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    New Mom, New Woman: Creating Your Smart Motherhood Plan
    New Mom, New Woman: Creating Your Smart Motherhood Plan
    New Mom, New Woman: Creating Your Smart Motherhood Plan
    Ebook169 pages1 hour

    New Mom, New Woman: Creating Your Smart Motherhood Plan

    By Rachel Egan

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    About this ebook

    New Mom, New Woman provides you with skills and strategies to become more competent, decisive, and empowered. You will develop a broader perspective of your new life, a deeper awareness of your needs and desires, and a keen understanding that a life you love won’t happen miraculously; it needs to be consciously defined and deliberately designed.

    Rachel Egan, MBA, is a certified life coach and President of Maternity Transitions®—a national coaching service provider.  She is the author of Life after ‘I Do!’ and lives in Massachusetts with her husband and four children.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGreenleaf Book Group
    Release dateOct 7, 2014
    ISBN9781632990044
    New Mom, New Woman: Creating Your Smart Motherhood Plan

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      Book preview

      New Mom, New Woman - Rachel Egan

      me.

      Awareness

      What Do I Really Want?

      Years ago, my refrigerator broke and a repairman came to fix it. When he pulled the refrigerator away from the wall, it exposed dirt, baby pacifiers, and lots of other things that had been lost under there. The repairman turned to me and said, Didn’t your mother ever tell you to clean under your fridge?

      At the time, I had two children—a fourteen-month-old and a two-month-old; and at this particular moment, they were both scrying—if you’re not familiar with this term, it’s a screaming/crying combo. As a matter of fact, I replied, don’t even get me started on things my mother never told me!

      It was one of those days when I was so overwhelmed and discouraged that the crud under my refrigerator only confirmed what I’d already suspected: I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I would never get this mother thing right! God knows, I was busy, and I was trying with all my heart, but I did not seem to be making any progress. I was not Supermom. I was not even a good mom. When the repairman left, I put my head down on my kitchen table and cried.

      More than twenty years later, I can look back at myself on that day with great compassion, but more importantly, I understand why I was so disheartened. Simply put, I was not the type of mom I expected to be: some version of Superwoman, always patient and happy, always knowing just what to say or do for my babies. Being a mother was far more complex and relentless than I had ever imagined. At the time, I had no clue that my unrealistic expectations and wrong assumptions played a significant role in determining my level of happiness and my ability to feel balanced.

      We all grow up with a great deal of conditioning and stories that provide us with a framework for the choices we make and influence how we live our lives. On this developmental journey, it is vital to become more aware of your thinking habits. During times of transition and self-doubt, it is important to figure out what you really want. You want to expand your mind, not shut down your thinking.

      If I had been more aware of what I was thinking, my perspective would have been different. I like to believe I would have run away from anything even resembling a Supermom cape and, as my grammar school teachers used to say, put on my thinking cap instead. But my unskilled thinking kept me living in some sort of trance, trapped by my fantasies and stories of a motherhood ideal.

      I don’t want this to happen to you. I want you to embrace the power of being a woman, however imperfect! The purpose of Part 1 is to expand your awareness, so you become mindful of how you think. Together we will tap into your brain to discover inner obstacles that may interfere with your ability to fully enjoy your new role as a mom. By the end of this section, you will be more aware of how you think—and whether your thinking serves you. You will understand why this miraculous, stressful, and sacred transition requires a bit more soul searching—and a bit more time—than you may have anticipated.

      Adjust Your Expectations

      Many women believe marriage and motherhood are extremely important keys to happiness. As a result, many women expect the beginnings of a family and the arrival of a baby to be the happiest time in their life—a love story that ends in happily ever after.

      Most real-life love stories are complex, consisting of many wonderful moments along with moments of distress. Your baby is about to become one of the great loves of your life and will evoke all sorts of intense and often polar emotions. You’ll feel challenged and bored . . . exhilarated and frightened . . . thrilled and disappointed . . . rewarded and angered. Some of these emotions, you expect to feel; others are surprising, even shocking. This explosion of feelings, and the tension that derives from their polar extremes, may not be how you expected to feel. Despite what you may have been told, new motherhood—whether it is baby number one, two, three, or more—might not feel like the happiest time of your life.

      Now is the time for you to become aware of your expectations when it comes to being a mom. This awareness will help you connect with how you think, which will help you design a more balanced life. Very often we are not aware of what we are thinking even though our thinking affects how we feel and what actions we take. According to the Happiness Institute, Unrealistic expectations are one of the top enemies of happiness. As you will see, my unrealistic expectations—and those of many of the women I coach—certainly support this theory.

      My Story

      When our first child was born—a son—I had been in labor for twenty hours and had pushed for four hours (he was posterior). The doctor finally used forceps to yank him out. Moments after he was born, my husband was holding him and kept saying to me, Rachel, say something. . . say something . . . I want to see if he recognizes your voice. I felt like I had just lost a nine-round boxing match, and what I replied cannot be repeated. In my wildest dreams, I never expected those words would be the first thing my son heard out of his mother’s mouth; it startled, embarrassed, and frightened me. (I expected a tender Hallmark moment between my husband, our baby, and

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