49: Parenting the Child You Weren’t Expecting with Margaret Webb DocWorking: The Whole Physician Podcast

“He has been the best teacher because it’s just a matter of noticing and playing around with, what is the feedback that I'm getting from this other human being? And it’s just been absolutely amazing.” -Margaret Webb

In today’s episode, Coach Jill Farmer sits down with Margaret Webb. Margaret is a Life Coach who specializes in coaching parents on ‘Parenting the child they didn’t expect while they were expecting.’ Margaret and her neurosurgeon husband of 25 years have their own story of the unexpected. Tune in to hear this story and find out what led Margaret down the path of Coaching and how she has been helping others to find the freedom in shifting expectations.  

Margaret Webb is a parenting coach who specializes in supporting parents with children who are on their own developmental timeline or who simply march to the beat of their own drum. (ie. Autism, Anxiety, ADHD, ADD, SPD, Apraxic, Dyslexic, Learning Differences, etc.) She and her neurosurgeon husband of 25 years thought that they knew what to expect while they were expecting their now 17 year old son but quickly learned he had other things in store for them. Turned out that the most powerful and helpful lessons for them involved shifting their own expectations and internal rules rather than placing all of the focus on him. 

You can find Margaret Webb on her website, MargaretWebbLifeCoach, you can email her at margaretwebblifecoach@gmail.com or you can find her on Facebook and Instagram.

Excerpts from the show:
 
“So let's talk a little bit about your specific journey. You were working full-time as a busy teacher helping to support your husband. He was on the very long and arduous path of medical training to become a neurosurgeon. So then you guys decided it's getting to be time where you might want to become parents yourselves. Pick up the story there, if you would.” -Master Certified Coach Jill Farmer

“Yeah. We got married when we were 23. So we're about to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. But he was in his research year of his residency and we thought, ‘Ok, this will be an ideal time, because he'll be home more and we're almost at the end stretch of his neurosurgery residency.’ So we decided, ‘Ok, we're almost 30, this will be a great time to get pregnant.’ So we did and from there things got really interesting because things did not go as we expected. We got pregnant and then spent a year in Auckland, New Zealand ...before his chief residency year. He actually had to go to Auckland before I gave birth. I had the choice to either leave my teaching job when I was 30 weeks pregnant so that I could go with him and be over there in time to give birth or I could stay back in the states. So I chose to stay in the states to finish out my teaching year and then have our son at the hospital with the doctors that I knew. So he was not there when I gave birth, which was a very interesting thing because we ended up needing to have an emergency C-section and me not having medical knowledge didn't realize, ‘Like oh, maybe we should just demand to have this sooner than later.’ It ended up that our son had the cord wrapped around his neck, so he was losing oxygen and all sorts of things happened as a result of that. So he was born and things progressed. We went to New Zealand and everything was hunky-dory. Then towards the end of our one year there, it started to become apparent around his one year birthday that things weren't going as planned. He wasn't babbling, he wasn't responding to his name, he wasn't waving bye-bye and so that kind of set up some red flags for us. After the year was up we came back to the states. Then he did his chief residency year and I went back to teaching. Andrew went to daycare and things got even more challenging. He did not want to sit at the table, he didn't want to do certain things that the other kids his chronological age were able to do. So that was the start of our journey.’ -Margaret Webb