Moms Need Other Moms

Me recently at brunch with my mom friends. xo.

 This is the first of a series about what the system calls peer support and I call friendship.

I was a young mom when my eldest son Isaac was born 32 years ago. I didn’t have any friends who had babies, and paternity leave and work from home was not a thing, so my husband went to work every morning, leaving me alone in the house with my little baby. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing (sorry Isaac).

My early days with a new baby were long and lonely. 

I struggled to breastfeed, but luckily I was determined to keep on nursing. 

This struggle led me to La Leche League, which is a support group for breastfeeding mothers. 

It was at La Leche League meetings that I learned the value of peer support.

At a meeting, I met one a mom named Jill, who had a baby around the same age. We lived in different neighbourhoods that were connected by a path in the river valley. I distinctly remember meeting up on that path with our babies and taking turns walking back to each other’s homes for conversation, coffee and banana bread.

Moms need other moms.*

(*Dads too of course, or anybody else who makes up a family, but this is my story about moms).

Three years later, when I was seven months pregnant with my daughter Ella, our family moved to brand-new city where I knew nobody. Joining La Leche League there saved me. I met another new mom named Maureen who introduced me to her world, and I eventually trained to be a La Leche League Leader.

That training taught me many things: the importance of greetings and first impressions. How listening was more crucial than fixing. That it was healing to give mothers a safe space to be together.

Six years later, life happened - as it is apt to do - and I was on my second marriage, living in yet another city. We were a blended family, a household of four kids under the age of 10, and I was pregnant with my third child.

Surprise! Our love child Aaron was born and soon after, he was diagnosed with Down syndrome. Almost a decade of mothering under my belt, and I had to learn to be a mother all over again. This time I was the mother of a disabled baby.

I knew I needed other moms. I tried venturing out to a community mom and baby yoga class. 

“My baby has Down syndrome,” I blurted out in the introductions. “Why didn’t you get prenatal testing?” gasped one of the other moms. I fled that class, knowing that the world of moms with typical babies was no longer a safe space for me.

Again, I sat at home alone with my little baby. People didn’t seem to understand that I loved my baby no matter what, but we didn’t fit into the world as I knew it anymore.

Remembering what La Leche had gifted me, I dug around looking for a support group for moms who had babies who had disabilities. There was none, so I wrote a letter and sent it to the local Down Syndrome Society. 

“Can you please mail this to moms who have had babies born in 2003?” I asked.  They did. The letter simply contained an invitation with a date to come to my house for coffee.

When the day arrived, I sat nervously with my baby. Three moms bravely knocked on my door with their little babies with Down syndrome in tow. We made our own peer support group of four, and we met monthly, rotating coffee dates at each other’s houses.

After a while, I thought about all the other moms sitting at home by themselves with their little babies with Down syndrome. The disability world was teaching me that when you see a gap, it is up to you to fill it. Nobody is going to do it for you.

When Aaron was two years old, our national Down Syndrome Society offered two-day intensive peer support training to create programs to visit new families who had babies with Down syndrome. 

I had desperately needed a visit like that when Aaron was born. Now it was my chance to fill that gap for others.

I travelled with another mom for the training. Fast forward many dozens of hours of self-reflection, coordinating and training others, we had a brand-new peer support initiative called the Visiting Parents Program. I co-coordinated that program with two other moms before Aaron entered school. Our team visited dozens of families over that time, to say congratulations, hold their sweet little babies and let them know they weren’t alone. I’m proud to say that program still exists (and is now called the Downright Lucky Team) and it helps introduce families to their new community, and importantly, lets them know they are in good company.

Moms need other moms.

I handed over the reins of this program when I got further away from the new mom experience and became busy advocating for inclusion for Aaron in school. 

I seem to have an itch to begin new groups and started an Inclusion Group in Aaron’s elementary school.  Us moms who had kids with funding for educational assistant support met every month at the coffee shop in the local recreation centre.  We vented, shared information, schemed, advocated and planned presentations to Parent Council. (You can see I have a recurring theme about meeting for coffee).

Moms need other moms.

When Aaron was 12, we moved to another city. I started all over again finding moms. Busy with work, caregiving and advocating in high school, I struggled to find other moms in a big new city.

I had drifted away from my Down syndrome community because of circumstance and geography. I was alone yet again when Aaron graduated from high school four years ago in the middle of a pandemic.

This time my baby was no longer a baby. He was grown up, 18 years old, with all the unknowns of the adult world looming ahead of us.

My search for moms began again. Where I live, there is zero support for moms who had adult kids with disabilities. If you are lucky, you already had group of moms from when your kid was a baby. I was not so lucky in this new city, so I started digging around from scratch.

Through that digging, I found another life buoy in the form of ACT workshops. ACT stands for Acceptance and Commitment Training. It was started by CAMH, to address research that proved that caregivers often have high levels of stress, depression and anxiety. (I must note that this is not because of our loved ones. It is because of the systems and society that we live in).

I was getting older and I was very tired. But I took a leap and signed up for a set of online workshops, where I was welcomed and mentored by ACT Facilitator Lee Steel, another mom who was further along in her caregiving journey.

Zoom forward.

Last night I graduated from the six-week long ACT Facilitator Training Program. Now that I’m trained, I’ll be working with another mom and a clinician to offer ACT workshops to parents in our community who have loved ones with Down syndrome or other disabilities.

This long story illustrates my bumpy 30+ year journey in what the professionals call peer support, and I call mom friendship.

Moms need other moms. If you are a professional, please know that supporting moms to connect up with other moms is what saves us.

Give us safe spaces to be together. We can take it from there.

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Next up in this series: more about my recent training in ACT, which is defined as:

Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) helps us live more mindfully and identify what we truly value, so that we can move toward a richer and more meaningful life.