You've Been Accepted: Amy's Story of FINALLY Becoming a Member of The Mom Club

Amy's application to join the Mom Club was denied many times. It took many applications, years, time and money.  But through it all, Amy discovered a resilience she never knew she had. And let me tell you, it's nothing short of inspiring.

As an author, Amy's creativity became her superpower, fortifying her for the rollercoaster ride of parenthood. From the anticipation of motherhood to the actual nitty-gritty of raising a child, Amy's story is one of growth, love, and strength.

But it doesn't stop there. Oh no, Amy and I dove headfirst into some deep waters – raising children with unique minds and living and parenting with neurodiverse traits. We tackled the tough stuff – the stigmas, the anxieties, and even that little voice in the back of our heads whispering about the freedom of our child-free days.

So, if you're out there wrestling with similar challenges, know this – you're not alone. Amy's story is a beacon of hope, a reminder that even in the darkest of times, there's light at the end of the tunnel. So grab a cuppa, hit play, and let's navigate this wild ride called parenthood together. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Motherhood and Resilience With Amy
• 8:50 Parenting and Early Childhood Education
• 20:17 Juggling Life and Neurodiversity
• 29:28 Navigating Parenthood

Transcript

Kayla Huszar: 0:00

Welcome Amy to the Chill Like a Mother podcast. I'm Kayla, an expressive art therapist who helps moms unload all the heaviness and all of the stuff that comes with motherhood because, truthfully, it just doesn't have to be so friggin' hard. Amy, tell me about joining the Mom Club and how long it took you to become a member.

Amy Ayres: 0:28

Oh yeah, I mean that's how it felt. You know I was child free. I would say you know, it was really for a lot of people, like in their early twenties when they start thinking about being a parent, because that's when everybody starts to do it and that's when you know your parents are pressuring you to do it and you know everyone's asking and other people are getting pregnant and saying you're next and you know, and then 20 years goes by of not being in the club. That's a long time of dealing with the same disappointments and hurts and stuff like that. So but then one day you're in the club and you're like oh, oh, I didn't want to pay these dues, but but it's, it's an, it's an experience to to go through that long process of waiting and and then, and then, having been on both sides of the fence, you know it just changes your perspective and everything.

Kayla Huszar: 1:22

You know it just changes your perspective and everything. Can you share with our listeners how you managed to get through the years of that?

Amy Ayres: 1:40

The only thing I think that really helped me cope was knowing that I had other creative strengths, other things going on in my life.

Amy Ayres: 1:45

And I know I knew a lot of people that I'd spoken to over the years who always sort of use their kids as like a convenient scapegoat for why they can't get anything done, why they can't, why are they more productive?

Amy Ayres: 2:00

And and on some level it's just like well, I have all this free time. I don't have a kid that needs me 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Let me fill it. Let me fill it with either going back to school or going in another route, which is where I sort of went, which was sort of doing my own approach to understanding the publishing industry and writing my books and doing all that research and networking, and obviously, yeah, that takes up a lot of time, and I sort of threw myself into that world intentionally, saying this is the only thing that sort of helps me forget some days and it and it helps me channel any sort of like angst or grief into it. So I say, you know, at the end of the day, I've accomplished something, even if it isn't the thing I'm really wanting to accomplish even if it isn't the thing I'm really wanting to accomplish.

Kayla Huszar: 3:05

You're using that as an, as an outlet for coping and I dare say like a little bit of like self-care and like channeling. You know the way that I talk about expressive art therapy for people when they can't quite wrap their head around it is that it's, it's just the container. Is that it's? It's just the container? It's? It's the container for your grief or your anxiety or depression. I mean it and the and the container is vast and it's different and it changes, and there can be a container for um, you know the pain you feel in a relationship, and it can be a container for processing grief or life transition, and so you're using your writing as part of a container.

Amy Ayres: 3:51

The irony is that I thought it was going to be that, because I know people in the industry who write through their grief and that's an amazing thing and it is something that I have done. But the act of being a writer and being an author and the whole scheme of trying to understand the publishing industry is a whole job in itself that I feel is often required in parenting you know, like you have a rough day with your kid the day before and you say, well, that's, we're going to sleep it off and we're going to wake up tomorrow and we're going to try again.

Amy Ayres: 4:27

you know, and I feel like all of that you know was getting like stored up in my body and I was putting it in other things, like it wasn't just the act of sitting down and typing out words or typing out the grief, which is all part of it as well. You know it's, it's developing that resilience at the same time.

Kayla Huszar: 4:47

Do you think that resilience has transferred into motherhood, or have you had to learn it again on the other side of the fence?

Amy Ayres: 4:54

Oh, you know, it's so funny because what I found I would say immediately like a postpartum was I had a lot of anxiety around, am I going to do this right? Um, because I've had a lot of time to practice so I better. You know, because I, when I was uh child free, I was taking uh child development courses. Um, I was taking like child psychology courses and I was getting smart in the way that you think you are when you're a child-free person about. Do you know you're gonna do it right, you're gonna do it better, and um, you know, and then you have that immediate thing of like, this is my child and everything I do is because of them and who they are, and not who I think I am and what I want. And that's something you just don't learn until it's a thing happening in front of you.

Amy Ayres: 5:52

But I did try. I said, okay, you know, I want my kid to be perfect. Everybody wants their kid to be perfect. You know, I don't want my kid to ever feel any pain or be unhappy. I never want my kid to deal with any of the things that I dealt with, and that's just so unrealistic. And the resilience factor comes from saying, okay, dummy, stop being so unrealistic and deal with the situation at hand. You know, cope with the thing. You know you didn't think she was going to be born with jaundice, but you're going to have to figure that out. You know she was two weeks early. You weren't planning on that. Figure it out, you know. So, yeah, I think I take a lot of that. It's just like every day. It's just like how do we not have a meltdown and figure this out and just move forward?

Kayla Huszar: 6:49

What does? What does lowering your expectations look like? You know like, yeah, I think for every person it might be a little bit different, but you know generally, can you see that playing out in your day? Is there like, is there a ritual, or is there like something that you do to like, catch yourself in it?

Amy Ayres: 7:12

Um, honestly, like I think my expectations are just already low. Like I don't know if that's, you know I just that's how I cope with it. Just the humor of it it's like I expected to have a kid at 25. So the bar's on the floor after having one at 39. I, you know, every time anything good happens I get to raise the bar a little bit off the floor. But you know I already have that mentality of like this is good, things are good, good enough.

Amy Ayres: 7:47

Don't don't expect the moon in in these real life situations. It's just not how life is. And you know, I think, if you take that approach in parenting, like you know that your two year old is going to have tantrums and you know they're going to take off their diaper and they're going to run around and they're going to you know your two-year-old is going to have tantrums and you know they're gonna take off their diaper and they're gonna run around and they're gonna, you know, become obsessed with a hairbrush, if you know, going in that those things are gonna happen, like you're not like completely blown back when they do, and and you can, you know you don't even need to cope in that moment. You just say, oh okay, yeah, she's gonna be. She's gonna act like a two-year-old today, because she's two, let's deal with it.

Kayla Huszar: 8:30

Yeah, yeah, you know I heard you say you know you were trying to study to become kind of a good mom, or you know what you think a good mom is. Can you share what that experience was like for you?

Amy Ayres: 8:50

It really started in early college years as a need to pay my way. I found that the I always had a love of nurturing children in like an academic setting and but it was the most convenient thing to work around. My schedule was to teach preschool and you know, I would teach preschool during the day and then I would go to class at night for something completely unrelated I was going for like comparative literature and poetry and stuff, but I was, you know, teaching one-year-olds ABCs in the morning and then a lot went into that. As my first boss was just this most amazing like sort of academically minded person around teaching children, like he understood the benefit of teaching young children, that he didn't want his classroom to just be like a daycare where parents dump their kid and they just sat there all day. Well, so the parent, you know, like that kind of thing. He wanted the parent to show up feeling good about what their child had learned that day. You know that they were happy and and well fed and becoming well-rounded little people and um, so he taught me so much of these sort of um like psychological theories around teaching children that I would not have learned otherwise, because that was not my wheelhouse and I learned so many things like the Montessori method and the Rye method and all of these things of how to understand children what's going on inside their head, instead of having that authoritative. You know, this is how we learn and you know, like going and getting down and dirty in their world and and understanding things at their high level, things like that, and that fascinated me. I was like there's another option, like there's another way to like raise children besides you know option Like there's another way to like raise children besides you know, being authoritative and bossy. And you know, and I said, oh, I have to keep going with this. Like I want to know as much, because I guess that's my brain. This is like a sponge. I just want to learn everything about a thing that fascinates me.

Amy Ayres: 11:08

And so over the process, I've been in situations where I worked at other places that were not. They were the daycare, they did not, they didn't care. I mean it was. It's sad that they exist. You know they, they're, they're there to take the parents' money, and then you know the kids sit there and eat crackers all day and then they go home. Like that's just how some of their models are, but the good places. I think you know they. It's not just a marketing ploy. They really try and the teachers they hire actually care, and so I always started to start sought out those places. I always wanted to see some of my best friends in the whole world, or other preschool teachers that I met over the years who were like aren't you a?

Kayla Huszar: 11:51

writer and like yeah, but this is really.

Amy Ayres: 11:54

I still care about this, you know, and so I had that sort of you know that building of, like all of these, those building blocks of an of it going in and then every year, and the same people were like when are you gonna have a kid? Like you'd make such a great mom and you know so much about this stuff and like I can't even imagine, like how amazing your kid's going to be when you finally have one. Like, ah, so much pressure. But you know, eventually I do take that in every day. You know I really care about my daughter's literacy. I care about, you know, if she feels understood. I care, you know, about the best way to handle her big emotions when she has those inevitable tantrums, and and not making her feel badly for not being able to express herself. You know the way that I would express myself in the same situation Like I like this brush. I'm going to hold it all day. I'm talking about the brush. That was like that was the thing. Do you have you heard of the unbrush? No, it's like. It's like this magical brush that's all over like Tik TOK and Instagram and everything, and it's it completely just detangles your hair Like after like just a couple brush throughs, no matter how, and my hair is very thick, it gets tangled really easily. So I was like I need this and I got it. I got one for me and I got one for my daughter and the first time I brushed her hair through with it, she grabbed it away from me and she held onto it like this and she wouldn't give it back and she was like it was a.

Amy Ayres: 13:33

It was a whole thing where I had to go into like preschool teacher mode. I'm like, okay, how do we handle this? Like I don't want her to cry and she's going to cry when I take it away and, um, how do I work through this transition? So it was like the first day I took it away, she cried uh, we would swim. The next day I brushed her hair day, I took it away. She cried, we just went in. The next day I brushed her hair again, she took it away from me, held it, took it away from her. She cried. I said, okay, well, we're going to put it in the closet, we're going to close the closet door and then we'll get it back out tomorrow, and so like two or three days of that. Finally, on the fourth day she was just like butterbrush and it went in the closet and it only comes out for 10 minutes every day and goes back in the closet. But um, yeah, it was the whole thing. You know, you don't know, that's not in a psychology textbook no, you know, no one.

Kayla Huszar: 14:27

One night, my, uh, my two-year-old needed, uh, swim goggles, the three random dog stuffies that we had in the house. We had to go all over the house looking for the stuffies that he needed to sleep with. There was at least two other like random kind of items that he needed to go to sleep. And I remember thinking and this was my second, so I had some context to like how long these phases last. Um, but I in my first, uh, cause I have a nine-year-old and so the the landscape of parenting and Instagram and you know, dr Becky was not online then um was is very different. Gentle parenting wasn't quite mainstream yet, and so I, anyway, I had some context to how long this phase would last, and so it was very interesting how I handled it the second time versus how I would have handled it the first time. The first time, I probably would have been more like you don't need this shit to go to bed, like you go to bed every night. This is ridiculous, right? Also, my first didn't have such attachment to things. My second has a little bit more of an attachment to items and um, so when he needed the swim goggles and the dog stuffies and you know we had to go traipsing through the house for all these things.

Kayla Huszar: 15:45

There was something inside of me that was different, because I knew that the temper, the, the phase was temporary and that I really had to walk myself through some of that narrative of like you're giving in or you're like you're um, like you're allowing. I think for some older generations they would even view that as like manipulation, like they, they don't need these four things to go to sleep, right, because as an adult, we like censor and we don't give ourselves permission, right, and so so there was, there was these moments, you know, in in my parenting where I was like in this, like juxtaposition of like am I giving in, my, am I meeting these needs? I have the capacity tonight, but what if I don't have capacity next week to like go through the house and find all of the items and I also have like a screaming older child who needs me, you know. And so there's just like all of these, um, these decisions, just about, like my example is like swim goggles and your example is like brush.

Kayla Huszar: 16:56

But there, there are these moments in parenting where, where you think, is this how? This? The books told me I should respond. Is this how you know um someone on Instagram who I I trust and I I value? Their opinion is is how they would handle the parenting experience. Is this, how? Is this how my parents would have parented me? Completely? Yeah, and those moments can be really complex.

Amy Ayres: 17:28

I hate to say it, but I do go into a lot of my parenting, thinking about how I was parented, you know. I know coming from a position of somebody who didn't know they were neurodiverse until they were in their late thirties, because my parents were like, oh, that's not a thing. You know, don't do those things. Just stop being weird. That's your job. Just go out in the world and not don't embarrass us. You know that was, was always, that was my family was. Please don't embarrass us. And uh, so you know you work hard at those masking behaviors.

Amy Ayres: 18:01

You work hard at learning how to not be embarrassing, and you never get. You know, the one of the reasons I didn't let my daughter keep the brush is because I knew she would. She would want to take it to bed with her and then she would be up all night talking to the brush and not sleeping. So that's really the only time I ever take anything away from my child is if I know it's going to keep them up all night. But but that often, you know, I do, I let.

Amy Ayres: 18:28

I'm like okay, does this make you happy here? Take it Like and I know that I don't want to think of myself as permissive, but I know it's like is it really going to hurt her to have this right now? Is it going to hurt anyone else? No, okay, fine, just, you know, whatever makes you happy for the next 20 minutes, I'm fine with that. You know, have you eaten? Have you slept well? Are you comfortable? Are you happy? Nothing else matters, you know, and and I feel that as a parent, sometimes I catch myself or, like you know, my daughter will do something silly and I'm just like my daughter, you know, like, deal with it.

Amy Ayres: 19:06

You think it's weird, I don't care, you know, and I try to take the exact opposite approach to being like oh, this is such a bad reflection on my parenting and this is making me look really bad right now.

Kayla Huszar: 19:17

Like you know, I just don't even like think that way, not how I function, so yeah yeah, yeah, and the um, the masking, the masking piece is first of all so very real, um, also late, late diagnosed adhd. Once we started to see some, I well, I mean I saw tendencies in my son, my oldest, since he was about three so I kind of knew it was coming, but um the uh, the reality.

Kayla Huszar: 19:54

Reality for me and my husband is that we also are both neurodiverse and I get asked sometimes what's an example? Why might he do that in this scenario but not in another scenario? Why might he do that in this scenario but not in another scenario? Or you know, those hard parenting moments that people can describe, especially for mothers, because there is research to absolutely prove that children are, like a ridiculous number of percentage, worse for their mothers than than for anybody else. And there can be this like conversation that happens, and and. Um, there can be this like conversation that happens, and, and. And my response is often well, it's because he's, he's masking.

Kayla Huszar: 20:39

In these moments he could be like legitimately and genuinely regulated.

Kayla Huszar: 20:44

For sure, there are those moments, right, um, but there are other moments where I, like I could see it, like I can watch it unfolding at family functions or or something where, like he is, he is holding himself back and and, truthfully, sometimes it is like an emotional regulation, like I don't, I don't put masking into the category of good or bad, it just like it just is.

Kayla Huszar: 21:09

And I think in certain situations, masking can, can be a skill, it can be a resource, um, that we use, and in other situations, um, it is a I want to hide a part of myself where I don't feel safe, you know, to show up in a certain way, and so, um, you know, I think in some situations, even as adults, we use it as a resource and as a skill, but that that masking can be it's, it's a, it's a real part of that neurodivergence, because, you know, as a child who grew up in the eighties and the nineties, it's like that those were bad kids, right, the, the people. Truthfully, I don't feel any shame for getting my child diagnosed or medicated, but I think my life would have been very different had I gotten an early diagnosis, because I would have been one of those kids then.

Amy Ayres: 22:06

Yeah, it's, it's very tricky. That was a very hard time, I do. I remember that that it was always like the delight.

Amy Ayres: 22:13

My daughter can't have ADHD because she's, you know, bookish and you know, writes little plays and stuff. She's not like that little boy over there keeps running back and forth into the wall for no reason, like you know, like there's a different, like divide there. We can't compare them and and that was a thing I think for my child, if it were to come to that, they, the doctor's always like oh, she's fine, she's fine, she's fine. You know they're still in that mode Cause she's only two. But I know, I know, I know it's coming, cause, like you said, my, my partner and I are both neurodiverse and you know so it's inevitable. But I don't want her to grow up with the anxiety that I feel. I have just recently sort of started to get over, like a little bit, in that, you know, in social situations or in professional situations or in situations like this where you go did I laugh at that joke too hard? Uh, did I clear my throat too many times?

Kayla Huszar: 23:11

You know, do I do? I play with my?

Amy Ayres: 23:13

hair too much when I'm on podcast interviews.

Amy Ayres: 23:17

Um, you know, I don't want her to have that, those mess of thoughts that in the back of her mind all the time about every little thing that she does, and if that's something that I can help alleviate for her, I mean, I feel like that would be huge, because that's something in my life that's always kind of held me back. It's's like, you know, I can't have this conversation with Kayla because, you know, if I sat for an hour and thought about it, I would think about all the reasons why I'm not qualified to have this conversation with her. And she, you know she's had, you know, like the anxiety, the negative thoughts, the intrusive stuff of like, oh, you know, like she, she's an expert on this topic and I'm just, I'm just a mom who writes books. You know, like the, the down, the talking yourself down. I just, if I can just help one child not have to and it's mine then I've done my job. But yeah, it's a's a whole thing. It's a whole thing. You're just learning day by day.

Kayla Huszar: 24:19

It is a whole thing. And I we've gone like full circle from like the, the attempt to have a child, the journey, the, the, the money, the time, the emotions, the emotions you know to go through that. And you know they're here and you're, you're in the mom club because you're not in the club till. You're in the club right, and like, when you're in the club and you're on the other side of the fence and you're like take me back, can like is there a hidden portal where I can like go back to my child-free life? I, you know, I, I love, I love being a mom, but man, I miss child-free life. I, you know, I, I love, I love being a mom, but man, I miss child-free life.

Kayla Huszar: 24:57

And and I think that can be true, whether you have a child at 19 or 39, and there's just this, like there's this juxtaposition of I equally love it and I equally want it to stop, equally want it to stop, and so it's a little bit of that. And then you throw in neurodiversity to all of that and your own like creative endeavors, and it's, it's a lot. And so can you share one piece of advice, and unsolicited, at this point? So if you listeners if you're not in a place to receive advice, your permission to move on to the next one. If you had one piece of advice for the listeners out there who may be in this, this position of juggling life and creativity, or life and self-care, or life and emotional regulation, what is, what is the thing that you wish they knew?

Amy Ayres: 26:05

No, everyone's doing it and you're not alone. And and I know that's so trite, but you aren't, because every time I think I'm the only person, like on my work team, who's dealing with a thing, I get a thousand Slack messages of like oh no, this thing happened and I can't do this because of this, and like my house is burning to the ground and or, like you know, my cousin's in the hospital or something. I was in a car accident, and it's like life is constantly happening and it isn't. This is something that I have definitely learned over the years. Life is not just happening to you, um, life is happening to everyone. You are I, you're amazing, you're lovely person, but you're not that special, and I wrote an entire book about a woman who really felt that way, that life was only happening to her and that she must be like just bad luck. She sees the highlight reels. She sees everybody else succeeding and getting what they want and getting it on the right timeline, which is huge.

Amy Ayres: 27:19

Uh, for me, like there is no right timeline and the people who think there is are highly judgmental. Am I wrong? Like they're just putting it out there. You know you don't get to tell other people when the right time is for them to have a child or when they should happening, and guess what? Their body might not be on that same page. Their brain is, but their body's not. So what are you going to do about that? It's not your problem.

Amy Ayres: 27:46

A lot of feels about that, just say. But it's not just happening to you. You are in the same boat as everybody else. Other people are just really good at pretending in a way that you might not be. And I'm not saying get better at pretending, I'm just saying face that reality, see it, see the pretending, see the realness and understand the difference and learn it. And you will find the people, the real people, who are in the world who were like I'm struggling, I'm hurting, I this isn't what I wanted, you know I want. I wish I had kids, I wish I didn't have kids, I wish, you know, everything was different Grass is always greener kind of thing. And the people who are like I love my life, it's perfect, or the people you kind of want to stay away from, sorry.

Kayla Huszar: 28:39

Because life is happening to everyone. Because life is happening to everyone.

Amy Ayres: 28:45

Yeah, yeah and no, and no amount of success. I mean, money is great. You can throw money at problems all day long, but no amount of success is going to make life better. You want the kid, you get the kid and now you have a kid and you have everything that comes along with that and you can look at other people and say, yeah, you're right, this is hard and for me, I was realistic. I said I know it's going to be hard but I don't care.

Amy Ayres: 29:18

That's kind of how I was. I know this. I know the childbirth is going to be painful, but I don't care. I know that I'm going to be changing poopy diapers for the next four years. I don't care. Okay, I'm not naive idiot. I know I've seen other people go through it. I know what it looks like. I don't care, and that's always been my attitude is. It's the one thing where I was like I'm going to get on the sinking ship because I want to be on the ship. So take with that whatever you want to do with a grain of salt, but that's my perspective on the whole thing.

Kayla Huszar: 29:55

Oh, thank you, Amy, for this gloriously rich conversation, everything from, um, you know, struggling to have a child and the timeline of all of that to becoming one, and the neurodiverse aspects of all of that in the hairbrush, your kids getting attached to the random items that you, you know you gotta navigate those things, and so thank you so much for being here and anybody listening. If you would like to um rate the podcast or give us a review or connect with Amy or me, our links are all below in the show notes and I wish you a wonderful day, whatever your day needs to be. Thanks so much, kayla.