Wintering: The Art of Rest and Self-Care for Balanced Motherhood with Author Katherine May
In this episode, author Katherine May delves into her book, "Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times," discussing the importance of self-care and rest for mothers. May shares her experiences with burnout and discusses the concept of "wintering" as a way to prioritize one's own needs and well-being. May offers practical tips for mothers looking to implement wintering into their lives, and emphasizes the importance of self-compassion in coping with the challenges of motherhood.
WEBSITE: https://katherine-may.co.uk
INSTAGRAM: @katherinemay_
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Show Transcript
You're listening to the motherhood unstressed podcast and I'm your host, Liz Carlile. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for being here. Thank you for pressing play. And honestly, I'm not that surprised that you've press play on this particular episode because I'm speaking with the amazing Katherine May, her new book wintering the power of rest and retreat in difficult times is out now. It's a brilliant nonfiction book rich with nature writing, poetry, mythology, philosophy, and memoir, and in all elegantly explores ways that the natural world tries to teach us over and over to take a season of deep rest and retreat. Even Elizabeth Gilbert you remember her from Eat, Pray, Love, love the book, saying it's every bit as beautiful and healing as the season itself. It's a truly beautiful book. And that's how I felt when I was reading it. I'm just so thrilled. I felt so lucky to have her on the show. And I just am so excited to share her words with you today. So if you love it, please share it with a friend who needs to hear it and enjoy my conversation with the amazing. Katherine May.
Well, hello, Katherine, welcome to the show. I am so glad that you're here.
Katherine May 1:15 Hi. Thanks for having me.
LC 1:17 Yes, absolutely. And, you know, the book itself is amazing. I just like I was saying before, I feel so lucky to have you on the show to share your wisdom with my audience. You know, why was this book so important for you to put out into the world? Was it just a cathartic process of healing for yourself? Or did you actually intend for it to be a balm for others?
KM 1:38 Yeah, I think it was really that I was I wanted to give something to other people. So I just kind of reached a point in my life when I realized I had a kind of expertise in wintering as I call it, which is these times of life where you fall through the cracks and feel like life is carrying on without you, I suppose. And I just, you know, sometimes you have these moments of clarity when you join the dots between for me or the moments that I'd wind to, but also all the moments that my friends were and were wintering at the time and had wintered in the past. And yeah, I suppose I thought we don't talk about this. We don't have a modality for getting through it. We don't acknowledge it as normal, we actually, in fact, do the opposite. We make every single person going through every single crisis feel like they've uniquely failed. And I just wanted to create something that that gave that language and that perspective, I suppose. Yeah.
LC 2:39 And when it does exactly that, you know, through your own personal story, your journey. I just, why do you think, you know, going back to what you just said, Why do you think it's so shameful? This process of wintering this process where you feel just completely out of sorts, like you have failed in some way? Why are we ashamed? And why is it on us in that way?
KM 3:01 We just don't have a narrative about that. Really not not in current and current society? I mean, I think actually, we used to have more of a way of talking about it. I mean, when you look at our folklore, when you look at our religious stories, we we probably talked about that much more cyclical way of living in great depth, actually. But the 20th century, we've changed a lot, haven't we, we've started thinking about success in very straightforward terms, and about this idea of lives that go from zero to 100, in this kind of perfect upward slope. And we've lost this really delicate, important dialogue about the times when everything's failing. And, you know, we think that we've pushed a load of things back, you know, we think that we've pushed illness back, we think that we've pushed death back. We think that we can read the right book to make sure that we get through every life phase perfectly. It's great to talk about this on a, you know, blog with motherhood, blogs, podcasts with motherhood in the title, because actually, I felt that very strongly when I first became a mother that there was, like, supposed to be a method for me to get this right. And I couldn't get it right. And actually, the failing is the important bit. I think that's where we find our humanity. That's where we find our compassion. And it's where we find our way through our personal way through it. I think that's vital. Actually.
LC 4:29 Can I just get chills when you're saying that because it is like in those slow down moments where we almost can't breathe sometimes that it's like you get these insights that you never would have gotten, if everything was going so well and so perfectly. It's it's almost like shock therapy, but I love the way that you have framed it in that it's actually it's the best medicine that we can have in that moment. And the part about motherhood is just so spot on. I think for me, like that's when I really came to know myself and to question everything that I previously thought about myself before and when you know up late at night with this baby thinking I'm doing it wrong and failing and you're just in a totally different realm.
KM 5:13 aAbsolutely. And, you know, for me, I think motherhood was the first time I came across a challenge that I couldn't get on top of, but I also couldn't duck out of, and that is like, that's a moment, isn't it? That moment when you think, oh, whoa, I've got to see this through even when it's awful.
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KM 6:28 Nobody says to you, like nobody says, Your baby's going to wake in the night, whatever the hell you do, your baby is going to wake in the night there is no method that's going to stop that from happening. Your baby's gonna go and crying Jags that you can't solve sometimes, like all of that staff, we have just lost the ability to say there are bits of this but so very badly. And that's part of the job. That's part of the mother work that we do. And you will look back on it one day and laugh a little bit but also made me feel good. Yeah. So not ready to fresh. Well, I mean, I you know, I only have the one because I just couldn't ever face it again. Right, right now I get it. But actually, I'm so careful about the way I talk to other women about motherhood now as well to open up that space for them, particularly when they've got tiny babies to say, Oh, this is horrible at the moment. And it's like we've lost the subtlety of thought to be able to love someone intensely and want to do absolutely the right thing for them and to be hating it at the same time. Like we can hold both of those things. We're big enough for that we can do that. We need to trust women more.
LC 7:42 Yes. And to understand that that's not a bad thing. It's okay to be like, This is not okay. And I'm not okay. And that's okay. I love that you just said that. Like it makes me think it is one other line from the book, I had to write it down because I loved it so much. It said, The problem with everything is often it looks a lot like nothing. You're talking about the busyness that we're all experiencing, you know, what did you learn about slowing down about centering, you know, in the midst of of everyone else just being busy? And what can we get from that?
KM 8:13 Yeah, well, I spent years in a huge rush, really just trying to get everything done. And to be everything, you know, I wanted, I wanted to be seen as important in my job, I wanted to be seen as competent, at the very least, but I wanted to be more than competent. And I wanted to get great satisfaction from that. I obviously also wanted to have a great home life, there were so many things that I was trying to do. And I was throwing myself at the World endlessly. And actually, I got to the point where I had to stop, you know, like stopping for me was not a choice. My health just collapsed underneath the mental and physical both at the same time. And by the time I got to the doctor and they you know, because like I had these big kind of gut health problems. They said that I had the gut of a 75 year old T and that was a wake up call. You know that was the work of stress in my life. And when I looked back over that time when I'd been so busy and striving so hard to be everything it was just a blur it was just this one big sense of panic and rush and no pleasure and slowing down for me you know did not come easy. It did not come willingly. But actually I would never go back to that life now. I just relish my time and space to think to be to breathe and to be well I just you know what am I if I'm not well what do I have if I don't have my health that's something that's really worth fighting for. And I I mean a few years on, you know This was not my immediate thought. But now I really strongly feel that we all need to start imagining lives that allow us to be well and happy and calm, like calm is possible, you know, we are allowed to feel calm and content that won't stop all those other crises coming, but we, we can imagine our working lives, it is possible to do this in another way. And I, you know, I had to be taught that very forcibly. But I would not ever go back to working full time, which of course, is many more hours than full time in a, you know, in a high stress job, but it's not worth the trade off for the years that you lose to it.
LC 10:39 Why do you think we put ourselves in these positions? Is it ego? Is it our parents? Is it society at large? Why do we feel like we have to do it, especially as women, you know, and and have it all and have the perfect home and the life and then have, you know, be killing it at work and just get all the accolades? Because, I mean, we have the ability to do it, right. Like, we have the ability to be super overachievers, but why do we feel like we have to?
KM 11:05 Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I think it's different for everybody may be for me, it actually hit home after I became a mother. In fact, I mean, before I had my son, I worked in quite a laid back way. I was always freelance, I always did the work I wanted to do, I always took time off for creative work. And it was only after my son came along that I felt this sense of urgency to, I think I'd felt so kind of pushed out to the world when he was tiny that I had to kind of elbow my way back in again.
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KM 13:19 I felt like I'd lost ground, I felt very worried about money. I felt like I needed to guarantee him a better life I needed. In fact, the job that that very nearly finished me off. I went into saying like, I need financial security, I've got to have a pension, I need savings, I need to make sure I can pay off a mortgage at some point. And it was almost it was always part of my nesting instinct in a strange kind of way, like I wanted to provide and make everything safe. And I know that sounds counterintuitive, given what I've just said about the effect on me. It's like a kind of thwarted instinct to sort everything out, isn't it and to look after everybody, but also Yeah, I didn't I didn't want to lose my footing in the world. I think I felt so isolated in those early days with a tiny child at home that I kind of wanted to force way way back into the world of people talking about interesting things and doing stuff at achieving stuff. Unknown Speaker 14:22 Yeah. To feel connected to who you were before maybe. Unknown Speaker 14:27 Actually, I think I was trying to be better than I was before. I think I look back on those times. And so I'd maybe wasted years of you know, and now I look back and think No I had it right at that point it was do it but it was a kind of panic. Yeah, it really was it was a fear that I wasn't enough and that I'd never be enough again and that was it for me like I couldn't I was just gonna go to waste somehow.
LC 14:51 You just saying that I think took off a weight of so many women listeners to this right now because all of us have had that feeling all of us You know, especially with the first one that you bring home, like you don't know what's going on who you are even anymore, what you want? And then yes, of course, you want to do the best you can for these children, whatever that means, you know, you're just gonna plow through and how long was it before, you know, you notice that you needed to change the way that you were going? How many years had it been?
KM 15:21 Man, I mean, six years, were up five or six years, it was a long time, it was really, I just every time I felt that stuff was going wrong, I accelerated rather than decelerated. And I think, you know, I looked around me, and I felt like other women were so content with less, you know, I met so many mothers who said, I'm so relieved to be out of work now that I don't have to go back. And I mean, we could never have afforded for me not to work anyway, that was not an option in our family. But I wanted the opposite of that I wanted to go back and to feel worthy, and to feel like I was something because I didn't feel like I was ever going to be mother of the year, I thought I could be a good enough mother. And maybe I could be a really good professional at the same time. But, yeah, it took me a long time to really be able to come to terms with not being able to do that actually into incomplete truth. And that's hard, because some people can, or some people seem very content doing that and very able to do it. But yeah, that's, that's life, isn't it sometimes knowing that you're not at the top of that pile?
LC 16:36 Yeah. But I think, you know, do they really think that they're doing it all, you know, even the people who seem like they have it all together, when you really peel back the layers, I mean, maybe there's just zero self awareness going on, maybe they are just plowing through day in and day out, or maybe I don't know, it's hard to say until you really, you know, peer behind the veil.
KM 16:55 But I think when you look at people that really cope, they have a lot of help, actually, well, and I, like I that's great, I couldn't afford the level of help that I'd have needed to cope. But you know, I have a very good friend who is very successful, and she has like a mother's aide who comes in in the morning, it's actually called her mother's aide for seems quite dated. Now, I don't know what that means for, like the men in the household. But I haven't seen and like sorts the house out for a couple of hours every morning. And I you know, all of those things, I think can mean that you can cope. But I was not in that financial position by any means. And so you know, you're doing all the housework at the weekend as well. It's it's just exhausting. We were not ever made to do 24 hours a day working, and to be scheduling our lives in the way that we schedule them. I was reading some interesting research about, you know, very ancient families like way back in our ancestral past. And, you know, we tend to think of those people as having to constantly work to keep food on the table. But actually, they rested for most of the day, they spent a lot of their time at leisure, just hanging out just drifting around like the, the hunting and the gathering took up very small amounts of time in their day. And they didn't work past what they needed. So they would have enough to eat, and then they'd have a rest and hang out and then you know, enjoy themselves. And I think we think that we're made to do the opposite. And I'm not sure that's true. I think we lose such a lot when we don't rest and we don't like kick back and laugh actually.
LC 18:35 Yes, yes. And let our spirits just kind of intertwine with each others. And that's part of what I really loved about the book, too is your mentioning of the animals and the ancient culture. And you know, the people of Finland who know how to winter, well, can you talk to us about you know, those cultures and those those elements that you brought into the book and why that was important to you? Unknown Speaker 18:57 Yeah, so when I was researching the book, I wanted to look at cultures that were intimate with proper, hard winters. I mean, we're I live in the UK, we occasionally get a bit of snow, and that's about as bad as it gets. But I feel like the people who are used to getting cut off every winter, who live in the far north, know something about how to survive personal winters as well. So I spoke to people from Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, and just ask them how they think about it. And what they all said was that they prepare very carefully, they always have winter in mind. So even in midsummer, they're busy stocking up food, filling their freezers with lovely things to eat. You know, like if someone drops around your house and winter in Finland, you must give them some cake because they come a long way in the car. I love that I thought that was very hospitable. But what I think what's really important because we talk a lot about Scandinavia and how they love, coziness and all of that kind of thing, but they actually hate the snow. They do not enjoy the snow, they know that it's all full. They all have stories of like friends they've lost who've gone out in a cold night and died, I mean are all who've had terrible car accidents or people who've become incredibly depressed over the winter. And so all of that beautiful culture of hugger and making the house beautiful than filling everything with candles and like getting together as a family. That's not coming necessarily from a place of optimism. It's coming from a place of survival and knowing that to stay happy and to stay afloat, you absolutely must do all you can to make life nice, like you feather your bed because the outside is cold, not because everything's perfect. And it comes from quite like a pessimistic place you know, we must keep working towards our happiness, because sadness is always so very close. And I think that that has huge insight for us that we are allowed to keep cheering ourselves up actually to keep deliberately making ourselves feel comfortable, cozy. coddled, looked after cared for. We're allowed to take care really,
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KM 22:44 And I like the thing that interested me most was the culture of the sauna or the sound. You have to call it the sound of it. You gotta go sound Scandi. Now I hate sounders I, oh, I'm not good in the heat at all. I were too cold lover. I took a sauna when I was researching the book and fainted cold out on the floor, which I wrote about.
LC 23:06 Oh, yeah.
KM 23:09 But I like I think if you're more accustomed to it, maybe you're better at surviving in it. But they talk about how the sauna is not just like, you know, like a health club thing, like we see it that might give your face a nice glow or whatever. But actually, it's a it's a space where families sit together in peace, and talk and listen. And it brings about this very kind of calm state of mind. It's it kind of invites contemplation, relaxation, the sense of almost dreaminess, an eye and that's vital to their culture that feels like a vital part of their existence. Because it's makes a part of the day special that would otherwise feel very dead in the middle of winter. And I think that's really beautiful. Like, you don't have to install a sauna to do that necessarily. But I think we can make those very deliberate conscious spaces that are about creating happiness, and coziness and warmth without installing the full charcoal burner. That is tempting.
LC 24:19 I know well, especially too as we get into real deal winter here and in the States. I mean, I'm in Atlanta, so it's not serious. I'm just like you and it's a little chilly. But that's it. Yeah. But you know, as you I was thinking when you were saying like coddling ourselves comforting ourselves. Even if you know you're a woman listening to this right now you don't have a family, we still need that, you know, we still need that check in and that was something that I really got from the book was these themes of of self awareness and of contemplation kept coming up again and again. And it's like people who don't do that, who don't take the time to really see what's going on inside. It's like the message hits you It whispers And then anoxia, and then it really gets yet so,
KM 25:03 yeah, yeah, if you can tune into it early, then you can save yourself quite a lot of pain, I think, I think most of us wait until any situation becomes urgent before we attend to it. And by then we've often been knocked off our feet already, and then it takes a long time to get back up again. Whereas actually, if we can learn to tune in and to be aware of what's happening for us, on a very basic level, how we're feeling physically or mentally, what situations are boiling in the background that maybe we don't want to pay attention to, then actually, we can deal with them, we can learn to be ready for them. It doesn't stop stuff coming from left field, like, you know, a pandemic, for example. But it does mean that we know where we are, when all of that comes. And I think we spend a lot of time not necessarily being, as you say, very self aware. And even if we are we don't think that we should really deal with it, because it seems indulgent. And it's not indulging in any way. It's not heroic to go marching on when you're suffering.
LC 26:12 Yeah. Where do you draw the line that because I do I so agree with you about that, you know, we do need to stop and slow down. But also there's this this other push to continue to be strong to weather the winter, you know, to make it as is because we're gonna go through it no matter what, you know, how do you how do you draw the line, even personally, for yourself, between relaxing into it, fully embodying it? And, okay, I'm gonna pull myself up, I'm gonna get through this.
KM 26:39 Yeah. I mean, there's always stuff that you have to do you know? And I think, actually, we ask the wrong questions in a way, because we assume that if we start to look after ourselves, we'll stop taking action, and we'll stop doing the right thing. And actually, you know, doing the stuff that has to be done is what we do, it's hard to stop doing that, it's hard to actually hold back on doing more than we need to do. You know, like, quite often we're looking after our families, but we're also trying to save the family next door as well, and make sure that somebody else has got dinner or, you know, checking in on a friend that hasn't spoken to us for 20 years, but we're really worried about them. So actually, I think the opposite is true, like with the where do you draw the line? Which is where are you going to draw the line between all of that helping, and that massive effort of salvation that we seem to be constantly indulging in and saying, instead, I'm going to take 20 minutes, you know, and it doesn't have to be a lot. I mean, I you know, we've had a tough time this autumn, in my family, like, everyone's been very, very stressed. There's lots of, you know, lots of people struggling, who I've needed to personally look after. And that is my responsibility, no doubt. But within that, I've made sure that I just take some time. And for me that's going out for a swim. That's making time to read a book for a while, it's actually you know, sitting looking at a film on my laptop for an hour if I can get away with it. Or it might be going to bed early to make sure I've had enough sleep. Like, you know that the other stuff can wait like my house does not have be full of homemade Christmas decorations this Christmas, it is okay for me to buy a cake from the store rather than bake it myself. It's okay for me not to paint my toenails or winter while they're in heavy socks anyway, and I see them. Like all of that does not have to happen like that's in service to the outside world and what they think of me, what I need sometimes is a hot bath on my own foot for half an hour with nobody bothering me. And when I've had that hot bath, I cut out a better person, I can do the stuff that I need to do. But also I get perspective about how much I'm often running myself into the ground doing stuff that nobody actually needs me to do, but that I do out of guilt and stress and overwhelm in the first place.
LC 29:04 I love it. I love it. It just reading your work. Like it always seems like you've had this this wider sense of perspective and self awareness. I mean, you talk about you know, when you were 17 going through, you know, your first winter are a significant one. Do you think it's because you've always been extra sensitive to life to yourself that you've abled, you've been able to really express it through your writing and through your work?
KM 29:28 Yeah, I mean, my mental health was quite poor when I was a teenager and after I had my really big breakdown when I was 17 You know, when I just couldn't function for six months. I think there was a I remember hitting rock bottom within that there was definitely a moment where I thought I actually I don't think I can go any lower and oh, I'm still here. And okay, so what do I What are the steps? What are the steps up? And it was a really deliberate conscious thought and ever since And I've been thinking very hard about how to make life work just work like not like how to make life perfect, not how to be a trillionaire and have a private jet. But that's never been my concern. My concern has been, how do I survive this better? How do I learn to to be happy and to be on an even keel? And if you're a person that has to ask those questions, like your know how important they are, not everybody has to ask those questions, but I did. And it took me a long time to get that right. Still, like I still had other depths. You know, it wasn't like, I sat there and figured it all out. But by my, you know, advanced years now 43 of them. I am, I've got the hang of it more, you know, I It's really true. I've got the hang of it. I am not the I'm not as vulnerable to those dips, because I have really studied how to how to cope the best I can. I mean, big things to me like meditation, getting into nature walking. They are, they're like my three things that I need to make sure that I'm okay. You know. And I, yeah, that's about making all of it's about making space.