Candace talks about the myths of a "good mum" and how she was trying to figure out who she was as a mother.

Transcript

To not show weakness or … And there’s so much, so many myths around what a good mom is, and there’s so many things that even in, you know, when you’re pregnant that people don’t even talk about, like the discomforts of being pregnant, and so many things about labour that nobody tells you. The things that, you know, no one wants to talk about, you know, bladder issues, or, you know, no one wants to talk about the non-happy or just the, the real things that happen to your body, or, like, what you’re going to feel like after you have a baby, like, physically. You know? Because that was one of the, I would say, one of the bigger things I can remember not wanting to be … How do I put this? Not wanting to be judged as, like, the stereotypical mom.

So I … We … For example, we didn’t do things like infant photo shoots. We didn’t do birth announcements. We didn’t do any of those kind of things because I didn’t want to appear like that’s just what you do when you’re having a baby. I didn’t want to feed into all those things. We didn’t do, yes, like newborn photo shoots, but now I wish that we did do some of those things. Like, I think I was just, I was fighting so hard not to, like, to fit in, but to not stand out, and I was struggling, too, with not wanting to be that mom that was overprotective, you know, that didn’t want other people, you know, necessarily holding their baby. So that when someone did want to hold their baby, I just let them even though I was uncomfortable, or … Yes, I was just, I felt like I was just trying to figure out who I was as a mom, but with the background feeling like I needed to make sure that I wasn’t becoming the mom that everyone hates.

Interviewer: Yes, the mom from hell.

Yes, or just the, “I can’t believe she doesn’t trust us to hold her baby.” Well, no. That’s not actually what’s going through my mind. It’s just, this baby is new to me, you know. Yes, I held her in my belly for, you know, 10 months, or whatever, but I still don’t really know her. So I’m trying to get to know her, right? But how do you … You don’t know that until you’re, you know, months into it, when you’re, like, “Well, yes, of course I wanted to get to know my daughter because she was a stranger to me.” But at the time, I didn’t, I didn’t know those were the words to describe what was happening.

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