Tara Clark Is Normalizing Taboos: From Infertility to the Mental Load of Motherhood

From episode: Tara Clark of Modern Mom Problems Talks Content Creation and Cultivating Community

of the things I love and it's sort of within your mission statement is that you're sort of you know, you want to like normalize taboo topics. And I think that's what I do, too. Like, you know, that's sort of where my the idea for my podcast was born. Like, I want to talk about, you know, mental health and motherhood and like post like this postpartum. I always say like postpartum really isn't like that six weeks. It's not six months like my kids are seven and 11. And I still feel like I'm in that postpartum period. Right. Like it's like we never go back to how things were. Right. So what are some taboo topics that you still feel like need to be discussed more or stuff? You know, what are what are you out there trying to like destigmatize or anything like that? Yeah. Yeah. When I got started on social media, very few people and I never like to use the word never. So that's why I'm saying very few people were talking about miscarriage or infertility or infertility treatments. Before my son was born, we unfortunately struggled with all of those things. I had three miscarriages and then I had unexplained infertility and then we had IUI and I had never felt more alone in my life as I did back then. And yes, in Facebook was there. But like people weren't talking about that kind of stuff on Facebook. People were taking pictures of their sandwiches and their lattes and that kind of stuff, you know, or actually on Facebook, they were checking in at the gym. They're like, I'm at the movie theater checking at the movie theater. That's what was going on in, you know, 2010 Facebook. But when I started my account, I switched at first, I was always laughing about very like tongue in cheek, sort of third world, first excuse me, first world problems for, for modern mom problems. And then I switched over to be able to talk about those serious topics, the more taboo topics, like I said, as, as I mentioned, infertility, miscarriage, another one that we've, is really catching a lot of momentum now is the mental load of motherhood. You know, my, my good friend Libby Ward, who is, she has an account called diary of an honest mom, absolutely, like cracked open that entire conversation about that. The mental load of motherhood and Eve Wrodsky too. I don't know if you're familiar with it. I know. I feel like everybody knows. We all know Eve. And then she obviously cracked open that conversation as well. And so that's something that people, I feel like 10 years ago, we never would have spoken about. And so now we talk about it so frequently. Yeah. It's, it's really interesting to me too, because as a mother, I was a mother 10 years ago, struggling with this, like the mental load, but I couldn't even name it for myself. Like I wasn't even able to, to, to, to label it to describe what I was feeling. And then it took these, these incredible women to kind of make it like, I don't know, a discussion for all of us to have. And now it's something that, yes, I talk about a lot. It's something that I still don't really think is fully understood either, because I mean, like it's where's the change, right? Like, cause like, I know we have to change within our own households, but like, we're still, I mean, for most part, we're still, moms are still the default parent and it has to be like a conscious thing, like to, to make that change. Like I even talk with my own girlfriends, a lot of whom are welcoming newborns this year, you know, I was 11 years ahead of them, but I, they're sort of dealing with this stuff now. And, and I have, it's not stuff has changed, but like not that much has changed. No, I agree a hundred percent. I love that you mentioned about putting words to it. Cause I think that was the biggest thing for me is having a phrase, something to call it something to call this sort of nebulous feeling that we all felt. And then if you could, you know, attach a phrase to it, the mental load of motherhood, you go, yeah, okay. That's it. That's, that's what we're all trying to work through right now.