Mama Shaker: Rebekah, Providing Comfort When It’s Hard to Know What to Say

Rebekah Rosler dedicates her waking hours to supporting women who are trying to become pregnant, navigating postpartum and the rigors of motherhood—all of which she’s experienced firsthand on the uphill climb to conceive her 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old twins.

“Whether you’re a therapist or a coach or a friend, what you really need to be doing is listening and supporting and helping—and oftentimes that’s all somebody else needs,” she says. “They don’t need an expert. They don’t need the most knowledgeable human being on a particular topic. They just need to be to be seen and they need to be respected and they need to be comforted.”

In the years it took Rebekah to prove the doctors wrong who told her she could never get pregnant, she formed bonds with a community of women going through their own infertility struggles. She learned how powerful it was to simply be present when someone is grieving.

“I often get messages from friends saying ‘I just found out my friend suffered a miscarriage. What should I say or what should I do? How should I act?’ and of course you don’t want to say the wrong thing,” she says. “But oftentimes, people just say nothing. And that’s the worst possible reaction. Even if you say the wrong thing, you’re trying and people want support, even if they don’t want it in that moment, or say they don’t want it.”

Rebekah’s advice is universal for the moments that we find ourselves sensing the pain that someone we care about is feeling, but we struggle to come up with the words to show them we care.

“I always say what you can tell them is you have no idea what the f*ck to say, you just know you want to be there for them,” she says. “You will be there when they want to talk. You are there for them now, tomorrow, in 10 years, whatever it may be.”

“Don’t leave them alone. Don’t leave them to their own devices. Let them know that they’re not alone, they have friendship and family and they have what they need. They might just not be ready or willing to dig deep and ask for it, but be present and be there.”

We often underestimate the power of sitting with someone—physically or virtually. Rebekah found a way to provide comfort through her Facebook “warrior” groups and 1:1 video calls available through It’s Conceivable, long before the rest of us relied on these forms of connection.

“Once I went through my own fertility journey and had my own experiences, really every aspect of trying to become a mother changed everything for me,” she says. “It shined the light on what it is that I’m intended to do with this wild and precious life.”

Even though Rebekah supports women all the way from pre-conception into the early years of motherhood, she admits to feeling the same imposter syndrome that most of us do.

“I’m an expert in some ways, but I’m obviously not a medical expert, and there’s a lot of things that I don’t know,” she says. “But I think sometimes just having a nonjudgmental ear or somebody to listen to, or talk to or communicate with or have camaraderie with; sometimes, that’s just what we need.”

Women Helping Women

While the healing power of human connection is undeniable, Rebekah cautions that all of the messages about motherhood that we consume digitally are a “double-edged sword.”

“Whether it’s celebrities or Instagram or social media or whatever social space and voice is out there now, I think there’s a lot more normalizing of things that either didn’t have a voice as much before—just by the nature of we didn’t have a platform for it—but I think the moms’ space, the fertility space, a lot of it is really being brought to the surface,” she says.

Whether it’s baby announcements, gender reveals, or breastfeeding, the social celebrations of motherhood can be painful to scroll through when you’re struggling with any stage of motherhood.

“I think we do need to be kinder to ourselves,” she says, and sometimes that can mean “hearing the positive stuff that’s coming from social media but blocking out the picture perfect images that people are putting up.”

“We’re all doing our best to get by, whatever that looks like. You have no idea what’s going on behind closed doors or the other side of a camera.”

Even when life feels overwhelming, the Golden Rule can help us figure out how to comfort those who need it.

“Treat your friends the way that you want them to treat you,” she says. “Treat your family the same way. Just love the people that love you and do your best. That’s all we can do.”

“People don’t want to be alone. People don’t want to be lonely. People need community, or at least a few people, or at least a person. Somebody, everybody needs somebody.”

Mama Maker: Megan, Getting the Most Out of Every Room

While our homes are multitasking more than ever, Megan Hersch wants to help families make the most out of every square inch.

“A lot of people don’t have a separate space that they can make their office,” she says, which is leading to requests like, “How can I put a desk in this corner? I really need to be able to focus. I need to feel like it’s away from my family. But also, I don’t want to feel like work is always in my home.”

As someone who’s sharing a home office formerly known as “mine” with my husband, I find myself dodging his booming voice during competing conference calls, and slipping into whichever bedroom isn’t occupied at the moment to escape the hollers from our two rowdy boys. For parents of school-age kids, online learning is a whole other dimension of space planning.

“Luckily, about two months ago, I converted a corner of my kitchen into an art zone with a countertop and cabinets under it, in lieu of a breakfast nook and I have been thankful for that every day,” says Megan. “My older daughter is on a Zoom call with her school and she works on that countertop and then my younger daughter will be in the dining room. I did get these plastic blow up chairs from Amazon that are have glitter inside of them and they sort of became portable reading chairs.”

Options also provide the opportunity for movement, which may feel aspirational during the workday as an adult but—as Megan points out—is a necessity for kids.

“They go to a Montessori school so they’re used to walking around their classroom all day,” she says. “I think in any classroom, kids are used to moving a little bit more. The biggest thing I’m focusing on is moving around and changing the location of activities, so we’re going to do art in the kitchen and then we’re going to do reading on a couch my younger daughter built for this morning.”

Beyond work and school, families spending all their time together in the same space gives us perspective and motivation that we may not have had before.

“I think the most important thing right now is to be grateful for what we have and focus in on what we can do,” is what Megan has been telling her daughters. “This is an amazing opportunity that we’re never going to have, again, to really be together.”

All of this togetherness provides inspiration to make the rooms we share more fluid, and perhaps even carve out a space for ourselves to catch a breath.

“I think getting a little bit of separate me time is really important and I think that that’s super hard, especially for moms, because we’re usually the ones that the kids come to if there’s a question or a problem,” says Megan. “But I think it’s also really good for kids to learn that everyone needs a break and sometimes we can’t be available.”

“That’s something that I’m trying to work on,” she says. “Maybe we’ll be really good at it, by necessity.”

Regardless of whether you have the space to spread out, the opportunity to reflect on what matters most in the spaces where we live, learn and work is spurring a lot of creativity. (Our toddler-proofing strategy changes on a weekly basis.)

“There are a lot of people who are sitting in the house that they don’t normally spend a lot of time in thinking, ‘Oh, it’s time for me to change this room’ or ‘I really need more seating because we’re just hanging out here,’” says Megan.

A growing focus of her interior design business, RoomLift, provides everything clients need to embark on a redesign in the convenience of a box shipped to their home.

“My eye for design put into an easy package for people to implement themselves is the idea behind it,” she says. “I’m just giving you a few great ideas to work in the room—something that comes from an expert opinion—and then you take it from there.”

Before and after: RoomLift client results

“You don’t need a major renovation to really change your space,” she says. “I came up with the name RoomLift because it’s like a facelift; you’re working with what you have. You might have your grandmother’s beloved table that you want to keep, but you want some new chairs and some paint or wallpaper and a light.”

While Megan believes it’s “so important to have a printed image as opposed to looking at furniture on a computer screen,” and “it makes such a difference to have it actually in front of you printed in color so that it feels as real as it can,” she offsets her high quality card stock, photos, samples and packaging by donating to One Tree Planted with every order.

“I try to focus on the fact that so much is going to change and hopefully we’ll be less wasteful and more cognizant of our impact on what we’re doing in our day to day lives,” she says, as we reflect on the positive changes resulting from families staying home together.

“Even just like eating the heel of the bread,” she says, providing a perfect metaphor for how we’re doing more with less.

Mama Shaker: Eirene, Reclaiming Time for Us

The world looked very different when Eirene Heidelberger and I originally spoke, but her mission to help women put the “me” back in “mommy” is more critical than ever for overwhelmed parents.

“Creating happy mommy time is finding the confidence and joy in yourself and recognizing I am a person,” she says. “I need to reignite what turns me on and what makes me happy.”

As the Get it Together Mom, she believes we unintentionally put ourselves on “Mommy Island” by doing so much for everyone else, that it becomes easy to forget about our own needs. This cycle of relentless giving can feel like “Groundhog Day.”

“When mommy gets off ‘Mommy Island,’ and she goes and fulfills her needs, she can come back to ‘Groundhog Day,'” Eirene says. “She has been renewed; she’s less beaten down because she has done something that has reignited her own self.”

I decided to experiment with this myself last weekend, as the weight of the world was starting to deplete my energy. So I let my kids entertain each other, while I supervised from a comfortable spot that allowed me to relax and only referee if necessary. Taking small breaks like this gave me more fuel to get back on the Ferris Wheel, so I was less likely to implode.

For Eirene, mornings are “personal armor” to build a foundation of me time and avoid feeling “like your child is sucking the life out of you.”

Plus, she believes her three sons deserve a peaceful start too, noting “it’s important for the boys to have to wake up on their own, rather than being roused by a blaring alarm clock. It’s the same process for them.”

While our morning routines no longer lead to rushing out the door, we can take the opportunity to set the right tone for the day.

“When your children have healthy sleep habits and there’s respectful boundaries, then everyone has their own me time,” she says.

Eirene believes sleep is the basis for a harmonious family life and lays the groundwork for her next tip: a schedule can make transitions (and me time) more predictable and cut down on power struggles.

“Those two pieces of the parenting puzzle go hand in hand all day long to create really easy flow of life and that’s what I’m all about,” she says.

While attempting a detailed schedule may feel daunting, one place to start is the evening. With less pressure to squeeze time in with our kids outside of work hours, why not pull dinner and bedtime forward? Even if it’s fifteen minutes at a time, suddenly an extra hour to recover from the day makes a big difference.

“Your time together is even more impactful because your children are rested,” she says. “Mom and dad know when they can fit their needs in around their child.”

Eirene also believes that transitions are really helpful for kids, so they know what to expect throughout their day. Ultimately, that means less battles and negotiations.

“A parent who is competent, happy and starts to give their children what I call the five-to-one transition,” she says, helps kids “know exactly what is heading their way.”

Earlier bedtimes are just one way we can find time to return to the things we used to love doing. Eirene has lots of other suggestions on her podcast and soon-to-be released book.

“What do you miss from your pre-baby life? What can we do to get you back to that?”

Eirene encourages both parents to answer these questions and suddenly, “they start talking.”

“I always say to parents, you chose to have a family and now what are you going to do to have the best time raising your family?”

Even if it feels like a tough time to change routines, the whole family will benefit from parents carving out time for simple pleasures.