There is a particular kind of loneliness that can come with becoming a mother: the moment you realize everyone warned you that you would be tired, but almost nobody warned you that you might lose pieces of yourself. Creator and author Emily Feret built her platform by saying the things mothers are often afraid to say out loud—the house is messy, the baby won’t stop crying, your body feels unfamiliar, your marriage has changed, you miss who you used to be, and sometimes motherhood is simply really, really hard. In this episode of A Fresh Story: Book Talk, Emily joins Olivia to talk about the book that grew out of that radical honesty, Normalizing Normal: Motherhood Without the Filter.
Covering the terrain from pregnancy through the early years of parenting, Normalizing Normal is less a traditional parenting manual than the big sister Emily wishes someone had handed her before she became a mom. She writes about postpartum life, identity, guilt, changing bodies, relationships, friendship, overwhelm, and the strange emotional duality of loving your children fiercely while sometimes not particularly enjoying motherhood. Emily and Olivia talk about the advice mothers are given—“sleep when the baby sleeps,” “don’t blink,” “enjoy every moment”—and all the things hidden underneath those phrases. What happens when you can’t enjoy every moment? What if the baby screams in the car for eight months? What if becoming a mother changes your marriage, your friendships, your relationship with your body, and the way you recognize yourself? And why are mothers so often expected to qualify every difficult truth with an immediate reminder that they are grateful?
For Emily, writing this book was also the fulfillment of a deeply personal dream. Becoming an author had lived on what she calls her “deathbed list”—the things she knew she would regret never attempting—and, fittingly, the opportunity eventually arrived through an Instagram DM she initially thought was a scam. But the heart of the book is much bigger than accomplishing a dream. It is about removing shame through recognition: the relief of discovering that another mother has thought the thought you were afraid to say, struggled with the thing you thought everyone else could handle, or needed to find herself again after becoming responsible for everyone else. Normalizing Normal makes room for two truths at once: motherhood can be beautiful, and motherhood can be extraordinarily hard. If you are becoming a parent, deep in the early years, emerging from them, or simply trying to find yourself again after life changed you, this conversation is a reminder that honesty can be its own kind of village.
