Pink Flamingo Podcast Lily Canetty-Clarke

In todays episode I had the joy of speaking with Catrin @mama_lleud, mother of 5 children and many animals all living nestled between the mountains and the sea in Eryri, North Wales. Catrin has raised her children at home, opting to home educate and somehow manages to also have been a birth worker since 2017 and now specialising in postpartum support and providing nutritious food boxes to local women in her community.

I learnt so much from this conversation with Catrin as she shares the starkly different accounts of her first birth as a single young mum at 19 with a practically non existent postpartum and lacking if any advice on postpartum boundaries or breastfeeding support. Comparing that to her subsequent births when she had the care and unwavering support of her husband and greater access to the internet where she learnt about doulas, and the home birth community, and postpartum care and different parenting styles ...each experience has been so different through as every child is so different and her most recent birth 9 months ago was a huge learning for Catrin when her baby was born quite poorly and needed a few weeks in intensive care hours away from their home which she found to be a very humbling experience of letting go of how things should or could have been and surrendering to the situation which is a lesson she has learnt again and again as a mother. 

Catrin shares her experience of home educating her children up until very recently when her older girls have just started at a small local school. So much of this conversation i found fascinating and so insightful but with the postpartum in mind it was both the support of the home educating community that have provided such an important village for her but also the way she spoke about navigating the postpartum with other kids at home all the time and how important that was to her for them to see her in the postnatal period, see their dad care for her and how she was attending to her own needs. This education on how to mother and father, a lived expereince of the postpartum, has stuck with me since this conversation and i feel life changing for her children.

As you will hear there is a little bit of backround noise in this episode as Catrin was joined by her baby who was being looked after by her seven year old in the same room. I hope you enjoy all the extra giggles and squeaks so you can hear from Catrin authentically in her home surrounded by her children. 
To learn more about Catrins work as a doula please visit  https://mamalleuad.wixsite.com/doula or follow her on instagram @mama_lleuad 

In todays episode I had the honour of chatting with my best friend Deya about the last 6 months of postpartum life with her son, my godson, Woody.

Deya had a restful start to motherhood which she credits to her Doula who encouraged her to spend time thinking and preparing for postpartum  when she was still pregnant and also reading the book The First Forty Days. As a very outdoorsy active person it was a real change of pace, but she managed to not leave her house for over a week and was fed by friends and family for about 3 weeks which enabled their new family of 3 to spend as much time as possible getting to know each other.

Breastfeeding was a major feature of the first few months for Deya. Never did she think she would think so much about her boobs. It was very painful for many months. She sought help from her community and professionals but it wasn't until she got some much needed sun, salt and sea on holiday that a longstanding fissure and raynauds in her nipples dissapeared which was a real turning point in her breastfeeding journey. Deya recalls the raw emotions of dreading a feed, panic that it will never improve and the exhaustion of trying to fix it. She really felt the duality of the early months - intense joy and intense pain living side by side and feels sad that so much of her brain was taken up by the pain but that it taught her intense patience and huge resilience and she continues to breastfeed Woody today.

We talked about her surrending to slowing down more recently and how it was easy to fill her days with endless classes and meet ups at the start but this need to stay busy was in part to show she had achieved things with her day. As despite knowing in herself all the tiny moments that add up to a day in the life of a mother at home with her baby, when sharing it with others it fell sickenly short of doing the day any justice. Her focus now on unfilling her days has led to a greater sence of presence to her baby, to her self, her intuition and the world around her.

Deya also shares how her work in widlife documentaries and researching animal behaviour, especially orangutans, has informed her natural parenting and made her pinker in combining her old work with her new role as a mother.

Deya speaks from the heart and shares some wonderful stories and insights into motherhood, I hope you enjoy it!

 
 

 

In todays episode I chatted with the lovely Sophia, a doula and mother to Elba, 9 and Wren, 7.

Sophia experienced two very different postpartum with her daughters. As a young mum at 24 years old and the first of her friends to have a baby, she wanted to show the world and herself that this new chapter wouldn't drastically change her life but she quickly learnt that she was lying to herself and there comes a point where you are forced to surrender to it. Once she did surrender and accept this new self and stage she was so immersed in it and happier in her mothering. Second time around she was much more calm and boundaried with her postpartum nest, she was much more comfortable with being slow and still and not rushing to groups, classes and to make friends.

We chat about making friends in the postpartum- how hard it can be. Yhe challenges of finding your like minded tribe, feeling pink enough to socialise in the first place, social anxiety, constantly running off after your crawling/running baby mid sentence when trying to converse. The exposing nature of making friends in the postpartum when you are potentially at your most vulnerable with a new unknown identity, doing a new unknown job.

Sophia talks about her work as a doula, and specifically within the postpartum, the importance of feeding people nutritious foods, emotionally holding people and listening and assisting families with asserting boundaries to help protect their postpartum. Sophia is a fantastic Doula in Bristol and a great resource on instagram for learning about your birth rights and learning more about uninterupted physiological births and you can find her at @theintuitivedoula on instagram and https://www.theintuitivedoula.co.uk/  

In todays episode I am speaking to Jessica about her mothering experience with her daughter River who is now nearly two. Jessica runs Mother Circle in Bristol, which came out of her own postpartum journey and the lonliness Jessica felt spending hours and hours alone with a baby at home each day, she missed the village, didnt understand what was happening to her and wanted a space to talk...and that is exactly what mother circle is- a landing pad for mothers to gather, learn and share their experiences as mothers – physically, sexually, emotionally, spiritually, and archetypally.

We also discuss the elimination communicated (EC)- the idea that babies have a natural instinct to poo on a loo/potty very early on and it can be an alternative or work alongside nappies . Jesicca mentions the account go diaper free if you want to learn more.

We also talk about the importance of surrendering to a new you and reevaluating what actually works for this new you and how there can be a sudden new appeal for things you once swore would never happen! For Jessica her love of festivals didnt feel quite so easy and fun as a mother and the new appeal for all inclusive holidays and Centreparks has now been understood!

Jessica speaks wonderfully on this episode and I am really excited for you to learn more about the wonderful work of MotherCircle . To find out more or find a leader near you please visit https://mothercircle.com/about/ and jessica is @mothercirclebristol.

In todays episode I am joined by my freind Serena who shares how the last 15 months has been with her son Max.

Serena shares how pink she has found postpartum and while not pretending its all been easy breasy she feels more herself that she did before Max. She shares with us 5 amazing reasons why she thinks her experience has been as such and there is so much to learn and take from all 5 of these which she shares on the podcast for us today.

Serenas is a story of resilience, acceptance, surrender and perspective and she sums up it all up as a joy that just keeps getting better and better. As she says it is really important to share postive narratives about having children too and is why this podcast is here to celebrate every shade of pink that parenthood brings. 
Serena has her own podcast, Birth tales, which shares amazing stories of birth and pregnancy and I highly recommend a listen. She is a hypnobirthing teacher who offers online courses and a pregnancy reflexologist in London. To find out more about all her wonderful offerings please visit https://serenalouth.com/ 

In today's episode I am chatting with Katie about the last 19 months with baby Elliot. We focus on sleep deprivation today and navigating the realities and normality of a baby who continues to wake at night well into the 2nd year of life and beyond. We chat about the socially isolating aspects of this, the feeling of dashed hopes that tonight might be better, the clock watching at night, comparisons and the incredible resilience of anyone in this position.

we chat about how quick people are to offer unsolicited advice postpartum when all you really need is someone to listen, acknowledge and cuddle you, and how rarely that happens. How the whole world of parenting in this digital age has become about fixing things and viewing babies as a problem with a hack to solve it. We stalk about balancing FOMO and staying connected as mums with also trying to stay off our phones infront of our babies.

Katie struggled with postpartum depression but it is largely looking back on her postpartum experience that Katie has been able to acknowledge this, as at the time she wasn't aware that what she was experiencing felt anymore hard than the next person.

We talk about how little time and space there is to give to your partner in postpartum and the subsequent pressure that then puts on special date nights and postpartum intimacy and sex. Katie found that just acknowledging the lack of everything and all the changes with her partner was incredibly liberating in and of itself.

We talk about the hugely different sexual experience between a couple postpartum due to all the hormonal, physical, and emotional changes that can affect intimacy for the birthing woman compared to the somewhat less changed hormonal & physical landscape of the partner.

Katie shares so much so openly and I am so grateful to her for chatting about some of these harder topics so I really hope you get a lot from this conversation and resonate with what has been one of my favourite chats since we launched the podcast.
To find out more about Katie please join her mailing list at https://view.flodesk.com/pages/6258214a5a98458d0c472d17?fbclid=PAAaYyx_fOSsQD44x9NoePh8cNz4P7FDt97lpQzg-P3RZo9H4TA0MvOMXpGiw