Mama Renew

This month’s Mama Renewed is Cari Burdett, mother of 3 beautiful children who shares with us words of wisdom on creativity, motherhood, and visionary self-care. Cari recently gave “birth” to a new baby – her CD “Winter” - offering songs, verses, and sound stories for families.

About Cari

I am a lover of life, music, children, good quality home cooked food and creativity. I am an opera singer, vocal improvisor, teacher of helping people give themselves permission to free their voice and sing sing sing, leader of song with children and more, gardener, alpaca & chicken host.    Three words that capture my way of being in the world are eclectic, inspired & joyful.

Growing up performing and then 10 years of Opera School, I defined myself as a singer.  Because of my life’s path (health and children), I have had to redefine that image and take a deeper look inside to discover who I am. I do know that without singing I don’t feel as much joy. As a mother, I want to be joyful  and so I allow myself to take time out to sing.

Why Mama Renew?

I took Mama Renew because I value connection and respect going beyond the masks to truth.  I admire how Mama Renew brings us together to evaluate and redefine our daily life.   I was seeking connection, witnessing, friendship, self-love and joy.

Lessons Learned

To nurture myself and ask every morning   ”What do I need today – right  now” and then to try and do it! I appreciated the confirmation that we need each other in this life and that it is fine to ask for help and support. I was grateful to learn how simple my basic needs are and yet how challenging they are to maintain..AND that it is possible to move towards a more balanced day that supports my basic needs.

Do I need help? Then ask for it. Do I need support? Then find it.  Do I need courage? Then dig deeper.

Do I need to cry? It’s ok to be vulnerable.

Redefining Self-Care

Self Care means to be honest and present for my needs.  I know my health effects everything I do – so I try to stay on top of essential basics, water, walking, sleeping and most of all- and I stress this – is that I take time to do things I love to do that nourish me – for me it is to SING.

I find I have to take occasional weekends or nights alone.. At this stage with a small baby again ( 8 months ) it will be a while before I do that, but I have continued to take one day every week to make music outside of the home and this is my salvation to finding that essential balance.  I also try ( and I say try because it is not often possible!) to give my self time to sing and create when the baby is sleeping and before the older children come home. When this happens WOW!! I also need to work in the garden about once a week to balance out the other parts of me, which includes cooking good food and keeping my counters clean.

On Creativity & Motherhood
As someone who pursued art for a career, it is always a HUGE question as to how to balance it while being a mother. If you let go of your art all together, we can get lost in the depths of depression . If on the other hand we believe that our own art is the only way to be, then one could lose out on family life and the joys of raising your children…

So where is the happy medium? At what balance do we find the way of  our true spirit calling and letting go of  the ego trip lust for fame – without letting our passion, creativity and inspiration all go down the drain?

We as mothers are allowed to make art and to find time for ourselves. I also believe that we can give ourselves permission to see the art that we already do in the home each and every day and learn also that it is enough at that moment.

In a flurry of impromptu email poetry back and forth with some of the women in my mama circle, these poetic words of wisdom emerged from Mama C., who has graciously allowed me to share them here:

I find myself struck once again by the beliefs and expectations so many of us carry around about who and how we should be as mothers.  I am reminded of how we continue to strive to live up to these expectations from within and without, and how it shapes our days and ultimately our lives.  The last stanza, in particular, rocks:

It’s not pretty
And it ain’t no picture
But I have believed
That I must be there

I try to show up
Brave face painted on
I try to live up
To all those rights and wrongs

To be responsible
For absolutely everything
Including everything forgotten
By all those other human beings

Who have other labels
To hang around their necks
Who have other “occupation”
Boxes to check

I forget to question
Why I’m stuck so far
Up my own definition
Of a mother superstar

- Gratitude to Mama C. for letting me share

We got this message from a mama on our facebook page:

I have an opportunity to go to Hawaii for 3 nights with some friends. I haven’t left my 22 month daughter overnight before. She doesn’t sleep through the night yet. I nurse back to sleep. I’m having heart palpitations just thinking about leaving her and having my partner lose sleep from trying to get her back to sleep. But I really need this retreat. It’s been a long 22 months of co-sleeping and nursing. Do you have any insights?

Dear Nancy,

You’ve got a big decision to make!  The first time away is big for the child, big for the person we leave them with, and big for us.  Most of us feel some range of emotions including guilt, anxiety, responsibility & anticipation.   I hear you divided between your very real need for this time for yourself, and your love and concern for your daughter and partner.

We posted the query on the facebook page to get feedback from others and here are a few highlights:

Both your husband and your daughter will benefit from you coming back rested and happier.  – Joyelle

If you are co-sleeping and you have already breast-fed this long, the bond between you is like superglue.  You deserve it!! – Crystal

I would NOT go. Find your retreats now in smaller ways. Wait till she’s a little older to take that big of a trip. – Lynette

Only you will know if she is (or you are) ready. Just don’t let your self fall into the trap that guilt creates – no one will benefit from that. – Stacelynn

The trick is to trust enough in the importance of the retreat…and not obsess about controlling things back home. – Corine

Contribute your thoughts on our facebook page: 

All of the above are true.  Everyone benefits when mama takes care of herself.  How our children respond to separation is often far less dramatic than we fear.   Each child (and mother) is ready at their own unique time. There is a time of readiness for each of us as women and mothers, and for our children.  If this is not the right time, self-care is still vital & the retreat energy can be created in other ways.  And finally, guilt does not serve anyone.

Now what?

Nancy, I invite you to use some of the following questions as guides:

If you decide to go – how might this 3 day retreat have a positive impact on your daughter & partner?

What are you seeking in this retreat?  How are you hoping it will nurture & support you?   If this isn’t the right time for a retreat, how can you create the time & space you need to care for yourself?

I encourage you to have a journal conversation with yourself  -  with one voice pro-retreat, the other voice representing your concerns around this decision.  Really let yourself explore your beliefs and assumptions about yourself as a mother, about your daughter, and even about your partner.  Listen carefully as you write and notice what is true, and what is coming from a place of expectations or guilt.

I certainly don’t know what the right choice is for you.   Ultimately this is your path to walk & only you can know.   Listen to your heart, listen to your belly, and allow yourself to step beyond assumptions to a place of possibility.

Blessings,    Sarah

Yesterday I boldly declared:    This week we’re going to find the time, create the time, make the time… Will you join us?

But I don’t have time.

You don’t know how busy I am.

There are so many things on my to do list.

I don’t have childcare.

But I just had a baby.

Not this week but maybe next?

Sound familiar?  Ah, yes…. the challenge of finding, creating, making the time to care for ourselves.  While core needs such as food, sleep and water get met on a basic level, the elements of self-care that nurture our spirit are lower on the list.

All of the above statements are real.   We are indeed busy mamas.

What if, instead of talking about how “busy” we are, we transformed that word to “full”???

“Full” is an apt description of our roles & responsibilities, but also opens the way for a different understanding of how we live.  The feeling of the word “full” reminds me that this is indeed my goal.  I want a full life, one that is fulfilling and alive & full of things that nurture me, my family & my community.

Your challenge today:

Consider one small thing you can do to help you have a more fulfilling day & nurture your mama spirit.

Love to dance?  Have a dance party with your kids.

Longing for the spa? Mix up a homemade facial mask and wear it around the house.

Feeling lonely?  Call a friend now.

Love to Cook?  Call a friend and spend the afternoon cooking together & share the bounty.

Craving mama time?  Watch for tomorrow’s post on spending time alone!

We’re one week into the Back to Self 30 day Challenge! If you’re just joining us now, it’s not too late – simply “Like” our facebook page and join in the fun.

Daydream, by Chantey Dayal

While I hadn’t planned on doing theme weeks, our first week of the challenge seemed to focus on physical self-care. This emerged in part due to my need to care for myself during a miserable cold. It also, however, is the aspect of self-care that is the most obvious. Articles & websites & experts abound telling us about good nutrition, exercise, water and sleep as the path to wellness. But wait, there’s more!!!

We’ve taken steps forward in caring for our Bodies, now it’s time for Spirit as our theme for week #2:

What activities nurture your spirit?

For me, these include creativity, dance, spiritual practice, yoga, alone time…

Here’s the catch: For many busy mamas I know, these are the very activities that too often get set aside in favour of family and household responsibilities. “I just don’t have time” is the mantra I hear over and over again.

This week we’re going to find the time, create the time, make the time… Will you join us?

Much gratitude to brilliant painter Chantey Dayal for the use of her painting for this blog. You can learn more about Chantey on her website & facebook page. Watch for more of her paintings in future postings.

I’ve been sick.   Sick enough that I stumbled over to my neighbors door 2 days ago wearing a full balaclava over my head, a big scarf around my neck, and a sign with the following words scrawled in red ink:

Please Call School – Need Rick Home – Doctor Now

This, after a 5 minute episode in which I enjoyed (not) a croup-like episode alone in the house gasping for breath & certain I was going to die.   Lucky for me my husband showed up from school drop-off just moments later and whisked me off, not to the doctor but to the Emergency Room.   Apparently they don’t like making patients who can’t breathe waiting for an appointment at the clinic.

Official diagnosis?  Acute Upper Respiratory Infection with Laryngitis. Origin?  Viral.  I liked this part – no tough antibiotic decision.  Lovely doctor told me to keep on doing what I was doing – lemon honey garlic ginger tea (she even approved of my addition of homemade rhubarb cinnamon vodka).  And reassured me that when another croup-like episode occured, it would pass, and I would be able to breathe again.

Home again, I settled into two full days of life as a sick mama.  Nestled on the couch with my hot vodka tea, unable to utter even a word to my children as my voice is completely gone.    I’m doing a bit better today, made it to yoga (part of my personal 30 day challenge), and am actually able to sit here at the computer with something resembling focus.  No voice yet, but I’m trying to take that as a blessing.  I’m not all that good at being quiet…

What about the challenge?

I felt horrible announcing the Back to Self Challenge and then disappearing!   My personal challenge for these few days was to simply let go.  No guilt about not working, not caring for children, not cooking meals, not doing yoga.  All my body needed to do was rest in silence.   Thankfully my dear husband works from home as well, and we’ve had two volunteers here to help on the farm, so I’ve had plenty of support and been able to fully let go.

So just a bit late, here is your challenge for days #3 & 4 & 5:

Listen to your Body!

If you need water, drink it.

If you need to pee, go.

If you feel sore, do something about it (yoga, massage, 5 minute stretch…).

If you are craving sex, intimacy, touch… create it.

If you’re full, stop eating!

If you need to go to bed at 7 p.m., do it.

Take Care, Mamas!

Follow our Mama Renew facebook page to join the challenge!

Day #1 was a success!  We heard from women around North America making a commitment to:

stretch, read, study, drink water, hike, drink less wine, go to the salon, clear clutter, tweeze eyebrows, pray…

Sounds like a good day to me!

Interestingly, the #1 self-care intention y’all shared was to drink more water. It’s so simple, isn’t it?   You know the feeling.  You’re thirsty, but you’ve pushed the sensation aside in favour of making school lunches or getting out the door on time. 

We’ve been working with mothers long enough to know that moms are really, really good at delaying that metaphorical sip of water. We’re good at talking about our desire for self-care, our longing for balance, and the challenges we’re facing, and not always so good at taking steps towards change. The busy nature of family life too often takes precedence, and our needs are set aside.

In a breakthrough moment in a Mama Renew group last summer one woman declared water, sleep, and daily exercise to be the absolute core of self-care.  If these are in place, she pondered, perhaps the deeper levels of self-care such as asking for help and knowing when to say no will come more easily.   Let’s find out, shall we?

So for day #2 of the Back to Self Challenge, let’s start with Water.   Lots and lots of water.  Like 8 – 10 glasses today.  & tomorrow.  & the next day!

Follow our Mama Renew facebook page to join the challenge!

The wise women at Nummies.com asked moms if they could go back to before their first baby, what would they tell themselves. These are their answers. Everyone in the video is a mom, and I find myself wishing I had met every one of them nine years ago when I was pregnant with my first…

Enjoy!

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Comment here…

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It’s a cloudy Friday late afternoon in late August and that means one thing:

1.  We have to pick all those perfectly ripe blackberries before the rain comes.

2.  It’s jam time!

We’ve already braved the blackberry bramble and emerged with an abundance of both berries and scratches.  This afternoon I will don my cutest apron and enter the glorious realm of making jam.

Jam making skipped a generation in my family – my maternal grandmother was raised on a rural homestead where food preservation was a way of life.  In later years she was known especially for her pomegranate jelly, and I savoured each and every spoon-full.  I was raised in the suburbs – our jam came from the grocery store, and I never stopped to ponder the possibility of making our own.

I began to make jam in my first years of motherhood.  Somehow it emerged as something that simply made sense – I’m not sure why, really.  I have very clear memories of feeling completely overwhelmed by piles of fruit needing to be processed and a baby needing to be breastfed. How on earth did we find the time? 

The more we made though, the more it simply became a necessity, a strangely essential part of who we are as a family.  Blueberry Spice, Rhubarb Saskatoon, Strawberry, Blackberry Lime, Oregon Grape…these are just a few of my favourites.  Jam, of course, serves somewhat like a ‘gateway drug’ – once you discover the wonders and ease of jam, it’s only a matter of time before you start pickling, freezing, and drying.

For me, food preservation has been a source of wonderful reconnection & renewal, nurturing both my creativity and sense of adventure.  These long hours of canning, drying, freezing, and pickling have become a time that nourishes me, and each step I take “backwards” to our old food ways is actually bringing me one step closer to myself.

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Favourite jam recipes?  How does making jam make you feel?

Comment Here…

I leave you with the lyrics to the most wonderful tune from Michelle Shocked – Strawberry Jam, sadly I couldn’t find a video of it anywhere.  Picture some fiddles with kind of a spoken word country vibe with a blues edge.

Saturday morning found me itching – To get on over to my grandma’s kitchen
The sweetest little berries was cooking up right –

And then we’d put them in a canning jar and seal them up tight
We were making jam – Strawberry jam, that’s what kind
Yeah, if you want the best jam – You gotta make your own

We have Smucker’s, Welches, Knotts Berry Farm
But a little homemade jam never did a body no harm
A little local motion is all we need – To close down these corporate jam factories
We’ll be making jam – Strawberry jam, mmmm-mm
If you want the best jam – You gotta make your own

Yeah, we have a little revolution sweeping the land – Now once more everybody’s making homemade jam
So won’t you call your friends up on the telephone
You invite ‘em on over, you make some jam of your own
You’ll be making jam – Strawberry jam
If you want the best jam
You gotta make your own

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Did you know we have a weekly Mama Renew post on Mothering.com?  Here is this weeks’ offering:

We’re back!  One glorious week away at a stunning remote mountain lake – just two ferry rides and a long stretch of very bumpy logging roads to get there.  The reward?   Children running wild & free, a perfect clear water for swimming, sun, sun & more sun, wonderful friends & family to share in it with.  What could better, right?

Just one big catch:  in order to enjoy such paradise, we had to leave home. Which means:

Click Here to Read the rest at Mothering.com

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We published a new article on Babyvibe this month sharing creative approaches to building a healthy relationship with the grandparents, one of the more tension-filled relationships for many young families.  Here is an excerpt and a link to the original article:

Are you are blessed to have grandparents who play a positive, supportive role with your family? Or perhaps you have equally involved grandparents who seem to bring more trouble than support? Conflict and judgment were most likely not on your list of things to look forward to when you were envisioning loving grandparents taking your little ones to the park.

Along with the perks of grandparents comes a new realm of relationships, and mother-in-laws (from your side or your partner’s) can play a particularly complex role in this new family dynamic. Our mothers are not the only mommy now, and as you grow into parenthood, they too are adjusting to her new role.

The result? Sometimes beautiful growth as you get to know one another in new ways. Other times? Crazy-making conflict. The last thing mamas need is tension with grandparents, so here are a few Mama Renew tips:

Click Here for ideas to support a healthy relationship with grandma

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This quote arrived in my inbox last night from Meghan Rathwell (who also inspired this great post on new motherhood and donated a fabulous prize for our Virtual Retreat this Spring).   Perfect Timing.

One of the things I love about the experience of a Mama Renew group is the way we have room to explore our assumptions about what our lives are “supposed” to look like.  Often we see women asking daring questions, revealing seldom declared life dreams, and feeling a healthy dose of optimism and creativity.

Reaching clear discernment is not a simple task.  Most of us enjoy many, many long discussions full of questions and worries and that wonderful query “What if…?” In a post last May we wrote:

And yet every once in a while, we ourselves, or someone we love, takes the leap and says Yes, somehow moving beyond the world of being sensible.

What is it that allows us to move from “what if…” to “I can”?  As mothers I suspect that the patience for clarity is sometimes harder.  We cannot separate our own life decisions from those of our life as a family, and this can create some considerably thick mud to wade through!

Eventually, however, there is indeed a moment of clarity, and it is very much this feeling of the mud and the muck and the questions and worries and doubts all settling to the ground (even if for only a few moments) and everything is crystal clear.  It is not a moment we can create or plan for.  Clarity simply arrives, often in a profoundly understated and simple way. And then we take the first new and exciting steps forward

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We’d love to hear from some of you – How do you know when something is right?  Where do you feel it in your body?  What would you like to say Yes to?

click here to comment!

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Many thanks to Martha of Laughing Volcano Art for the use of her beautiful Blue Girl Leap of Faith image.



Yesterday on our Mama Renew facebook page we posted the query:

What’s YOUR favourite phrase or mantra to keep you going? C’mon, share the encouragement!!

I don’t want your responses to be lost in facebook land so here are just a few of your wonderful mantras:

Live Strong

Good is Good Enough

There is enough time, and every moment counts…

I had a baby…I’m pretty sure I can do this.

Let it Go.

Bedtime and wine time always comes….

“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can”

If it’s not a good time, it’s a good story.

& one of my favourites….

Everything is going to be alright.

Many (many) years ago I had the joy of playing Mary Magdalene in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar in Lusaka, Zambia (!!)  Mary’s opening song “Everything’s Alright” has become a source of great soothing to me.  My husband sings it when I’m sick,  I sing it to our boys,  I sing it to myself…

I think in the end this is what it is all about. At the core, we know that we have what we need to move through this. “Alright” may look very very different from our ideal world, but it is indeed alright, and we can be fully present and responsive to what the moment demands of us (sounds a lot like birth, yes?).

Here’s a clip from the 1973 movie – enjoy!

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