Finding Community in Motherhood featuring Katie Madden

You don't need to be a breastfeeding mom to appreciate the conversation that I have with International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, Katie Madden. We cover everything from setting boundaries to learning how to give your child (and yourself!) room to grow and why you need to find some ways to give yourself some grace. Veterinarian moms are AMAZING; if you are one, or if you support one, please have a listen to this episode!
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Here is Katie's Info!
Instagram: @balancedbreastfeeding
Facebook: www.facebook.com/katiemaddenibclc/
Website: www.balancedbreastfeeding.com
Email: info@balancedbreastfeeding.com

Katie Madden RN, BSN, IBCLC is the founder of BalancedBreastfeeding.com and the owner of The Balanced Breastfeeding Clinic & Clubhouse. She believes in Safe Advice that protects a parent's and baby's whole health and well-being, Realistic Strategy that creates actionable, manageable breastfeeding plans for real life, and Kind Community that fosters courageous, authentic connection online and in real life.

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Delaware Today Article - Local Mothers Share the Truth About the Fourth Trimester by Amy White
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Ways to connect with The Whole Veterinarian!
Instagram: @thewholeveterinarian
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thewholeveterinarian/
thewholeveterinarian@gmail.com
www.thewholeveterinarian.com

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Music Credit: Journey of Hope by Alexander Nakarada

Transcript

Stacey Cordivano
Today's guest is Katie Madden. Katie is a registered nurse and an international board certified lactation consultant who has been helping women adjust to navigating motherhood for the past 15 years. While creating and growing the lactation department at a local birth center, Katie started her online presence with a blog in 2013. She opened her own private practice in 2020, and also provides a comprehensive online learning community that is accessible to anyone in the world. Personally, Katie has helped me through the humbling entry into motherhood and I know how important her work is. I'm also lucky to call her my friend. Welcome, Katie. Thanks for joining me.

Katie Madden
Hi, Stacey.

Stacey Cordivano
All right. We're just gonna get into it because I know you can handle it.

Katie Madden
Hit Me.

Stacey Cordivano
You have a quote about doing the best you can do and I was hoping that you could explain a little bit about it because I feel like it's applicable to not just new mothers but new vets or anyone feeling kind of inadequate in their life.

Katie Madden
So I like to use this quote when we are reflecting back on past choices that we have made, and potentially questioning past decisions that we've made in our lives. And the quote goes, did you do the best you could, given the circumstances and the information you had at that time? Often times, we judge our past decisions based upon our current circumstances, and the current information we have. And the truth is that we do the best we can making these hard choices in life. And we often do them without full access to that information we have in the future. So this is really helpful for moms who are navigating the postpartum period, making a lot of quick and hard decisions, and then come out of that period, right? They come out of that maybe at six weeks or 12 weeks postpartum, and they start doing that process of reflecting back questioning things they've done and perhaps being really critical of themselves for decisions they've made.

Stacey Cordivano
Certainly, I think as veterinarians, we're pretty used to just working hard and being able to figure something out and make a plan and act on it. And for me, and I know other people, motherhood is an instance where you cannot do that. Sometimes things just don't go the way you want them to go. Or they're harder than you expect. Certainly, one of the things that you have taught me is to give myself grace. And I know there was a recent newsletter about compassion and giving yourself grace.

Katie Madden
So yeah, just to go back to what you said about, you know, veterinarians that, you know, I work with a lot of professional women. Now, this generation of mothers, they built their careers, and they and a lot of ways are thriving in their careers before they add children. And this is a relatively newer concept, right? Our mothers didn't necessarily build a career and then get pregnant, you know. So there's this cognitive intelligence part of it that you have. It's when you're put in a position in postpartum, where you are vulnerable, right? Where you have this emotional component that clouds a lot of your critical thinking skills, or the part of your brain that uses knowledge to solve problems. And now you're using your felt sense, your experience of love and your experience of fear, your connection that you're creating with this child, which is straight up terrifying. And then you have all these other influences that are part of your decision making process. So when we look back on how we've behaved choices we've made in a period of time, that was essentially crisis. That's what new motherhood is crisis. Yeah, even if it's beautiful, and good and wonderful, and it's going all the way you want the way you want it. Anytime you're making this giant transition into something new, it's crisis. So in reflection, we have to be able to look back and give ourselves the loving compassion that says perhaps I will have made different decisions, knowing what I know now. But I still give myself so much love and so much grace to say that I made that choice. And I still am where I am today with the sense of holding both holding that maybe I would have done something different. And yet look at where I came to in this moment. So it's almost as if you are holding the bat in the good at the same time to say maybe I would have done that differently. Maybe I'm disappointed with myself. Maybe things weren't what I expected them to be. And yet look at all the beauty that came out of this. Look at how I grew. Look at this child. Look at this breastfeeding relationship that either I navigated through and let go of or I navigated through and continue to carry with me past this early postpartum period. And how can we love ourselves with that paradox to hold the difference between the two and still love ourselves without saying it was good or bad or right or wrong?

Stacey Cordivano
I would say when I I started working with you, I had never done any introspective work. I don't know if that's just all the years of science brain and studying, is that pretty common for women in the postpartum period, to have no idea how to look inside and recognize how to hold those two spaces together?

Katie Madden
Oh, yeah. And also consider the fact that leading up to having a baby you were graded and tested. We are the generation of seeking award. Now, when you come from science, everything is measurable. And then when you enter motherhood, there are no grades. And we seek them, right? We seek grades in the sense of like, how is your baby growing? Or how much milk do you make or you know all these stats and so you find yourself just just a float in this sea of ambiguity. And so all that there is, is your own self confidence, your own knowing your own, you know, belief in yourself to be worthy of mothering this child. We crack it open. It's one of the first times in a lot of women's lives that they are asked to take a hard look at themselves. Even even the women who are doing really well, the babies are growing, breastfeeding is going well. They're still so self critical. And it's such a great opportunity to be like, what what's going on here? Why are you suffering so much? And it's often not about the circumstances. It's much more about disappointment in yourself.

Stacey Cordivano
Yeah, you think you're not doing it right. Or well enough.

Katie Madden
Not doing it right, not doing it well, and then we bring in the whole element of comparison. That's how we were built. Motherhood calls us to sit in community with other women and say we're all doing well, because the test is not about who's the best mother. The test is about, Do you feel like you're a good mom to your child? I often tell mothers, you've already won the mothering game, like nobody is vying for your position as the mother of your child, this isn't a competition. But the scariest thing about this not being a competition between mothers is that it becomes a competition with yourself. And therein lies where we start to cause problems for ourselves because we compete with ourselves... hard.

Stacey Cordivano
Oh, for sure. I'm definitely harder on myself than anyone else. So you probably see women at one of the most vulnerable times in their adult life, when their new mothers are about to be new mothers. What do you think that women need from other people in their life at this point?

Katie Madden
It's a good question. I think we need to ask a question before we can ask that question. So one of the things that I used to say a lot was ask for what you need. New motherhood. The postpartum period is very, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You need sleep, you need food, you need connections, you're not lonely. You need to hydrate, you need safety, but what I realized was The most recent years is most women don't know how to ask for what they need, because they don't know what they need. So the question that comes before, what do you need from other people is, what do you need? Ask yourself? What do you need?

Stacey Cordivano
Mm hmm.

Katie Madden
So in pregnancy, when women ask for what they need, they make an Amazon list of the highest rated products. First time moms need stuff in their opinion. They ask other people for stuff. It's not what they need. But they're not even asking themselves what they need. Right? So then this baby is born and we pregnancy we focus a lot on the birth, right. So if we're doing any forward planning, it's on the birth. And what I have found pretty notoriously is that there's almost zero thought put into the postpartum period. And when we talk about the postpartum period, I'll give you this lame as six weeks, which is what Americans think is an appropriate postpartum period. When really, I mean a six week postpartum woman going back to work, I don't even know that she has all of her faculties about her. 12 weeks is a blessing and still nowhere near what families need. But when we talk about the postpartum period of we'll say six weeks. I think one of the reasons why women don't plan for it is because it's a complete like black cloud. They can't see it. They have no idea what's coming.

Stacey Cordivano
Yeah, you have no idea. like you can't possibly.

Katie Madden
You can't and and, you know, I hear all the time, like I should have prepared more I should have. You cannot prepare your heart for the way it feels to love your first child, and also simultaneously be terrified that something is going to happen to this child, and even more terrified that something is going to happen to this child at your own hands. Yeah. What do women need from others? They need community of women. And so this is where you can you know, I kind of love the connection between veterinary medicine and lactation. My mom used to tell me when I was growing up, how do you know if an animal is a mammal It has a belly button and it nurses. It's young. But we all do this as mammals, right?

Stacey Cordivano
Uh huh.

Katie Madden
Let's take animals in captivity. If you have a gorilla, and she gives birth, how does she learn how to breastfeed her baby? Does she just do it all by yourself?

Stacey Cordivano
No, there's a huge community that they're living in.

Katie Madden
Right? Or they'll even bring in other lactating gorilla moms to show her how to nurse. Breastfeeding is a learned experience. It is natural in the sense that mammals lactate and it is natural in the sense that mammal babies thrive best on Mother's Milk, but it is not an instinctual act to nurse your baby women learn from watching. And we don't have that anymore. Right. So when a woman really asks herself, what do I need in this postpartum period, she needs to feel seen and heard, understood, validated, and you just can't get that from a partner who's potentially a dude, maybe a woman, either way, they've never had a baby. He has no idea. We just can't expect it of male counterparts and we can't even expect it of our mothers, because many of our mothers did not nurse. What my organization does, the heart of what my work is, is gathering women, either virtually or in real life to watch one another right? To have women go, Oh, yeah, me too.

Stacey Cordivano
I mean, I know. And in the group that I attended, a question will be asked that you didn't even know you had. But then you hear it and you're like, oh, gosh, that is very relatable. That's me. I needed to know that.

Katie Madden
I often say when you come to group, someone will say aloud what you were thinking and in that, speaking of truth, you feel validated and a little bit less crazy.

Stacey Cordivano
Mm hmm.There was recently a really beautiful article written by the Delaware Today magazine and you were quoted as saying, These women are being brought to their knees by breastfeeding. I want to hear a little bit more about who those women are and what you meant by that.

Katie Madden
A lot of women who are seeking care from me already have a history of pain, a history of loss, either difficulty getting pregnant in the first place, needing to use fertility, treatments, losses, miscarriages, perhaps they had a birth that didn't go the way they hoped it would go. They maintain the strength through all of that, right. It's this, you know, I'm going to keep fighting for this. I'm going to keep doing things. I'm going to keep going to appointments and trying again, but there's this deep seated hurting that's already sitting there. And oftentimes they make the choice to breastfeed and so much is riding on breastfeeding. I couldn't get pregnant on my own. I couldn't birth on my own. Nothing is going the way I wanted it to go. And now breastfeeding is not going away. It's quote unquote supposed to be going and they fall apart. So much riding on breastfeeding because for the first time they can actually actively do something for this child, right? There's a powerlessness that comes along with struggling with infertility. There's a powerlessness that comes with miscarriage. Certainly, however much we plan for our births, we do not have any control. So it's all the aftermath not just of breastfeeding, but of the birth of the pregnancy of loss of past children. That comes to a head when a woman is struggling to feed her baby. And so what I say it brings her to her knees. It's the breaking point of months, years of heartache. And what it comes down to really at the end of the day is my body isn't working, and my baby doesn't want me. So those are two really, really painful statements that a lot of women come to but it is at that point that we can begin to actually do the work of realizing that motherhood is not about doing things perfectly. And it's not about doing things, quote unquote, right. It's about figuring out who this child is and how you can best nurture this child. And the way that we form deep lasting bonds with our children is perhaps to be down on our knees with that baby, saying, it doesn't matter how I feed you, or what my body can do, or if this went the way that it was supposed to go. It's you and me, babe, and we're in this forever. I feel so lucky that I get to bear witness to that great humbling of women falling to their knees when everything feels like it's falling apart. Because it's from that place that I get to witness the most miraculous growth and evolution and the tightening of bonds between mothers and children. It is the greatest honor of my life to watch these children's mothers rise. and thrive, and I knew them when they were down on their knees.

Stacey Cordivano
Whoa I feel like that deserves a moment, that was beautiful. I definitely know what it's like to have you help in a time of crisis. Mine wasn't immediately postpartum, but when I was forced to wean my second son early for medication reasons, the help that you were able to provide in saying that you will, Stacey, find a different way to connect with him, was really life changing at that point in time.

Katie Madden
You know, most people think of lactation consultants as people that help get breastfeeding going. And most lactation consultants care a whole hell of a lot about the act of breastfeeding and that that mothers breastfeed and that babies are breastfed. My personal philosophy is that if you choose breastfeeding, if you choose this path of mothering your child feeding your child in this way, then I'm there with you from that choice to when your breasts stop lactating. That might be in two weeks, or it might be in two years, the arc of breastfeeding and the journey of breastfeeding deserves care from someone like me from the first choice until the last drop of milk in my opinion, it's interesting with you because with your second, you endured the hardest part at the end. This is often true if we get through the early phases of my body's not working, my baby's not doing this, this isn't happening. Normally, women that do get up over that hump get to enjoy a long, challenging and deeply nourishing and fulfilling relationship through breastfeeding some women and to let go of that is also to step into the next phase of motherhood in which your baby no longer need your body.

Stacey Cordivano
Mm hmm.

Katie Madden
Stay with that for a moment because that is a transition that deserves So much attention and love and reflection and awake and awareness. That weaning process is so important. So I have a 13 year old daughter who's getting ready to be 14, her name is Lucy.

Stacey Cordivano
Hi, Lucy!

Katie Madden
And what I have observed in my own mothering is that this transitionary period where you have to let go of what was and make space for what's next happens again and again and again. And motherhood is a slow and long progression of letting go and letting your child move further and further away from you. And a mother who learns this process of letting go of what was and making space for what's next. She is able to thrive through each stage of motherhood. It's hard every single time. But I believe that the first lesson we get to learn in letting go and making space for what's next is in weaning. So you'll hear me very often make metaphors between breastfeeding experience and mothering later in life. And I've learned that the lessons that I'm able to teach women through the breastfeeding process are truly just foundational parenting lessons that they can use for the rest of their lives.

Stacey Cordivano
The introspection that you've asked of me the compassion that you've asked me to give myself, it started with a baby and continued on.

Katie Madden
And I'll tell you again with my almost 14 year old daughter, she's turning out quite well. So far, so good. I believe so much of that has come from modeling, meaning I didn't tell her to take long, luxurious showers. I showed her that I take long, luxurious showers. That's the time that I tend to myself that I love and have gratitude for my body that I slow down and breathe, right? That's how we mother is by modeling. So every time I say you make space for what's next, what I also mean is, you need to continue to grow and get a life and take care of yourself. Because your children are watching. Part of the scary thing about weaning is what will I do with all of this space and time? These thoughts, these feelings that I can't now just nurse the baby through? Yeah. So in order for our children to thrive, we as mothers must thrive.

Stacey Cordivano
That's a good transition to a question that I had for you because obviously veterinarians are hugely susceptible to compassion, fatigue and burnout. But I would say that in your job, you're also, if not more, highly susceptible to that. How do you take care of yourself?

Katie Madden
A big mantra that I use that I find really helpful is I am responsible to these mothers. I am not responsible for these mothers. Take that a step further. As your child gets older. I am responsible to my child, I'm not responsible for my child. I am only responsible for myself.

Stacey Cordivano
Mm hmm.

Katie Madden
When you show up and you are of service with a client, in that moment, you can be fully present, your heart can be open, you can be fully attentive, showing up as the the one who will deliver them from pain struggle. But when I walk away from that relationship, I have to have some sort of way to close it and say I did the best I could. And I delivered on my promise to be responsible to you what happens now I am not responsible for and so this really speaks to not just being present with women and you know, having emotional boundaries, but also what we can transition into the role of being a working pumping mom, and how much trickier it is when you take on this role of mother because not only are you that, and an individual and a wife and a daughter and all of that now, you're also a mother, if you already have a blurry boundary around who I am as a human and who I am as my job. Then if you bring motherhood into that and you think that you're going to All the things to everybody all the time, this is just going to get worse.

Stacey Cordivano
Mm hmm.

Katie Madden
If you take an animal home in your mind, if you take a mother home in your mind, now you're dragging mud all through the front door into your role as a mother and you can't be fully present as a mother. And then we start playing this game of like, I'm not present anywhere. I'm not doing enough for anyone.

Stacey Cordivano
Oh, yeah,

Katie Madden
It all comes back. Right? We all know that. Right? The I can't do anything. Well,

Stacey Cordivano
I think I said it last week. Haha.

Katie Madden
Right? I'm failing everybody. I'm not doing a good job in any of my jobs. And really what it comes back to is what is your center? What is your core? Who are you when you you know, for you in particular traveling around house to house? Like what is the intentional practice when you leave a client you leave a horse and you get back into your car? Are you immediately thinking like what's next or you taking a moment to let go of what just happened and make space for what's next. And by making space I literally mean like leaving the problems there and saying I've done that for now and then opening up and going, Okay, I feel clear, I feel confident I feel myself now I can step into another role.

Stacey Cordivano
It's so hard as an equine vet with the on call and running potentially your own practice. I mean, that is, that is a tall order, but definitely something to work on. You know, every vet needs better boundaries. We get asked by random high school friends on Facebook Messenger for advice. You know, it's, yeah, boundaries are hard. And certainly, I think a huge part of improving mental health.

Katie Madden
The process of creating boundaries is a lifelong journey. And it's okay if you're just starting with like physical boundaries of I'm at this client's farm right now. I'm in my car right now. Right, you can literally start with the physical containers. And so when we talk about pumping, you know, I, of course work a lot with the transition, you know, about 80% of Women are back are in the workforce as mothers, which is a staggering number. Basically, almost everybody is turning around and working eight weeks after they have a baby. it's mind blowing, really. And then we just pile role on top of role. When you're a working pumping Mom, you really are blurring lines because you are doing an act of motherhood while you are inside of the role of professional. It's interesting because a lot of times we use pumping time to continue to work and that's really not what our brains were designed for. Right when we get down when your milk flows. Again, let's take this back to animals. A cow is not going to let you milk it I assume on a remote account. If she's stressed if she's in this sympathetic nervous system of getting ready to run away from you. Yeah, you know it's fight or flight. You're not going to rest, digest and express if you are thinking about hurrying up and driving to the next place. So it's a very strange process of we're able to express milk while also thinking about something completely different and not getting the oxytocin release that you get when you're with your baby. So a lot of times, that doesn't help the situation when we're trying to have this delineation of roles. In fact, pumping in working is so much harder than even just being a working mother. Because repeatedly you have to stop what you're doing. Hook yourself up to a machine, and then trick your brain into thinking that the baby is there enough to remove her milk. And women do it all the time. And it's freaking miraculous. And yet, they still are so hard on themselves and they still feel like failures if they don't make it to some, you know, random designated timeframe, six months, 12 months, whatever, you know, society has implanted in their brains and can't even take this moment to be like, holy cow. How are you even doing this? The saddest thing I could ever imagine would be that a woman doesn't take the time. To sit and reflect on how phenomenal she is for having risen to the occasion of not only being a professional career woman in this world, but also maintaining her milk supply for her baby. And that's where again, that big growth can come in is to look back and be like, well, damn, if I did that I can do anything.

Stacey Cordivano
Yes, certainly a superpower.

Katie Madden
A superpower only, only if you can see it as a superpower. Because so many women look back and go like, well, then I only nursed for five months. Well, I only needed to 10 months. But I had to supplement with formula. But my baby never latched on. And that there again, let's come back to this holding both things. If it wasn't perfect, it was crap. That's a very binary thinking it's black or white. It's good or bad, right or wrong. And Grace is to hold both those things.

Stacey Cordivano
Okay. Yes, for sure. I mean, we're trained either you diagnose something or you didn't, the patient lived or didn't. So, yes, binary thinking, I think it's probably ingrained in us. So, yes, more practice on giving yourself grace. I wanted to transition a little bit to ask you about what is currently offered at Balanced Breastfeeding. Personally, for me, I think that the working pumping moms online course should really be a requirement for anyone that is going to attempt to go back to work and pump. Can you elaborate a little bit on on what's online currently?

Katie Madden
Yeah, so the Balanced Breastfeeding Club is an online membership, one time lifetime membership that gives you access to all of the curriculum and all of the support community. So the curriculum is the didactic learning that goes along with breastfeeding. There's a lot to learn and it's broken up in phases so it's not overwhelming. Working pumping moms is ideally done about four to six weeks before returning to work, it gives not only the technical components of how to do this, but also the emotional components of why are we doing this? Why are you doing it this way? And why is this so hard? We start out with Why do you work? And why are you leaving your baby because almost everybody is very, sometimes surprised by their their sudden urge to not go back to work when their job was their whole life, right? Your job, oftentimes, especially if you have a private practice or small businesses, that was your baby. And so it's almost surprising when you're preparing to go back to work and you're like, I would throw my whole career away because it hurts so much to think about leaving this baby. So we talk about that. And then we go into the curriculum component. In my, in my practice, I found that the curriculum the didactic learning, is something that's best done self paced in small pieces, and with extra time for reflection or distraction, right. The nature of early motherhood is that you really can't focus your brain for very long and one thing so the online curriculum was really born of the need to pace yourself, take your time, take things in small pieces in order to learn and then be able to refer back to them when you're actually in the thick of it. So the club membership starts with a pregnancy program called prenatal breastfeeding prep. And a lot of the education you get in pregnancy is very hard to retain because you can't do it right. You can't have that experiential hands on learning that really gets us to move from didactic to experiential. And so having the online components throughout let you go back and refer when you have your own baby, pull up the latching videos and do it together. The other element that I really wanted was, you know, because I broke out in 2013, I've really watched the arc of how women behave on the internet. And because we are so information seeking, especially if you come from like academia or you know, science is there's got to be there's got to be an answer to my problem that I can research and solve. And so the online membership site is also designed to limit you to how much information you can see on purpose, right?

Stacey Cordivano
Oh yeah, vets understand that. We don't want our clients looking up all this random

Katie Madden
Like, let's create a safe place for you to search and search and search and limit you getting into things like you know, starting salads when we're really just trying to get back to work. And then there's the support community component. The support community is a private Facebook group that is for our community, our members, people who've seen me in person or who've taken the online courses. Philosophically balanced, breastfeeding believes in safe, realistic and kind support. And so the Facebook community I created quite a while back with the specific intention in mind of not being critical or giving unsolicited advice. It is really just a place to be supportive of one another. And so the combination of the didactic learning and the community and then both locally in person and virtually people have access to me for one on one consulting for unique circumstances, we've created this really nice bubble of mothering friends and really making space to talk about those decisions to stop or supplement and in particular having some set groups so there's a subset group for the working pumping moms because nobody can really understand what it's like to be working pumping mom, other than another working pumping though.

Stacey Cordivano
Yeah, the blog alone is kind of immeasurable and the amount of information that is available for a very reasonable price for the lifetime membership. I can't stress enough how helpful all the information is. So I hope everyone checks it out if they have any need, ie they have a child.

Katie Madden
You know, I always felt like breastfeeding from the way that it was presented to me when I was learning was just so clinical. You know, all the advice was about promoting the milk supply or making the baby nurse or. It's just not that serious, like we call it boobs and sometimes we talk about the baby being a jerk and I try to bring this element of humor and lightheartedness to try to make this feel less clinical and more, you know, relational that this is about making friends. This is about discovering what our bodies can do. This is about reflecting on our childhoods, like it's everything.

Stacey Cordivano
Yeah.

Katie Madden
So I think you'll also find some peppered humor and curse words throughout my blogs that I've used as a way to just be like, dude, we're just talking about breastfeeding here. Like, just trying to make your baby suck your boob.

Stacey Cordivano
And realistic. That's one of your big words, too, I know. It has to be realistic and you are realistic. I would say in the northern Delaware, southeastern Pennsylvania area you're lovingly referred to as the boobie whisperer, but I actually think that does you a disservice because you provide so much more than just assessing someone's boobs. You take into consideration mom, which a lot of lactation consultants don't. Any number of stories I've heard of people dealing with lactation consultants at their hospital, it was just milk, just baby just and no consideration for moms mental health and whether that's a good idea.

You know, the whole idea for this podcast is to help bring little bits of information so that people can increase joy in their life. So I was curious, what is one small thing that has brought you joy this week?

Katie Madden
Oh, well, my peonies of course! You know, I really try to show the women who I work with my evolution as a mother beyond infancy, right. So having one teenage daughter who sometimes graces me with her presence and other times, most of the time is, you know, in her room, has given me a lot of new time and space to reconnect with things that maybe I did before I gave birth to her or I've always wanted to do and this week I've been documenting the progression of my peonies. I think that the up close noticing of the subtle changes that happen in my peonies, I just think is such a beautiful metaphor for the becoming, and the unfolding that women experience throughout the course of their life. And in particular, in motherhood. I just want people to see that once again, after the hardest part of life, in my opinion, right rearing children, having babies and managing your career and having little kids after all of that, I promise you that there will come a time again, when you can go out every day and notice a flower blooming. But then I would also make the argument that you could do that today.

Stacey Cordivano
Yeah, and probably should.

Katie Madden
And when we talk about boundaries are taking that moment when you leave one client and go to the next client. It's all about intention. Everybody has 30 seconds to 60 seconds to sit and breathe and return to themselves.

Stacey Cordivano
Oh, yeah. Taking a mindful moment is my mantra for the year.

Katie Madden
Yep,

Stacey Cordivano
trying to, anyway.

Katie Madden
And it truly is just a moment and it's just it's stopping. You know, the whole Like, stop and smell the roses. like it truly is... stop. breathe. Notice something beautiful. Be there just for that moment, and then return.

Stacey Cordivano
That is excellent advice. Katie, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you spending some time with me this morning. Where can people find you?

Katie Madden
So my website is balancedbreastfeeding.com, but if you want to watch me and follow what I'm doing in my life, you can follow me on Instagram @balancedbreastfeeding. And you'll see the whole breadth of my life, not just mothers and babies, but the whole beautiful soul stirring adventure that is Katie Madden and balanced breastfeeding.

Stacey Cordivano
Excellent. And I will definitely link all that and everything we chatted about today. Thank you. It was fun. I'm glad we connected.

Katie Madden
I'm super excited.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai