Chill Like a Mother Podcast
This show shares stories, offers tips and tricks, and provides education to help you feel more chill like the mother you know you want to be.
Hey! I'm Kayla Huszar, a creative counsellor who's all about unconventional therapy that encourages creativity, curiosity and finding what makes you feel alive (again). I've helped so many women navigate the waves (ups and downs) of motherhood, and I'm here for you, too!
So, if you're feeling overwhelmed or need a moment to yourself, grab your headphones and press play on an episode!
You're not alone, and you already know what you need.
Chill Like a Mother Podcast
Beyond the Mom Mask: ADHD, Authenticity, and Breaking Free from Perfect Parenting
In this episode of Chill Like a Mother, I sit down with the brilliant Stacey and Stephanie to have a real, raw, and slightly irreverent chat about the wild ride that is gentle parenting - especially for neurodivergent moms.
We’re peeling back the layers on the emotional toll of motherhood, the sneaky ways shame and guilt creep in, and why holding onto our own identity and creative expression isn’t just "nice to have" - it’s essential for survival.
We’re also getting real about how motherhood doesn’t have to mean losing yourself (even if it sometimes feels like you've been permanently rebranded as “snack dispenser” and “keeper of everyone's lost socks”).
More than anything, this convo is a love letter to every mom who’s ever felt like she’s drowning in expectations, reminding you that prioritizing yourself isn’t selfish - it’s revolutionary.
Here’s what we dive into:
- Gentle parenting is hard. Period. And when you’ve got a neurodivergent brain? It’s like playing life on expert mode with a controller that keeps disconnecting.
- Feeling like you’ve lost yourself? That’s not just "a phase" - it’s a wake-up call. Time to reclaim what makes you you.
- That heavy mom guilt? It’s probably shame in disguise.
- Self-compassion is your freaking lifeline, especially if ADHD is in the mix.
- You weren’t meant to do this alone. Finding your people (aka a supportive, non-judgy village) is everything.
- Creativity isn’t just a hobby - it’s a way back to yourself.
- Putting yourself first doesn’t make you a bad mom. It makes you a whole, thriving human - who, coincidentally, also happens to be a great mom.
- Trusting your intuition takes practice.
- Society’s idea of motherhood? Maybe it’s time we… gently set that on fire and build something better.
- When you find yourself again, motherhood stops feeling like a life sentence and starts feeling like your life.
Bottom line? If you’ve ever felt like you’re failing at this whole “gentle parenting” thing or like you’re slowly disappearing under the weight of motherhood, this episode is your permission slip to take up space, get messy, and do motherhood on your own terms.
Listen in, exhale deeply, and let’s rewrite the rules together. 💛
- Instagram: @mother_plus_podcast
- Free resource for your audience: The ADHD Good Girls Survival Kit
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Gentle Parenting and Self-Identity
02:45 The Emotional Toll of Motherhood
05:53 Navigating Shame and Guilt in Parenting
08:50 Finding Your Voice and Needs
11:40 The Importance of Community and Connection
14:41 Reclaim
Meet Kayla Huszar, the Host of the Chill Like a Mother Podcast
Kayla Huszar is a Registered Social Worker and Expressive Arts Therapist who helps mothers reconnect with their authentic selves through embodied art-making. She encourages moms to embrace the messy, beautiful realities of their unique motherhood journeys. Whether through the podcast, 1:1 sessions or her signature Motherload Membership, Kayla creates a brave space for mothers to explore their identities beyond parenting, reconnect with their intuition, and find creative outlets for emotional expression and self-discovery.
Thank you for letting me be a part of your day—kids running amok and all! If this episode helped you feel a little more chill, please leave a rating or review. Your feedback helps the podcast reach more moms who need to hear it.
Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Chill Like a Mother podcast. I am here with Stacey and Stephanie and I'm just going to start with our little ADHD blunder this morning. So Stacey and Stephanie so graciously sent me this email. We love what you're doing, we want to connect and my brain read that as let's be on their podcast, but really they were asking to be on mine, so we've pivoted and we've talked it out.
Speaker 1:We've already, before we hit recording, we started talking about some of the myths and the expectations and the pressures of gentle parenting in the context of being a potentially dysregulated, diagnosed or undiagnosed ADHD woman and what that means is the larger context. But what we are here to talk about today is how, when we suppress our own I'm going to call them creative urges, whether you facilitate that in a real creative way or an artist way or a music way, or just like the way that you bake, or the way that you show up in the world, the clothes you want to wear, the socks you want to wear when you suppress that, it is really hard to show up regulated and present in motherhood it sure is.
Speaker 3:It sure is, and it takes some time before you can actually recognize that you're even doing that. I think really early on when you first become a mother for the first time, you're so deep in it that you don't even realize how much you've lost yourself. You said before we started recording that one of your clients you know used to listen to Slipknot, and then she either felt like it wasn't allowed anymore as a mother or it was just kind of something she stopped doing because she was probably listening to too much Baby Shark. I don't know, but you don't realize. And then you get to a point where maybe you're getting some sleep and you look in the mirror and you're like, oh my God, what the fuck? Yeah, where did I go Right? And so that's like the first step, right. You have to even get to the point where you realize you've lost yourself before you can start finding yourself again.
Speaker 2:And sometimes you don't notice for a really long time. I think it's like you said you come out of a fog. My brother's a psychoanalyst and when I had my first baby 18 years ago and I was like, oh what. He referred it to, that beginning. You know, you hear about like the fourth trimester, but he talked about the mother, infant, dyad, and I'm like like as an entity, right, like before. They're like walking away from you or like having you know language and opinions. It's like you're the same thing, right.
Speaker 2:And so I think, when all of a sudden they individuate and then you become acutely aware of the absence of your own needs being met, like when you have a baby, it's almost like just a mushy extension of yourself. I mean, like I was still, like I'd sit on the couch for hours breastfeeding and watching the marathons of the closer, like my needs were still being met. But then all of a sudden, you're like, oh, this isn't, this isn't me, this isn't just my externalized uterus, this is a person who is now taking away from all the things that made me feel like myself. But you don't even have the language or the cognition to recognize it. You just emotionally explode inside yourself. Yeah, yes.
Speaker 1:Oh, the emotional explosion is like giving me such a metaphor in my whole being of what that actually comes out of. Bodies like, and we use names like anxiety and burnout and guilt, which is totally misconstrued, by the way. If you feel guilty, inherently in the definition, you're motivated to change what mom's label is. Mom, guilt is actually shame.
Speaker 2:I'm like you're right, it's not guilt, it's.
Speaker 1:I'm like you're right, it's not guilt, it's shame, it's shame because it's not I did a bad thing or I took it too far, or I wasn't on my game. Today it's I am fucking bad. Yeah right, I am a failure. I should not be doing this. I cannot do this. And then, if it's deep and dark enough and we have the predisposition to that, it comes out as I shouldn't be parenting at all, like somebody else is way better at this than me.
Speaker 2:And if you're neurodivergent, that imposter syndrome is going to be more acute. That internalized, that imposter syndrome is going to be more acute. That internalized, it's like rejection, sensitive dysphoria RSD is so common in women with ADHD, it's like. But it's like coming from ourselves. It's like we're rejecting ourselves as being good moms or being capable, and we assume that other people are perfectly happy having abandoned themselves. And so, number one we've self-abandoned. Number two we have a sense of shame because we didn't want to self-abandon. We still want to be ourselves, and that surely means there's something wrong with us, right?
Speaker 1:And then third, how do we reconcile all of that in modern intensive do it right, parenting Right?
Speaker 2:There's no space. There's no space for our self-awareness or our self-compassion, and there's no nuance. It's like we've just been fed into a machine that wasn't built for us, and that's the thing. One of the reasons Stacey and I bonded was because we think that there is a kind of mom who takes to this a little bit more naturally, who's maybe a little less tightly wound. Not trying to like negate the individual needs of any type of mother, but there are some moms that they recalibrate. Yes, and if you are, we've all met them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we all, we've all met them in our baby group or at the library at story time, where you just know like they're tired for sure. Yeah, but they're, but they're, they are in their element. This is, this is what they were meant to do, or speaking of mom.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're yeah, they, they have a chill that you don't have. Yeah, you don't sense that under the surface there's like a boiling pot of water, um, and I think what we do is we eat the shame, right, because there's nowhere to put it, because it's embarrassing to be like do you know what I wish I could just do, like get rid of this baby for a week and just like fuck around, right, like I just want to write stories and take a nap and get massages and listen to my music.
Speaker 3:And good moms, don't say or think those things and when you find the woman or the mom you can say those things to. Then you know you found your people.
Speaker 1:Yes, I remember very distinctly this moment when I had shared with a friend, I took a risk and I shared with a friend that I had, like, full on, lost my mind in front of and at my tiny little person, who I loved so much.
Speaker 1:I would want to eat them, Like, oh my God, I love them so much and yet like losing my mind on them, that if that would have been my partner, like it would have been like World War III, Like you know, like I was so in the dysregulation that if that had been another adult, they would have been like you need to leave, Like this is not okay. You are on the verge of like toxic and unhealthy words and body language right now. And and she just said to me and I can't even remember what she said to me, only that I felt so heard and held, that I wasn't alone. Because then she said, oh my God, let me tell you what happened last week, you know. And then it started the dialogue around it and then I was able to see it and then get help right, Because then it was like I'm telling you and you're holding me and that's, that's perfectly OK, but I can't just now let it stay as that.
Speaker 2:That's and that's the difference. Right, like I could just almost feel my own nervous system let down with being held by someone in that way. But yeah, it again. It's not a statement I am a monster, I shouldn't be a mom. It's a statement of I am not regulated and it's not OK for me to feel this way. Not OK as in I'm a bad mom, not.
Speaker 2:OK, as in you deserve to feel good. None of us enjoy feeling dysregulated, and so it is something that we that we want to to steer away from. But I think so many times we come at it only from the shame, only from the prohibition, like do not do this, you are not allowed to do this, keep it in, don't explode. But really, the key is why did this happen? What is happening in my system? What need is not being met? And I think that we are so afraid of being selfish moms that we don't want to spend the time untangling that spool of thread. We don't want to to unravel it back to the beginning, where it's like guess what this is? This is your wiring. You are a highly sensitive, anxious, neurodivergent woman, and you have been missed by every professional and adult in your life. There are decades here of getting you to this point, and now you need to understand and have compassion and learn that your operating system is not that of the machine into which you have been fed. Here are your new operating instructions. Use them.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes, instructions use them, yes, yes, and the big asterisk of when you do not use them. You will end up exactly in this place because using them is absolutely essential. Like for me, my user manual is like time alone and that changes from week to week, but like time alone to be you, to pursue whatever you want to do. Medicaid, it is a resource. Right now in my life, the stage I'm in, it is a non-negotiable resource.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Thirdly, move your body. Not in a go for a run, go for a bike, whatever. Just move your body and try to take space to understand what those needs are so that you can communicate them. Because so much of, for me, my dysregulation is that my brain is going so fast that if someone was to even just give me all of the right environment, all of the right calming environment that I might need, and they asked me what do you need, I would probably say you can fuck off because I have no fucking idea.
Speaker 2:Well, yes, and also yes, if Tanya does not require the time alone, or that you look away from Tanya, right, like you look away from what other people's operating instructions say, follow yours, like we need permission to do that, and I think the time artist's way right now. And I'm on a chapter where Julia Cameron says something like you know, many people need this, or that we're supposed to do this or that. Here's what you want. You want to be left alone. And she put it in italics. I'm like, yes, julia, I want to be left alone. I want to be fucking left alone. That is all I want. I want everyone to leave me alone so I can think my brilliant thoughts and write my brilliant words and make my beautiful things. I don't want to do any of the other things. I want everybody to fuck off and I want to be left alone, and that's the thing we are not supposed to say.
Speaker 1:Yes, that is the thing we're not supposed to say.
Speaker 3:The problem is awareness and education. Because, if you might, you could not tell my 2017 self that I, I never, I never would have begun to understand that there were things I could do and that I wasn't a monster and that there was help. There was a diagnosis there was. I had no idea. All I thought was a diagnosis there was. I had no idea. All I thought was this is a secret I have to keep. Something is wrong with me. Shove it down more, hide it, hide it. Hide it. Put a smile on, pretend we have the fun silly mom conversations with the mom groups and act like everything's okay.
Speaker 2:Mask, yeah, masking, and so masking it, just it like that's why I love podcasting, that's why I love shows like yours and shows like ours is like let's just keep talking about it so that the brand new moms out there hear us and know oh, I am not a monster paradigm shift about what it means to be a mother, and it no longer should be a prerequisite that we throw our own needs and lives and passions and art on the fucking pyre right when we switch the paradigm and we say no, no, no, you don't have to do that. In fact, you shouldn't. You need to do it this way. You were told the wrong information Right, like we're not going to break this for moms until we learn how to do motherhood differently, and I don't know what that's going to take interviewing.
Speaker 1:I'm a Fair Play facilitator and I was interviewing another Fair Play facilitator earlier this week and she said women cannot change the world if we are exhausted and starving. Right, and that spoke so deeply to me, because exhausted and starvation isn't just about tired or sleep and food. It is so much bigger than that. It is allowing, allowing pushing through all of the societal bullshit to to follow those urges or to follow intuition or to follow anything that you might think or feel. And I think there's another big misconception out there about mother's intuition, because there are those people out there at the mom's groups who seem so much more chill and they're so much more relaxed and they just respond to their babies and it comes so easy to them.
Speaker 1:To me, and the information and the education that I've done around brains and and motherhood and how it comes out and social aspects and all those things, is that there are people who are there, there are hang on. There are not people who are intuitive and not intuitive. There are people who practice it and people who don't, and and and that's okay. If you fall in the category of don't and if that rubbed you the wrong way, I'm so sorry. Please resource yourself in whatever way you need to, if you had been believing this whole time that there are just people out there who are better at it, who have the mother's instinct to, who do all that, um, the the loudness of the world that we live in makes our own intuition impossible to access, unless we actually like sit down and spend time you have to do it intentionally, it's not, it's not going to be given to you.
Speaker 2:And you know, when I think about um, like the maiden mother crone archetype, um, my like beloved yoga teacher and massage therapist is like, oh, let's not forget the wild woman. The wild woman should be woven into all of these stages. And I think we hit motherhood and we're like get in mother mode. No bitch, your wild woman is still in there and that's the intuition, right. But you, she's not going to grab you and scream into your face, she's gonna whisper and you have to shut the fuck up and get quiet or you're not going to hear.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, because if anybody needs unsolicited advice right now, you don't need another book on how to feed your babies. You don't need another book on potty training. You don't need another book on relationships or how to be a human. You don't need that. We might need guides, we might need bits of that information. Did I buy a book when my baby was potty training? Yes, because I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.
Speaker 2:Those are great resources, but I think what we need more than that. I think we need our own recipe when we get to motherhood, and we are the only ones who can write it, and my recipe is you need more sleep than your partner and maybe than friend you had in adulthood. You need her. Your college best friends you need them. You need therapy, right, you need hours in the day when you were just writing and not being productive. You need someone else to clean your house. This is your recipe so that you can thrive in motherhood. That's what we need. We need to write our own books. We need to write our own operation manual.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely, and do either of you or both of you have a story where you felt like that husk of a person and how? How did you find your way back?
Speaker 2:You know, maybe you're still finding your way.
Speaker 3:No, yours is good, steph and I. Starting this podcast was how I found my way back. It was I had totally lost myself. I was a shell of myself. I was a creative, very creative human being, very social human being. I moved to Colorado and didn't know a lot of people made friends fast or, I should say, made acquaintances fast, not the same and 2020 happened and that wrecked me even more.
Speaker 3:My emotional dysregulation was horrific, like I was losing it constantly on the children that I love more than anything, and I was lost and scared and confused because I had always done everything so well up until that point Like we like to call it, the ADHD good girls, because I was straight, a high honor roll, gifted and talented, top of my class, you know like, came out, hit the ground, running internships and all the things, and I was forgetful and flighty and late all the time, but it was okay because I wasn't a mom and it didn't really matter and it was fun and I thought I always wanted to be a mom. And then I became a mom and I fell apart and just totally crumbled and and I couldn't figure out why I really couldn't figure out why I was so confused. I was like, why can I not do so when I had? I knew I needed something for myself. That's, that's all that. I think it's a podcast because that was kind of what was changing around that time and it wasn't a blog anymore, it was a podcast. I knew I didn't want to do it alone.
Speaker 3:Stephanie was my daughter's music teacher and she was this bright, bubbly, huge personality and you know how we talked earlier about when you find that person. Now, we weren't super close, but you know, when you have a sense about somebody that you're like, you're my people, you'll understand me. And so I asked her out for coffee and said, like I have this idea. It's about a podcast, but it's a motherhood podcast, but it's not about the kids, it's about the moms and it's about our ambivalence with not feeling happy with motherhood. And why is that?
Speaker 3:Mother Plus was because we wanted to to call out that, yes, we are mothers, but what else are we? Mother Plus entrepreneur, mother Plus artist. And so I just remember walking away from that. I still you know the moments that just stick in your head you don't think will ever leave. I remember walking away from that coffee date like floating, thinking oh, my God, this is it? This is this is what I needed. This is what I needed to get back in touch with myself. This is mine and it. I mean, I wouldn't say it was like rainbows and butterflies from there, but it was the first step. It was a shift, yeah.
Speaker 2:It was your path back to yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and it was a good fit, because I'd been writing about maternal ambivalence since my first child was born. I could not go gentle into that good night and so I immediately started I hate mommy blog, what a terrible diminutive, awful, reductive, patriarchal terminology. But I was like, fuck, yeah, I'm going to blog because and I'm going to blog about the stuff you're not supposed to say so I'd been writing and producing motherhood shows, and so that was kind of my jam. My problem was I did it all the time, but I couldn't shake the guilt that I was doing it Right, like I kept giving myself creative outlets. But it doesn't really count as much when you're shaming yourself all the while, does it?
Speaker 3:Yes, or when you have a partner who doesn't support you Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so yes, I don't think I broke through until I got a divorce and was able to be like, oh, and now my life is mine.
Speaker 1:Yes, there is something to be said about reclaiming that time for yourself and doing the activity, but feeling like you should be somewhere else, right, or that you should be doing something else.
Speaker 2:Yes, and that's the thing that takes time. My motto has always been feel the guilt and do it anyway. But always the aspiration is to at some point ditch the feel the guilt part and just stick with the do it anyway. I'm getting a lot closer, but I've got teenagers. You know I'm a single mom of two teenage girls and and they are fucking incredible feminist, know themselves proud of their neurodivergence Right, and we're living authentic lives together and I feel free reclamation era and my hope is that it would take mothers less time to get to the reclamation era of their lives and maybe at some point reclamation isn't going to be necessary because we won't have amputated our souls upon delivering our babies. It's like, do our lives inevitably have to follow this course of wild, unwild rewild? What if we just skipped the middleman?
Speaker 1:right.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes, If you could give one piece of advice, unsolicited of course, because we're not being honest on how to fast track that, even though you and I know that it's not fast. You know, easy in premise, harder in practice, but you could fast track that process. What would be the unsolicited advice you give to somebody who is right in the middle of that middle part?
Speaker 2:Who's?
Speaker 1:like I've lost myself. I know it. I know that I've lost myself and I'm going to the recalibration. I'm going to the reclamation, I'm going to the wild self.
Speaker 2:I would say sit in silence as much as you can. Sit in stillness and listen for that voice. Don't rush it, don't judge it, and then let yourself journal it all out in the most self-indulgent way you possibly can. What do you want? What do I want? What do I want? What am I yearning for? Let yourself daydream the most beautiful landscape in life for yourself, and then ask yourself what you need to do to get there. And what's holding you back? Because my suspicion is at the core of all of it is I don't deserve it, I'm not supposed to want these things. And so I think, giving yourself unconditional love. And if you can't do it, imagine it's your child. Imagine it's your child saying, mommy, I have these dreams, I have these things I want. And you're saying, oh, my beloved, go get them, build yourself a beautiful world. Say that to yourself. Guess what? You're going to be a better mom if you do, if you need to hear that.
Speaker 3:Agree, Absolutely agree. It took me a long time to start sitting with myself, which I think has a lot to do with ADHD as well. The most hated advice from any ADHD woman is you just need to meditate more, Because I'm like what?
Speaker 3:You're like bitch. Please I would if I could Right exactly. However, I have come a long way and I do actually meditate in the mornings. It's guided, it's short, I can do it.
Speaker 3:Sitting with myself has been a game changer. But my thing is find your people. You have to find your people and it's so much easier said than done. But it's kind of like when you're looking for a therapist and you try one and you're like that sucked and you give up. You have to keep trying, because finding my people changed my world. It made me remember who I was.
Speaker 3:And so if you're in the thick of motherhood and you're exhausted and you feel like you're crumbling and you have friends, but it's all surface conversations, it's just making you feel worse because either those women are not telling you their whole truths or they are and you're not on the same page as them, and so you're feeling like something's wrong with me because I don't really feel this. But I'm going to smile and nod and talk about the surface conversation and the weather and how my baby's walking is going and stuff like that. It's like you've got to go deeper and go to the places and find your people, because once you find your people and you start speaking your truth and you take your mask off. That's when you remember who you are well and that's what I would argue.
Speaker 2:Don't panic, you haven't lost yourself, you just forgot. Like that's. That's the thing that I would want to leave people with. Don't panic, you're not lost, you just forgot. All you have to do is remember.
Speaker 1:You can remember anytime you want, not the best spaces to hang out in. Of course, trial and error is creative spaces. Typically, mom groups aren't inherently creative. They are based on milestones and phases of life and they're lovely, they're great. I host mom's groups, but if you used to be creative and that feels like the piece that's missing or that you've forgotten to continue doing, creative spaces is where you're going to find some of those people, whether that is online or in person or in Julia Cameron's book or in any of the books that are written about creativity and self-expression, not just as fun hobbies, not just for kids, for adults too. We all need it. In any book, any self-development book I have ever read, it comes down to self-expression and some form of creativity in the way that the broad definition is, not in the way that we think about it as artistry.
Speaker 1:No survival as creativity. Yes, yeah, thank you so much, stacey and Stephanie, for being on the podcast. If anybody would like to reach out to them, all of their information is below and we will see you next week. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Kayla.
