Tag Archives: mom health

Partner

The Mental Load of Managing Childcare (On Top of Everything Else)

By Olivia Bergeron, LCSW, PMH-C

It’s 9 p.m. and the apartment is finally quiet. The kids are sleeping and as usual, you’re still on your phone working. And stressing. You’re texting to confirm tomorrow’s pick up, while formulating a backup plan in case your child with the runny nose wakes up sick. Here’s what’s surprising about childcare: the hardest part often isn’t the childcare itself. It’s being the one who coordinates all of it.

The constant anticipating that goes unseen has a name: mental load. For every task and chore, someone has to quarterback the action, and childcare is no different. Even when you get help taking care of a task, chances are, you’re still the one who plans how to do it.

Finding childcare, scheduling it, communicating and preparing for when things go sideways are activities that happen mostly in your head. No wonder you’re exhausted. 

Five Hidden Pieces of the Childcare Mental Load

  1. The scheduling puzzle. Work, school, activities, and last-minute changes all require planning and coordination. You are most often the one making decisions and figuring out next steps when someone gets sick or the weather doesn’t cooperate. 
  2. The backup plan. Sick days, school closures, and a caregiver running late all need a plan B worked out ahead of time.
  3. The communication web. You are the point person, coordinating with partners, caregivers, and schools, so that everyone has the same information.
  4. The remembering. Food preferences, allergies, daily routines, permission slips reside only in your head, and you keep constant track trying not to forget something of importance.
  5. The emotional layer. Underneath all the busyness of logistics lies a deeper question: “Am I doing this right?” 

Why It Wears You Down

When you have to constantly keep track of all the big and small details of family life, you become accustomed to living in a state of continual high alert. It becomes challenging to rest and turn your brain off, even when given the chance. The result? Irritability, followed by guilt. Feeling like you’re drowning.

As a therapist, I want you to hear this clearly: this is an understandable response to an overloaded, overwhelming time, not a sign that you are failing.

Ways to Lighten It

–Get it out of your head. Shared calendars or a nightly ten-minute check-in can help spread the load.
–Share ownership, not just tasks. One person should own the task, without relying upon the other person to think over the logistics. 
–Set up backup coverage before you need it. A plan made on a calm day works better than one made at 6 a.m. with a sick child.
–Bring in a trusted childcare partner. Someone who handles the matching and the logistics, like the team at Bell Family Company!

No one sees how hard you’re working. Taking on all that you do would be a lot for anyone to handle. You are not bad at this. And, importantly, asking for support is not giving up your role as a parent. It is the best way to make space to enjoy it.

So here is a question to take with you: what is one thing you are handling that someone else could take over? That is a good place to start.

Olivia Bergeron, LCSW, PMH-C, is a licensed perinatal psychotherapist and parent coach and the founder of Mommy Groove Therapy & Parent Coaching. Her free Stop, Soften, See resource is a quick way to find calm in a stressful moment: rebrand.ly/S_S_S.

Health

Signs Your Pelvic Floor Might Need Some Attention With The Lifted Lotus

You know your body better than anyone. You notice when something feels off, even if you can’t quite name it: a twinge in your back, a heaviness in your pelvis, a pattern that’s crept in slowly enough that you’ve started to explain it away.

Here’s the thing about the pelvic floor: it’s easy to ignore until it isn’t. So many of its symptoms get quietly normalized. “That’s just what happens after kids.” “That’s just getting older.” “That’s just stress.” A lot of people live with pelvic floor dysfunction for years before anyone tells them there’s another option.

There’s no magic device or quick fix here, and I’m not going to pretend there is. But there is a path for healing, and it starts with recognizing what your body has been trying to tell you. As an occupational therapy-led clinic, The Lifted Lotus provides whole-person pelvic floor care every single day. Let’s talk about five of the most common signs that your pelvic floor could use some attention, and why each one deserves more than a shrug.

1. Back Pain

Low back pain sends people to physical therapists, chiropractors, and orthopedists all the time, and rightfully so. But the pelvic floor is part of your deep core system, working in coordination with your diaphragm, your abdominal wall, and your deep spinal stabilizers. When one part of that system isn’t pulling its weight, the others compensate, often the low back.

If you’ve been treating back pain for a while without lasting relief, it’s worth asking whether anyone has actually looked at the whole system. Back pain isn’t only about the spine in isolation. It’s about how your breath, your core, and your pelvic floor are working together, or not, to support you through your day. This is especially common postpartum, after abdominal or pelvic surgery, or after long stretches of high stress where breathing patterns shift and core coordination quietly falls apart.

2. Leaking

Leaking urine when you laugh, sneeze, cough, jump, or run is so common that it’s become a punchline. It’s the kind of thing people joke about at baby showers or brush off as a “normal” symptom of having a baby or simply aging. I understand why the humor exists. Naming something absurd can feel like the only way to survive it.

But leaking isn’t something you have to accept as your new normal, and it’s not something you “just have to deal with.” Stress incontinence, urge incontinence, and mixed presentations are all real, diagnosable, and treatable conditions, with a clear evidence base behind pelvic floor rehabilitation as first-line care. Whether it’s happening during exercise, during everyday moments, or catching you off guard when you least expect it, it’s worth real attention, not just a pad and a shrug.

3. Pain With Intimacy

Pain during sex is common. It is not normal.

When intimacy hurts, whether it’s a sharp pain, a burning sensation, or a feeling of tightness or resistance, that’s your body sending you important information. Pay attention to it. This isn’t something you have to just get used to. The pelvic floor muscles can become overactive or hypertonic for all kinds of reasons: childbirth, surgery, chronic stress, past trauma, or years of unconsciously guarding and bracing without ever learning how to release.

What makes this one particularly hard is the silence around it. So many people carry this quietly, sometimes for years, sometimes into their relationships in ways that ripple far beyond the physical. If this is part of your story, I want you to know that pelvic floor dysfunction is one of the most common and most treatable causes of painful intimacy. And healing doesn’t just involve muscles. It’s about safety, nervous system regulation, and rebuilding trust with your own body.

4. Constipation

We don’t talk about bowel health nearly enough, and that’s a shame, because bowel function is one of the clearest windows we have into pelvic floor health.

If you’re straining, feeling like you can’t fully empty, relying on laxatives more than you’d like, or noticing that your bathroom habits have become a source of daily stress, your pelvic floor may be part of the picture. The same muscles that support continence and intimacy also need to coordinate properly to allow for a full, comfortable bowel movement. When those muscles are too tight, too weak, or poorly coordinated with your breath and your abdominal wall, constipation is often the result.

This is an area where I see people make incredible progress once they understand what’s actually happening mechanically, because so much of it comes down to learning how to work with your body instead of against it. That includes things like toileting posture, breath mechanics, and retraining the coordination between your diaphragm and pelvic floor.

5. Pelvic Pressure or Heaviness

A sensation of pressure, fullness, dragging, or heaviness in the pelvis, especially one that builds throughout the day or worsens with standing, lifting, or exercise, is one of the more unsettling symptoms people bring to me. Often that’s because it can feel vague and hard to describe, and because it can be a sign of pelvic organ prolapse.

I want to be clear: prolapse is common, and common doesn’t mean it’s something you have to live with in silence or fear. A feeling of heaviness is your body telling you that the support system down there needs some help, whether that’s from muscle weakness, connective tissue changes, or how you’re managing pressure through your core during daily movement. This is deeply treatable with the right assessment and a plan that actually addresses function, not just isolated exercises done lying on a mat.

What These Signs Have in Common

None of these five symptoms exist in isolation, and that’s really the heart of how I think about this work. Pain with intimacy, constipation, back pain, pressure, and leaking can all trace back to the same underlying system: the coordination, or lack of it, between your breath, your core, your pelvic floor, and your nervous system. That’s why a whole-body, occupation-centered approach matters so much in pelvic health. It’s never just about strengthening or stretching one muscle group. It’s about understanding how these symptoms are showing up in your daily life and affecting your engagement and quality of life. They shape your ability to work out, to parent, to sit through a workday, to feel present during intimacy, to socialize, and to trust your body again.

If you recognized yourself in one or more of these signs, I want you to hear this clearly: this is common, this is real, and this is treatable. You don’t need to wait until symptoms become unbearable to seek support, and you don’t need to have all the answers before reaching out. You just need to start paying attention to what your body has been trying to tell you, and know that there are people ready to listen when you’re ready to talk.

In Collaboration With The Lifted Lotus.