(Excerpt) Do You Know the Core Stabilizing Your Motherhood?

I didn’t make it to studio pilates this morning. Between Daylight Saving time and a very late dinner, my usually fail-proof natural alarm clock didn’t get the job done. Instead of taking a day off, I did a virtual workout at home.

I’ve done mat Pilates at the studio nearly every Sunday since December. It sounds crazy. But I fell in love with this fitness mode for the pain it caused. I enjoy the sensations that linger in my deep interior muscles through the week. The fatigue stays with me in ways yoga engagement doesn’t. And the determination to push my body beyond its limits is a skill I transfer from the mat into daily challenges. The part I care about most is the awareness it’s brought to my core and the resulting ability to build strength in my spine.

Once the workout ended, I celebrated the familiar fatigue in my lower belly muscles, the transversus abdominis as proof that I kept my core engaged throughout. I’ve only recently begun to consider how important my core is to my overall wellbeing in movement and mothering.

I learned the name of those deep belly muscles during pelvic floor therapy to relax my hyperactive pelvic floor, which is at least partially from a life with generalized anxiety disorder. My pregnancies further eroded my already underdeveloped core muscles. I likely had untreated diastasis recti — a gap in the core muscle of the abdomen— after giving birth, on top of a host of other things.

That erosion of the core—both physiologically and metaphorically—impacts everything about our lives. Our core is the very essence of who we are and controls our ability to stand in our bodies and on our principles as the demands of life come our way. It impacts our mobility, strength, and how we see ourselves and what we are capable of achieving. And while women kinda remember this in movement, we rarely center the importance in daily life and motherhood. Just as physical exercise is required to build strength and awareness in our physiological core, building the core that roots our sense of self in life and motherhood requires effort, too.

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