'You don't have to do this perfectly to do it well': Working motherhood and mental health

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
This is a podcast by The Straits Times.

**Vanessa Chelvan** (0:08)
Hi, I'm Vanessa Chelvan, and welcome to The Mother Load, a five-part podcast series by The Straits Times. This is a space for honest conversations about the juggle, the 9 to 5, the 5 to 9, and everything in between. Real talk about the mess and the magic of being a working mum. Today's topic is one I feel very strongly about, and that's the mental health of working mums. And I don't mean in a, here are five tips for self-care kind of way. I mean the real stuff, the stuff that happens when you're depleted and nobody is asking if you're okay, because you look like you're managing.
That feeling when you're running on empty, but force yourself to keep going. The terrifying moments where you want everything to just go away.
I have two guests with me today, clinical psychologist, Elysia Tan from Annabelle Psychology, and she is mom to a nine-month-old.

**Elysia Tan** (1:02)
Hello, thanks for having me.

**Vanessa Chelvan** (1:03)
And at the clinic, you see?

**Elysia Tan** (1:04)
I see children and families for trauma-related issues.

**Vanessa Chelvan** (1:07)
Okay. And next to me is Joline Lim, parent, coach and co-director of Chapter Zero.
And you have a seven-year-old girl and ten-year-old boy.

**Joline Lim** (1:16)
Yes. Hi, Vanessa. Thanks for having me.

**Vanessa Chelvan** (1:18)
Of course. And can you tell us a bit about Chapter Zero?

**Joline Lim** (1:20)
Sure. So Chapter Zero is a community of parents and caregivers who wish to practice respectful parenting.

**Vanessa Chelvan** (1:27)
Right. Welcome. Let's dive right in. There is actually a name, right, for what happens to you when you become a mother.
It's called matricence. It's, your brain literally rewires itself, right? Elysia, maybe you can start us off by talking through what's happening neurologically, hormonally to a woman's brain during pregnancy and after.

**Elysia Tan** (1:50)
I think there are a lot of things that happens to a woman, a woman's brain once she becomes pregnant as well as postpartum. Hormonally, of course, we do know that when we are pregnant, our estrogen and progesterone levels increase because that helps with the fetal development during pregnancy. But what we do know is that once we deliver, those hormones drop right after pregnancy. And that's so because we don't have to kind of grow a baby inside us. But the downside to that really is that because estrogen is a mood regulator, and when that drops, then a lot of the times, our mood also drops quite significantly.
That on its own may not necessarily lead to, say, postpartum depression and things like this. But if you put it together with a lot of the risk factors that we may have in our own individual lives, because of perhaps our childhood growing up, perhaps of the expectations we have, the social support we have around us, that makes us a lot more vulnerable. I think when you become a mother, your brain also really rewires. And there are a lot of different mechanisms in how it rewires. One of the things that I thought was important to know really is that when an infant cries as a mother, I think you will feel that you always want to pick that infant up.
And that's something that you may not have before you were pregnant. And there have been studies they have done that show that when they compare mums and non-mums, when an infant is crying, what they find is actually the brain activation in the brain is very, very different for mums. The part that is activated actually is parts related to things like grasping, picking up, talking. And if you think about it, right, those activities are all about caregiving, right, because it's all about picking up your child, soothing your child. And the fact that that is so much more activated really shows how just the moment you give birth, how your brain really has changed.

**Vanessa Chelvan** (3:37)
That's so interesting. It's like chemical, right? Actually, when I was breastfeeding, I read this somewhere that breastfeeding mums, when you hear an infant cry, even if it's not your own child, your milk production...

**Elysia Tan** (3:52)
You're not lactating.

**Vanessa Chelvan** (3:53)
Yeah, I was trying to think of a polite way to say that, but your boobs start leaking, right? It's that kind of reaction that you get in your brain and your body.

**Elysia Tan** (4:01)
Yes.

**Vanessa Chelvan** (4:02)
And, you know, so there's a lot going on physically, mentally. And this sense of isolation, maybe this loss of control, you might be beholden now to this little baby, right? Do you feel like our Asian kind of confinement culture has a role to play in there?