To Mom, From Mom: Meet Angela Bailey

We bring everything we are into our roles as moms – our strengths, our challenges, our vulnerabilities. This Mother’s Day, we talked with a few of our favorite moms about their own mental health journeys, stories that we hope will inspire you as you navigate your own.

Fill in the blank: Motherhood is___________. 

Motherhood is brutiful – it’s brutal and beautiful. It’s brutal because your heart is walking around out in the world and you can’t control everything that happens, and it’s the most beautiful thing in the world because you learn your capacity to love another human. 

 What's one thing you want to share with other moms? 

There’s no one right way to mother. We are all really imperfect humans, and so we have to have a lot of grace and compassion for ourselves. Even when we make mistakes as parents, that vulnerability, showing our kids that we’re human, and repairing it with them actually teaches them more than anything else that they can really learn.  

How did becoming a mother change you? 

I think it made me look at myself more intentionally, and kind of set me on what I think now is a lifelong journey of working on myself – who am I really and who do I want to be and who do I want to model for [my son]? 

How has motherhood affected your own mental health journey? 

There’s more to worry about when your heart is walking outside of your body in the world... Especially when I was a new mom, that was very hard. I had a lot of anxiety kind of all the time. I’ve really had to work on taking care of myself and cultivating my own relationship with myself and how I talk to myself, and that’s something I have to keep as a priority otherwise I will spin out. 

I do a lot of journaling and yoga and talking to myself, and I go to therapy. I do all of those things to keep me in a good space so that I can be my best self for [Teo]. I’m modeling to him and talking to him about mental health all the time – I want him to be able to have that practice far sooner in his life than I did in mine, because I didn’t really start thinking about it until about 10 years ago. 

What do you do to care for yourself and your own mental health as a mother? 

When I feel myself start to become dysregulated, especially in a parenting interaction with Teo, I will say, “I need space,” or I’ll start taking some deep breaths. That’s not always what someone wants to hear, especially a child, but we have an agreement – that if he says he needs space, then I respect him as a human and give that to him. That’s one of the things that helps me take care of myself and also model for him like, you get to take care of yourself too – we all need space sometimes. 

In your words, why is it so important to remove the stigma around mental health, especially for mothers? 

Mental health is really real, and if we don’t talk about it, then it’s still there and it’s underneath the surface, and it can be really damaging to relationships and your own self if you don’t address it and talk about it. 

There’s so much power in reaching out and connecting, and we’re all connected in that we all have different things going on with our mental health. If we’re not acknowledging it, then we can’t work on it. And the only way to really work on it, for us to improve and for us to feel better, is to be able to talk about it and normalize that this is all around us. It’s really important to be able to talk about it because it’s real.