riverside_melissa__ nov 24, 2024 002_melissa's_studio

The speaker, Melissa, discusses her personal experience as a young mother and the challenges she faced. She felt isolated and struggled to find others who could relate to her situation. This led her to desire to help other moms who may be going through similar experiences. She believes that motherhood is a unifying experience, despite its differences for each individual. Melissa hopes that her project can provide support, learning, and a sense of community for all mothers. Hello and thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to 24 and I just wanted to take a minute to explain kind of the heart behind this project for those of you who don't know me to get to know me a little bit better and to give you some vision for where I hope we go with this. If you don't know me already, my name is Melissa. I am a mom to three very different but all very awesome kids, each of them in very different stages of childhood and that in itself is a journey. I became a mom when I was 20 years old is when I conceived my first child and it was a jarring experience. I thought that I had prepared myself as best I could. I read all the books. I went to the classes but I have to say that it completely changed my life in a good way but it also was very overwhelming and unexpected just how things I had expected things to go in my head and how they actually played out and what reality of being a mom actually looks like if you've never done it before and especially in those early days with each of my children. Adding a child to your life makes things more complex and it's a new tiny human to figure out and help figure out the world and so all of those things wrapped into the hormonal changes and the body changes and the lack of sleep really left me thinking like I cut out to do this. It was a very isolating time for me in my life. I became a mom a lot younger than most people around me and so I found myself in this sad conundrum of being a very dedicated mother who wanted to do all things baby, toddler. I was in that realm but when I found myself there and I looked around there were not people who seemed to be like me and I felt out of place but then when I would spend time with or talk to other people who were my age they didn't understand the struggles that I was facing or maybe didn't understand why it was so hard for me and so that time for me was very lonely and so it is through that experience that has kind of left this desire in my heart to help other moms. Maybe you're not a super young mom, maybe motherhood took you by surprise or maybe you thought you had motherhood down pat and then you added a second or third or fourth child to the mix and things are different this time. I think that's what's so unique about motherhood is that it is something that can unify us all. We all can relate to but it also looks so different in so many ways. I'm so excited to see how this project can help us see that we're each walking this journey and while it may look very different in each of our lives that I think we can all learn from each other. We can all support each other and I do think that there is power in knowing you're not alone on your journey.