BELIEF #1
There are no "good" moms. There are only moms who are well-slept, well-loved, financially secure, and practically supported with a collaborative and invested "village."
BELIEF #2
We are all socialized into believing that women owe our bodies, children, free labour, and increasingly impossible mothering standards to the world.
BELIEF #3
Mom shame is the fulcrum used by capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, to scapegoat women and exploit us of our free labour for profit and power.
I'm Natasha Coulis, a white, queer and neurodivergent writer, sociology student, strategy designer, mother of four, and creator of Undoing Motherhood.
That's my late mother at left, 18 years old, pregnant with me, and not ready to be a mom. Disabled and traumatized by violence and abuse, she raised me in poverty as a single mom, with the help of her parents and seven siblings.
I'm twinning out at 30 years old, in the photo beside her. I wasn't ready to be a teen mom either, but you couldn't tell me that at the time. I adore children. As a teen, I subscribed to parenting magazines and planned my future home births and extended breastfeeding. By age 18, I had joined a fundamentalist high-demand religion and married a lawyer nearly twice my age. By age 25, I had four kids (no twins!).
Those children are now grown. To summarize 24 years of parenting, nothing went as I thought it would. Actually, one thing: My kids are my favourite people on Earth.
The pandemic ushered in my empty nest and an abyss of existential angst and philosophizing. I thought about everything I wished I could re-do. I researched. I read tens of books and journal articles on the sociology and history of motherhood. I realized I would have had to understand motherhood differently from the beginning to prevent everything that would later pain me and my children.
Our culture's foundational beliefs about mothering are toxic. We are each set up to fail, by design. To achieve the standards put before us, with ever-moving goalposts, mothers are forced to centre our children to a co-dependent extreme. This extreme smothers and pressures our kids while exhausting and traumatizing us. It becomes our undoing, over and over.
I created Undoing Motherhood to increase the accessibility of motherhood sociological scholarship, and to co-create new culture and practical solutions for and with mothers who recognize that motherhood needs a liberation movement. We are undoing our culture's current motherhood model and reimagining something healthier for everyone.
Undoing Motherhood soft-launched social media content in the summer of 2022. It officially launched in September 2023 with a Substack newsletter, and a shop carrying merchandise designed to foster cultural shifts. The first major product offering will launch January 2024: Motherhood Liberation 101—an independent online course. Next, Undoing Motherhood will offer an online private community to exchange education, support, and tangible acts of care.
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