This Mother’s Day, skip the bouquet and let's start the revolution.

Image by Gabro Izso

This Mother’s Day, skip the bouquet and let's start the revolution.

Mother’s Day is often a reminder of the deep love and labor that motherhood requires, but it also highlights a painful contradiction: we celebrate mothers and parents while living in a society that fails to support them.

Parenting today happens within a system that demands everything and gives very little in return. There’s little to no paid parental leave. Affordable childcare is out of reach for many. Mental health resources are scarce, and support for postpartum healing is minimal. We glorify self-sacrifice but offer no real safety net.

Since the pandemic, maternal mental health crises have surged. Parents are raising children in isolation, far from the extended family networks that once helped. The weight of this work—physical, emotional, and invisible—is crushing. And yet, we’re expected to carry it silently.

But, what if we try to change that?

We can share resources. We can speak openly about what’s hard. We can create communities of care, advocate for policy change, support one another in practical, meaningful ways. We can rebuild the village, one conversation, one act of solidarity at a time.

This Mother’s Day, and every day moving forward, honoring mothers and parents must go beyond recognition. It must mean committing to a world that truly supports them.

As part of that effort, we’re hosting a special event on May 21st, Motherhood Brain & Body, in collaboration with leading voices in postpartum wellness and neurobiology. Together, we’ll explore the profound transformations that occur after giving birth, becoming a parent, or stepping into the role of an intensive caregiver.

In the lead-up to the May 21st event, we’re sharing a Q&A with our featured partners and experts: Chelsea Conaboy, author of Mother Brain, and Ruth E. Macy, PT, DPT, and Courtney Naliboff of Your Postpartum Body.

We hope you find their insights and perspectives as powerful and helpful as we did.

Q&A with Chelsea Conaboy of Mother Brain

1. What’s something surprising you’ve learned about how the brain changes when someone becomes a parent?

Chelsea - When I started working on this book, even just the basic idea that the brain changes with new parenthood in ways that last for the rest of your life was surprising to me. This was not something I learned about as I prepared to have a baby 10 years ago, even as I did all the things I thought I was supposed to do—read the books, signed up for the parenting classes, attended many prenatal appointments, and religiously checked my pregnancy tracking app. It was not part of prenatal education or the broader cultural conversation at the time.

Later, after I experienced the turmoil of the early postpartum period and took a deep dive into this science, I learned so many surprising things. One that I think about often now, while raising big kids, is that parenthood is thought to be a life-long enriching experience for the brain. Researchers have used massive brain imaging databanks—including thousands of people—to compare parents and non-parents in later life, and they’ve found that the brains of parents are “younger-looking.” Why? One factor may be that parenthood introduces complex cognitive and social demands on our brains, and those demands are constantly challenging us. Just as we advise people in retirement to keep using their brains, all that effort may have a neuroprotective effect. I find this point helpful to think about when I’m struggling through some new phase with my kids—it’s good for my brain in the long run.

2. Do these brain changes look different for a birth parent versus someone who becomes a parent another way?

Chelsea - Pregnancy is a powerful physiological process, and it involves major changes to the brain. But when researchers look at the brains of really engaged fathers and other non-gestational parents, they find remarkably similar changes happening in their brains, too. This is especially true when it comes to changes in social cognition, or the brain regions involved in how we read and respond to another person’s mental states and emotions—a process that is really important when you are caring for a tiny, vulnerable, nonverbal and ever-changing child.

The catch is that time matters. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a famous anthropologist and primatologist whose research on motherhood across species was formative for this field, published a book last year on fathers. She uses the acronym T.I.P.—time in proximity. This is the catalyst for the brain’s adaptation to parenthood: time spent exposed to a needy baby and the immense effort it takes to understand and meet their needs.

3. How do you think things might shift, like in society or policy, if more people understood that all kinds of caregivers go through real brain changes?

Chelsea - Culturally, we tend to prize the idea of maternal instinct, as something automatic and innate to women. The idea is a myth, and it’s a harmful one. In reality the process of becoming a parent is a powerful and often grueling adaptation that can occur in anyone who is committed to this work and that requires real support.

New parenthood is a distinct developmental stage of life. Really embracing that idea would change how we approach clinical care and social policy. For starters, it would require that we create far more postpartum support than one standard six-week appointment and that we finally do something about the fact that the United States is one of just a small handful of countries without mandated paid maternity leave (most of the others on that list are tiny island nations). And it should change how we talk about the work of caring for babies and young children, whose job it is, and what resources young families need to do it well. I do think that this science is making its way into the cultural conversation around new parenthood. That starts with how we share our own stories.

Q&A with Ruth E. Macy, PT, DPT and Courtney Naliboff of Your Postpartum Body

1. What inspired you to write the book, and how did the collaboration come about?

Courtney: I had my kid in 2014 and as I healed and rode the roller coaster of hormonal and physical changes over the next several years I found myself surprised by some of the ways in which my body no longer behaved the way I expected it to. Running was challenging, my bladder was even worse than it had been before I got pregnant (and it’s never been great!), weaning set off the worst mental health crisis of my life. When I looked for a book to read, like I’d had during my pregnancy and like I’d had for baby sleeping, baby eating, baby milestones, you name it, there wasn’t a book. So I decided to write one, but realized pretty quickly that I needed someone with Ruth’s expertise to co-author it. She is my friend of two decades and because she is a pelvic health PT, she was my go-to person when I had questions.

Ruth: Courtney and I met on the island where she lives and my husband grew up. I’ve been a PT for 20 years now, and we’ve been friends all of that time. The book really encapsulates 20 years of friends talking about their bodies, but one of them happens to be an expert on parts of it. Courtney pitched Your Postpartum Body to me right around the pandemic, where I had people frantically wondering how they were going to get care or help of any kind. I had whole conversations without my boss about who in pelvic health was “emergent,” and it was always: the pregnant and postpartum people. I thought a book would be a great way to get some education where you can’t get individualized care.

2. How did your own experiences (as a clinician and as a parent) help shape the content and tone of the book?

Courtney: It was essential to my mental health that I maintain my identity as a human being after becoming a parent and not become completely subsumed into Mama-fication. We wrote the book with that strongly in mind–it was also important because not every person who was pregnant becomes a parent.

Ruth: I became a parent in 2008. This was the era of Mommy blogs, which spawned the “Mommy Wars.” There was a lot of needless infighting about every choice you could make as a parent. It caused me a lot of indecision and uncertainty about the choices I was making. I wanted this book to be approachable to any person who needed care: those who had a stillbirth, those who choose adoption, those who hate the term Mommy, and those who embody the typical Female Birth experience. We didn’t want to create supremacy or erasure in the book. Full inclusion or bust! I also have about 15 years of pelvic health experience, listening to the stories of people’s bodies and their births. Shame and trauma in pregnancy and postpartum are huge. We wanted to move people away from shame and into acceptance, curiosity, and hope about their health and their bodies.

3. What are the most common postpartum challenges that often get overlooked?

Courtney: The whole system in the US is stacked against the postpartum person. Rest and time for healing are actively discouraged by employers, but also by peers and narratives on social media. On a smaller scale, some commonly experienced postpartum challenges include lactation (and ceasing lactation!) and learning how to reintegrate the whole musculoskeletal and respiratory system in your torso to allow your pelvic floor to be springy and resilient instead of floppy or overly tense.

Ruth: The healthcare system as a whole has not decided what to do about cesarean sections. It’s a major abdominal surgery, and yet it is treated unlike any other major surgery. We don’t have standardized care for issues with the abdomen, in general. For instance, if you have a hernia, why aren’t you automatically sent to PT? If you have a 6-inch cut in your abdomen, you should be sent to PT. This has lots of people buying online programs about the core, particularly diastasis recti. Science is still like, yeah, that’s an adaptation that we don’t think is a big problem. But people who have it feel like it’s a big problem. The science has not caught up to the human experience.

We are also missing a framework around birth trauma. Birth trauma is so isolating, and an area where people feel gaslighted by providers or let down by the system. It can impact mood, tissue healing, ability to exercise, and lactation, but again, medicine does not have a good framework to address the issues.

4. What's one thing you wish every parent knew going into the postpartum period?

Courtney: Well, not every postpartum person is a parent. But! I wish everyone knew that healing takes time and how important it is to allow time (and hydration and nutrition and rest) to work their magic.

Ruth: Your support system matters more than anything else. Building a village or leaning into community is crucial. We are not meant to navigate this time of life alone. We need our people more than ever. Most people don’t want to be a bother or know how to ask for help. We are maybe a generation that too closely swallowed the idea that you can do it all, alone. Postpartum really highlights how and why this is both a bad idea and not really possible. If you see someone doing amazingly well, chances are they have access to amazing resources and a support system. Don’t compare. Befriend. Reach out. Be vulnerable. Be honest. It’s okay to have needs.