By Heather Cabot, Editor-in-Chief, The Well Mom
New motherhood not only saps your energy, but feels like it claims more than a few brain cells, too.  Every mom of young children I’ve met sheepishly admits to her own “mommy moments.” You know the times you leave your keys in the front door (at least once a week for me), or race out of the house with your shirt on inside out or dial a number and forget who you are calling.  One humbling day, a few weeks ago, I actually convinced myself to the core that it was a Thursday when it was really a Tuesday and got a lovely $47 ticket for parking my car on the wrong side of the street. 
 
It’s easy to get down on yourself.  But despite these minor hiccups, when you think about all of the mental might it takes to juggle the pieces of our overscheduled lives, you realize that moms have to be pretty brilliant people to keep things running smoothly.  We are, in fact, much smarter than we think.  And as featured in Newsweek this week, some new research suggests women as a whole need to give ourselves more credit.  British researcher Adrian Furnham, a psychology professor at University College of London, tells the magazine that women often underestimate their smarts while men overplay theirs.  Furnham analyzed 30 international studies of how men and women assess their own brain power and found what he calls “the male hubris, female humility effect.”  So you may very well be smarter than the guys in your life but your ego doesn’t realize it.  And it is especially difficult, when you are toiling away changing diapers and folding laundry.  
 
My point is that sometimes the mundane side of motherhood dulls our self-confidence (not to mention sleep deprivation and those last ten pounds).  But like all women, we must not lose sight of our innate abilities to problem solve, manage time and along the way, nurture our families.  As journalist Katherine Ellison points out in her 2005 book, “The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter,” being a mom may actually improve our mental function by boosting our perception, efficiency, motivation, resilience and emotional intelligence.  Raising a family is a big job with multiple hats. So on those days when your can’t remember where you put your keys, it might help to remind yourself just how smart and capable you really are.

I’m going try it myself…right after I figure out where I parked the car.
 

By Leslee Horner
New motherhood can drive you crazy.  Even before you even bring home baby, there are all of the pregnancy concerns.  Is this symptom normal?  Is my baby healthy?  What is the gender?  What will we name her/him?  What’s a birth plan?  Which pediatrician do we chose?  Will breastfeeding work for me? 

Then the baby arrives and we have a whole new set of concerns.  How do I get my baby to latch?  Should I co-sleep?  How do I get my baby “back to sleep?”  What does that cry mean?  When should I start solids?  Will my baby get ADHD from watching Baby Einstein?  And of course, these questions and concerns extend through toddlerhood and beyond. 

These days, most of us search the web for the answers to those never ending questions.  But what we are forgetting is that most of the time we already know the answers.  We’re just too busy to tune in. 

What I am referring to is a little something called maternal instinct.  In fact, you can even drop the maternal part and just call it instinct.  In spite of what some may believe, we all have it and are perfectly capable of allowing it to lead us to the best
possible outcome for ourselves and our children. 

I have been a mother now for 4 and a half years, if you start counting from the day I saw the positive home pregnancy test.  During that time, I have listened to both my heart and my head.  By far, the best outcomes have been the times when I listened to my heart.  I had a beautiful co-sleeping relationship with my first child that began as a response to my heart.  When she was six-months-old my head started butting in.  I convinced myself that if I didn’t get her out of my bed, that I might never sleep alone with my husband again.  At the advice of a well-intentioned friend, I began the arduous task of sleep training my baby.  It seemed to work out okay at first, but in the long run it was a heartbreaking experience.  Even after she was “trained,” there were nights when she just didn’t want to sleep alone.  On these nights, I would lie down on the floor beside her crib with my eyes closed and listen silently as she cried herself to sleep.  If I had followed my instincts, she would have stayed in my bed until the time was right for both of us. 

To this day, my daughter loves to cuddle and be close to me. It is just the kind of person she is.  My heart knew that, but my head wouldn’t listen.  My head (and Google) have been responsible for diagnosing my daughter with measles, whooping cough, pneumonia, and asthma.  Each one of those occasions turned out to be benign everyday childhood illnesses and I would have known that if I had quieted my thoughts long enough to hear my heart.  I could go on and on about the times I didn’t listen to my instincts.  I can also mention a few examples of when I did, like nursing her until she was almost three despite the critics in my life, not pushing potty training until she was ready to accomplish the task, and allowing her to be a picky eater until she is ready to expand her horizons. 

Whenever there is an upsetting headline about something happening to a child you often hear the parent say they had a feeling about it that they ignored or didn’t defend.  Our hearts know so much more than we give them credit for.  We use our rational mind to disconnect our souls from the universe.  We assume that our doctors, parenting books, friends, and relatives must know more than we do.  But that is not true.  The best answers for us come from within us.  When you have a decision to make concerning yourself or your child, take a moment to quiet your mind and listen to what your heart says.  If you find that it is difficult to quiet your mind (like I did) it might be time to start your own “meditation for mom” program.  I recently read the self-help book, “I Had It All the Time” by Alan Cohen.  Cohen offers an activity to help in decision making.  When you have a decision to make you should take a moment to visualize the choices you might make and see what emotions bubble up while you are imagining.  The decision that leaves you with the most peaceful feelings is probably the choice you should make.  When you feel at peace you are aligned with your heart’s desires and you are listening to your instincts. 

Leslee Horner lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her husband and two daughters (ages 2 and 3.5).  Before becoming a stay-at-home-mom, Leslee was an elementary school teacher for five years.  

By Heather Cabot, Editor-in-Chief, The Well Mom
From Halle to J Lo to Julia, the public is going “ga ga” over celebrity off-spring.  And with the spotlight shining bright on baby bumps galore, it seems that Hollywood starlets are starting families later and later (Jamie Lynn Spears aside).  But deciding to become a first time mom after 35 or 40 isn’t pioneering anymore.  It’s the new norm.
 
The number of women who’ve delayed first-time motherhood until their mid-thirties or beyond has grown tenfold over the past 30 years according to researcher Elizabeth Gregory, associate professor and director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Houston and the author of the new book titled, “Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood ” (Basic Books 2008).
 
Gregory, a first-time mother herself at age 39, spent two and a half years interviewing 113 women who had children in their mid-thirties or older about their choices and the consequences.
 
 ”Women are choosing when they want to have children for the first time in history,” she told me in an interview this week.  She says their decisions, due in part to birth control, longer life expectancy and new fertility technologies are spurring societal changes including more participatory dads and more employers accommodating family-friendly schedules.
 
“Most consistently, I heard (from the women) that waiting offered them the chance to establish themselves, as individuals and in their work, to find the right partners and to achieve a measure of financial stability. When they did have their kids, they felt ready to focus on their children’s development rather than their own,” Gregory says.
 
So maybe us Gen-X slackers had it right all along.  We’ve been delaying marriage and parenthood to find ourselves and at the same time maturing so we could actually handle the responsibility of raising a child.
 
Motherhood unfolded so differently for our own moms. When my mom gave birth to me in 1970, the average age of a new mother in the US was 21.  And while, my aspirations as a little girl included being a mom someday, it was never in the context of choosing to pursue a profession or not.  Thanks to Title IX and the feminist voices who really changed the landscape for me and my contemporaries, I grew up thinking I could be anything I wanted to be and have it all.  
 
But somewhere along the way, I became aware of biological realities.  Despite advances in fertility treatments, it’s tough to ignore the ticking clock.  Gregory found that her research subjects were keenly aware of the timeline.  I was, when I finally hit thirty.  But the chance to live the life of a single, working person, to pay my own bills, to bask in my own professional accomplishments, and most importantly, to know I could support myself and live independently were tremendously important lessons for me.  And now at age 37, with two-year-old twins, I think I am a better mother for it.

When I turned 23, a year older than the age my mom had me, motherhood was the last thing on my mind.  Fresh from grad school, I was in hot pursuit of my first TV reporting job and had somehow patched together a bunch of freelance gigs to make my rent.  I was living in New York City in a crowded apartment with four, sometimes five female roommates who all had lots of drama in their lives (or so it seemed at the time).  I remember sipping wine on Sunday nights while we gabbed for hours about our work, our love lives, politics, not to mention our worried parents, anxious about us single gals living in the big city.  It was heaven.  Looking back, I wouldn’t trade that self-indulgent time in my life for anything.  And I hope my daughter won’t either.
 
“If you are perfectly set up to have a family at 32, then fine.  But if you are not, why add the burden of all this anxiety?” asks Gregory.   She hopes her research will empower other women to feel confident in their decisions to choose motherhood when it feels right.