. And for many moms,
it's like a privilege access or access issue. There's so many things that could be preventing a mom from actually engaging in self -care that takes her away from her baby and telling her,
oh, just put your needs first. Oh, just get a babysitter. Oh, just, you know, as if it's so easy to do some of those things. So I always like for myself and encourage other moms to understand that, like, you don't necessarily have to choose yourself over your baby or leave your baby to take care of yourself.
Like, there are things that you can do to make sure that you're just also being taken care of, not instead of, not before, but just you're taking care of yourself as well and allowing others to care for you. Why do you think, I have two questions, actually. This is like a two -part question. Why do you think that moms are still the ones carrying this mother load, as you call it? And I'm also really curious because you brought up the idea of gender norms and gender roles.
I'm curious if we see this play out in the same way in same -sex relationships or not, or if you can speak to that at all.
Yeah, actually, I look at that in the book. And what we find is that there is a more equal distribution of labor in same -sex couples because they don't have default gender norms because they don't have gender norms to default back to. So there has to be a conversation of who's going to do what because there aren't these sort of pre-existing or predefined roles. And so research still shows us that the mom or the woman and gender being on the forefront of the predictor of who holds the ownership of these tasks.
And I've been in lots of interviews lately and they're like, oh, you know, like dads and partners are making such great progress. They're taking on more than previous generations ever have. And, you know, that's great. We, we love that for them. We love that for us, you know, like, wonderful. Yeah. But if the ownership is still assumed to mom and defaulted to mom, like if we're in a room with two parents and there is a household task or a caregiving task to be done and it is assumed that mom is the one responsible for stewarding and carrying out that task or facilitating it in some way, then we are not anywhere near equal partnership in parenting because the ownership comes with all of this invisible load that we're talking about.
Physical tasks are a part of it. But if you think about when you were like in school and you had to write an essay or a research paper, you had to think about the topic you were going to write about, you had to source the articles, you had to read the articles, you had to like construct a narrative in your mind. And then the final step really was sitting down to write that paper after hours of invisible work that had no tangible outcome at first. That's what this ownership gives us or puts on our back in that invisible backpack that we're carrying around is all of those anticipating, researching, managing, planning components that aren't actively being shared right now. And the weight of that is, you know, devastating sometimes.
Right. Oh, my gosh. Okay, I have so many thoughts about this because my husband just became a stay -at -home dad. We're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about that.
So we're back with Erica Djossa and we're talking about this mother load, this mental load, this invisible backpack that you talk about. It's so interesting to me because my husband is very progressive. Like he's very hands on. He does more of the chores than I do. He does the dishes, the laundry, everything. And he always has. He's great at it. And he recently became a stay -at -home dad. So he's also now primary caretaker for most of the day for our toddler.
And still, we have struggled with this transition because it's only been a few months of this new arrangement and we're still struggling with it because it's still assumed that I will be doing a lot of those invisible labor tasks like making the doctor's appointments and buying the next size up in clothes when we're going on vacation, making sure everybody has a bathing suit. All of those things that just really add up, right? And I think part of it is this assumption that I'm better at it. I just know more about it. I'm more efficient. And, you know, I'm just, I'm better at certain things and he's better at other things. And, you know, we each just play to our strengths, right?
But I think this assumption, this assumption that mothers are naturally better at certain caregiving and decision -making tasks can just make such a heavy burden. So how can moms and partners, regardless of their work, you know, and caregiving split and divide, how can they work together to share that mental load and to challenge these assumptions? What is your advice for parents on that?
Yeah. It's, I mean, I love Eve. I love fair play method. And I think that that's a great conversation starter and starting point if we've not like done any of this work before. But there's there's a piece here that my book gets at that is a little bit deeper on our part as the moms because this this book came out of my own absolute breakdown turned breakthrough. I talk about in the book where I had three and that load had just exponentially grown and I was trying so hard to be perfect and keep all the balls in the air and ultimately was like, I am drowning. I am actually, I might not make it out of this if I don't figure out a different way forward.
Right. And so when we think of the, when we think of being a good mom right now, so much in our culture that equals caregiving and household tasks. It means keeping a tidy house. It means having kids that are like well behaved and well adjusted and all of these things are tethered to our identity. So if like being the point of contact for the pediatrician, for example, and being in the know and being the owner of that and being the one that has that consistent, you consistent track of all of that information. If I hand that over to my partner,
then that's an expectation society usually has of mom. Am I a good mom? Like it starts to encroach on our identity. There's one piece of it, which is that.
The other piece is that we are likely more expert level status as you were describing. So I talk about maternal knowledge in the book being something that we gain, being with our children day in and day out in those early years. And if we think about what it takes to be an expert, and I don't know if you've heard this before, like in blogs and things, it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. So if we are day in and day out mothering and the point of contact and the default, that's for like two and a half years.
By the time our child is a toddler, we're like, we've reached expert level status. If our partner works out of the home and doesn't have the same proximity and amount of hours spent,
they're going to remain at beginner, novice, you know, intermediate level for potentially double that time, four years or whatever, because they haven't had the same exposure and experience to really level up in that knowledge, understanding of preferences, ability to anticipate next season clothing items or things like that. It doesn't mean that they are incapable of doing it or we are better biologically wired to do it. It's just often not expected of them. And we often own these pieces because they're so tethered to our identity that sometimes they're hard to let go of.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I've heard the term like maternal gatekeeping before. I've definitely had to do some work on myself to release some of that because you're right. Like as much as I don't want to have to hold all of this stuff, it can be really, really hard to let some of it go. And that's just, you know, that's for me who has a partner who's totally willing and able to take on as much as I can give him.
What do you say to moms who maybe don't have that support, either like single moms or moms who have partners that are really just like either disengaged or traveling a lot or whatever the case may be where they're just really not willing or able to share in that labor? What do they do?
I resonate with your experience because it wasn't that I had an unwilling partner. It was that these norms were just so ingrained in us that when we started to have these conversations and sort of unpack this, things have dramatically shifted. He's probably more the default parent in the home than I am for the vast majority of things. So I hear that a lot actually, that the partners are willing.
And so I think that like really reevaluating in a conversation of whether it's an actual issue of willingness or not having the path forward. I'll just put that out there. And then absolutely 100%. Yes, there are partners who are not willing, who really value these traditional gender norm structure in the home, and expect moms to do and carry all of these things.
And there are partners who are solo or there are parents who are solo parents by choice or single parents. And in the book, I focus on reevaluating the load for, like us, like for you yourself without an assumption that there is somebody to share the load with because that's not always the reality for people.
Right. So walking through uncovering our values and operating according to values -based mothering, which is what I call it in the book, allows you to have a criteria for yourself about what is important on your mothering journey so that when somebody tries to hend you an expectation or give you advice or interject or you see something when you're scrolling on social media and you feel like, oh, they make lunches in this way and they have this many fruits and veggies, like, I should do that too or when we want to like assume these things on ourselves….. we can pause and say wait a minute…. does this align with my values this is truly important to me or is this more their value system that they're operating out of that I don't need to subscribe to frankly.
I don't need to add this on to my plate. I don't need to put this in my backpack to carry. And there is so much when we really start to unpack it that we expect of ourselves and take on that is unnecessary or not in alignment with our values. That is so freeing and buys a lot of just mental capacity and, like, wellness, frankly, when we learn to let go of those. Yeah, like not not everybody has a partner and we need to be able to do this work without the assumption that it can be redistributed or handed over.
Yeah, so true. And it's for people like that where I say, where is this like a proverbial village? Where is the community support? How can, you know, people outside of maybe just that nuclear family, how can family members, friends, communities, how should we be supporting moms managing their mental health, especially in that early postpartum period?
I have kind of like a very tangible way. And then I also have kind of maybe like a little bit more of an abstract way. So tangibly, the best thing that we can do for a new mom is prioritize her sleep. I have something on mom well, our website at momwell .com. It's called a maternal sleep plan. So we focus a lot and you talk a lot about like understanding baby's sleep and trying to, you know, like obviously our sleep is tethered to baby sleep. It's so important to kind of figure out those pieces.
But I come from a little bit of a lens where let's assume baby doesn't sleep. Let's start from that angle and build a plan out for mom. Right? Like it's so like we can we You never know what kind of sleeper you're going to get. You never quite know. And if you are sleep deprived or if you are like running yourself into the ground, you need sleep. It's a cornerstone pillar of your mental health. And so really practically understanding that if we can untether our sleep to baby sleep within our support system and like structure a plan for ourselves.
So some examples of what that might look like. Maybe you've got a mom friend who's offered help. Maybe they will come for a good chunk of the day so you can either get a nap or maybe you have grandparents or aunties or whoever who will stay over and do the first night waking so you can try and get a consolidated chunk of sleep. So it doesn't always have to be a partner. It could be grandparents. It could be moms who have come together in community and do this for each other as a bit of a swap but not running under the assumption that baby will sleep and how do we build out a plan for mom to make sure that she gets that rest.
And then a little bit more abstract than that just as like good citizens and community members and moms, like understanding that just because something is right for us and our family does not mean that that person operates under the value system that we have assumed for ourselves. And this is so important. Like, this is so, like, I don't know if you had this experience in the early, like, motherhood days, but the wars that can break out about trying to prove one's, like, rightness in early days of motherhood around particularly charged things like sleep and feeding and, you know, all kinds of parenting philosophy stuff.
What is good for you doesn't necessarily need to be good for the next family. And we all have different parenting philosophies, approaches, and values. And learning to respect that for others, I mean, would be so freeing, allowing everyone to have their own expression or their own empowered way to parent that it doesn't have to look like how you parent.
Yes. Oh my gosh. I could talk about that all day. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
So yeah, we were just mentioning how hard it can be, especially now. I feel like past generations maybe had it hard in parenting in different ways, but I think moms today have it so hard because there's so much comparison happening on social media. And you mentioned like the, you know, quote unquote mommy wars about things like daycare and feeding and sleep training and all of that stuff. What would you say to a new mom about comparison and navigating the landscape of social media right now?
In previous generations, we may have packed up our kiddo, gone over to a friend's house or a couple of friends' houses and gotten together and would have been exposed to maybe a handful of ways that other people are parenting and decisions that they are making. Now we scroll for an hour and we see hundreds of different approaches and examples and advice and, you know, parenting accounts, which we both are from different perspectives.
And it's valuable. But if you are not tethered and anchored to a value system very consciously, you have not gone through your values and uncovered them. I have a free exercise called a value sort. And it's a bunch of cards with value words on them and little descriptors so you know exactly what they are. And you cut them up and you lay them out. And you sift through and come up with your top 10 values for yourself as an individual. And you can also do it with your partner if you're partnered to come up with family values.
And if we aren't tethered to those intentionally, it is a free falling of just trying to meet and please everybody's expectations. This person expects motherhood to look like this and oh, now I also have to do this. And this person says, I have to do that. And oh, my gosh, this also. But if we have our values, I can say, okay, I value slowness in my family life, probably because my work life is sheer and utter chaos that I like to feel a little anchored and, like, more calm with the kids at home.
And so when I see moms signing their children up for three activities a week, I'm like, ooh, it would be good for the kids to be in a few more activities. Like, you know, they could benefit from that. But then I take that expectation that I've just observed online that I would usually pile on my load can I say but actually we really value slowness and flexibility with our schedule so that wouldn't work for us right now.
Maybe we like take note and add that as the next activity in the next season or something. So guarding against comparison is really um not like solved by but really it helps us to have a GPS and like a roadmap when we know what our values are.
Wow, I love that. And I think that's such a tangible thing. Like you said, you have this little activity with cards. It can be so tangible. Because I think that's not something. At least I did not think about that when I became a parent. Like, I did not think about what my values were. I was just very influenced by what other people told me to do. I was influenced by my pediatrician and what acquaintances that had babies said that I should do. And I never really took the time to sit with certain things and really reflect on whether or not they were in alignment with who I wanted to be as a parent and what I wanted for my family and my child. So I really love that advice.
Erica, it's been so wonderful to talk to you about this. We've only scratched the surface. This is just the tip of the iceberg with this conversation. So can you please tell us all the details about your book and what other resources from you? Also, I wanted to mention when you were talking about sleep. I loved your podcast episode about this, about protecting maternal sleep. So I will also link that one in the show notes. But okay, go ahead.
Yeah. Well, the book is called releasing the mother load, how to carry less and enjoy motherhood more. And I just like that message of hope that we don't have to lose ourselves. And we don’t have to resent our role like we can retain parts of ourselves and also enjoy motherhood. It’s just such a hopeful message and i hope that we can get there. And this book is a guide to help you do that. It’s available wherever books are sold. The book website and the free value sort and downloads that pair with it is ericadjossa.com, D -J -O -S -S -A .com. And that's got that free value sort exercise, also a companion guide of worksheets to go along with the book if you really want to dig in and do this work.
And then I have the Mom Well podcast. We talk about all things, maternal mental health, anxiety, depression, sleep, you know, relationships, all the things. And Momwell .com,
Mom -Wall on Instagram, kind of mom well everywhere for those resources.
Perfect. Well, that makes it easy. So thank you so so much. I hope everyone will check out the book and all the other amazing things that you put out into the world for moms. I really, really appreciate the work you're doing. And thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you so much for having me.
