Mama Shaker: Charlotte, Joining the Sisterhood of Mothers

Charlotte Blake Kaplan brought new mothers together for a decade before becoming one herself. While helping postpartum women recover, she caught a glimpse of the healing power of the sisterhood of mothers.

“Motherhood has taught me how to be with women, how to not judge the kind of person I think that I would be friends with, ” she says. “It’s just opened my heart.”

“So many of us have grown up—or we were brought up—to gossip and not really know how to be in the circle of women, even though that’s our ancient lineage,” and it results in what’s described as the “sisterhood wound,” says Charlotte.

No matter what came before our children, or how adequate we feel going into it, motherhood is the great equalizer. It bonds us together as warriors who’ve been through similar physical and emotional battles.

“So I feel like that’s been a big, beautiful gift that I wasn’t expecting,” she says.

While it’s impossible to know what motherhood will be like, Charlotte’s instincts were spot on: spending time with moms is guaranteed to ease the transition.

“Women need to be together,” she believes. “In my twenties, when I was working with women who had just had babies, it was somehow imprinted in my brain that I was definitely going to surround myself with women who are going through the same thing as me.”

She started Charlotte Blake Pilates as a way to heal from years of dance that wreaked havoc on her body. Learning how to help others move without pain bonded her to mothers early on.

“I feel like I always held myself back because I loved working with moms, but I wasn’t a mom myself,” she says. “But I see, looking back how my work was really helpful and it didn’t matter that I wasn’t a mom.”

“I also have the perspective of being a single woman in my twenties to now being married with a baby, and having gone through that experience definitely changes how I work with women and how I relate to them,” she says. “I am giving myself a little bit more credit retroactively.”

Charlotte also created a Facebook group of women in her Brooklyn neighborhood who were due around the same time.

“It grew to 150 people, so I had a community of women when I was pregnant, and then postpartum and we continue to post and lean on one another,” she says. “We post on the Facebook group, we call each other, we text. Some of these women have never even met and I’ve had multiple conversations with them.”

“I love talking to women about her birth story and my birth story,” she says. “It’s just a different way of working with a woman.”

When we spoke, Charlotte was beginning the journey of reclaiming some of her identity as her 9-month-old son approached his first birthday.

“I really took a look at what brings me joy and where my heart really lies and was just feeling like it’s time to really do the work that I’ve been called to do,” she says.

“Something about motherhood just makes you fully commit because you kind of have to with your babies, so I feel this new responsibility for myself and for my family and for my dreams,” and “the message I want to put out in the world.”

“Really commit and just go for it,” says Charlotte, emboldened by the women she supports and no doubt are rooting for her too.

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: Jen, Casting Motherhood in a New Light

Photographer Jen Goldberg found herself having a mother-daughter talk about boudoir photos, when she started fielding questions from her 68-year-old mom about her evolving style of portraits.

“I said ‘I think it’s boudoir, mom, but I’m not sure because the boudoir I knew before was very red and glossy,'” she recalls, while they reviewed her sophisticated black and white photos together.

Her mother responded with a simple but powerful question.

“Can I do this?”

When Jen reassured her it’s for anybody and everybody, the cowboy boot-wearing art teacher she calls “mom” had one condition: no high heels or lingerie.

“I think you’re the most beautiful when you’re wrapped in a towel and you’ve just come out of the shower,” Jen suggested, an ode to the style of Mario Testino — which some of us may remember from his portraits of Cindy Crawford in the 80s.

Together, Jen and her mom created the stunning image that headlines this story.

Conjuring each subject’s personal definition of style, comfort and confidence is how Jen draws mothers of all ages out of their shells to reveal their most radiant selves.

“I want to feel that I am capturing the essence that is you, and you recognize–in the image–the beauty that you create, and we create together,” she says. “We talk about who you are in this moment of your life and why we’re capturing these images at this time.”

“Some people come for reasons that are quite hard for them, or they’re marking the end of a moment, or something has happened and they feel that these pictures will add positivity in their life,” says Jen. “Some people cry.”

She says that more often than not, it’s an emotional release that she describes as exhilarating, “freeing and liberating,” and even surprising, to see themselves “in such a beautiful way.”

Jen often meets clients earlier in the journey of motherhood, starting with maternity shoots and continuing through newborn portraits. By becoming familiar with her and the process after those initial sessions, if and when they decide to return to be photographed by themselves, she notices an immediate level of comfort.

Either way, she believes “it’s never too late and never not the right time to do it,” she says. “You’re different now than you were 10 years ago, you’d have made a different picture.”

In fact, it was the return of one of her maternity clients two years later asking for Jen “to photograph me with that same feeling of empowerment and beauty and delicacy that those pictures represented for me,” that inspired this new direction.

Not all moms immediately grasp the power of being in front of the camera–even during family photo shoots with their kids, when she’ll reassure them, “they want you in the picture.”

From Jen’s point of view, it’s not only family portraits that can create powerful memories for our children — it’s how we see and treat ourselves during these selfless seasons of motherhood.

A new mom 3-4 months postpartum and mothers of kids in their twenties have had identical reactions to seeing themselves photographed by Jen, “I can’t wait to show my daughter how beautiful this picture is.”

“They want to know what you look like, and having these kind of photographs becomes a legacy of things that you pass on to your kids as something that you did for you that was really beautiful,” she says.

When Jen did what many people do with boudoir, and gifted a portrait of herself to her husband–holding a guitar for the music-lover’s 40th birthday–she learned the biggest lesson of all.

“Living with it changed the way I felt as I started my day,” she says, about her striking silhouette hanging in her bathroom.

“This feeling is real,” she observed. “It feels tangible that I have inspired myself in the morning, getting up, in those two minutes while brushing your teeth.”

Jen’s reaction to seeing herself was, and always will be, completely different from her husband’s or her two daughters.

Her image is uniquely hers.

“I always say love it for you first.”

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Photos courtesy of Jen Goldberg Photography.

To access Jen’s gallery of sophisticated boudoir photos, visit PrivatePortraits.com. Her gallery at Jen Goldberg Photography features maternity and family photos, as well as headshots.

Normalizing the Moods of Motherhood with Dr. Alexandra Sacks

Newly crowned TED speaker Alexandra Sacks, M.D. wants moms to know that all those overwhelming thoughts swirling around in your head are to be expected when you’re expecting–and acclimating to motherhood.

“Am I cut out for this?” is one of the most common questions Dr. Sacks hears from moms who assume that such closed-door confessions will lead to a diagnosis of postpartum depression.

“I realized that part of what was contributing to people feeling like a lower mood, and feeling better after they spoke to me, is that they weren’t talking to each other,” she says.

That’s why Dr. Sacks recently took to the stage at TED Residency with an important message around the concept of “matrescence,” a transformative developmental stage that occurs as women become mothers.

“Shifting the focus from the baby to the mother is a pretty radical idea, globally,” she says.

“I’ve been getting letters, emails from people all over the world,” she says, including a mental health worker in Zimbabwe raising funds for a women’s health conference, and women in Pakistan, Malaysia, Australia and beyond.

“Matrescence” started to take off when Dr. Sacks penned “The Birth of Mother” in The New York Times in 2017. She was blown away by the response when the story went viral, which solidified the need for a broader public health push.

“I thought it was pretty straight forward stuff that everybody knew, so I was really surprised that it got passed around so much. Then I thought we have to keep going,” she says about the steps that led to the TED talk.

Dr. Sacks has also co-authored a book coming out in 2019, What No One Tells You: A Guide to Your Emotions from Pregnancy to Motherhood, which features “the most common psychological challenges that we’ve seen in our patient population” along with Dr. Catherine Birndorf.

“The book is really supposed to be a how-to guide to get through pregnancy and your first year of motherhood in a way that helps you really understand the terrain of the psychological transition,” she says.

It Takes a Village

There are signs the medical industry is beginning to embrace “matrescence.” In fact, Dr. Sacks says the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology is changing their guidelines to encourage postpartum moms to see their doctors before 6 weeks.

As for those whispers of postpartum depression?

“The medical community is shifting to a broader umbrella term called PMAD (postpartum mood and anxiety disorder),” she says. “Some people feel more anxiety than depression…I don’t even think of them as two separate conditions; I think of it more as a spectrum.”

Dr. Sacks believes that treating this spectrum is a “community exercise” that requires partners, friends, family and/or hired help to allow mom to get out of the house and take a break.

“Cutting off self-care will also lead to anxiety,” she says. “We need to rest. We need to be able to relax, to calm our nervous system, to have social interaction, to not work 24/7 which is essentially what the job of caring for an infant is.”

“Sometimes people just need a good night’s sleep and then they feel better,” says Dr. Sacks. “It’s really just about sleep deprivation sometimes.”

(There aren’t enough emojis for me to convey how relevant this is for me and so many moms I know.)

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Photo credit: TED/Ryan Lash

“If you stop doing the things that make you feel like you, you’re going to stop feeling like you,” she says.

Plus, the whole family benefits when mom carves out time for herself.

“When you preserve a part of your identity, you’re also leaving room for your child to develop their own,” says Dr. Sacks, in my favorite line from her TED talk.

Women Helping Women Succeed

“I want the definition of matrescence–and what will best support a woman when she’s going through matrescence–I want that conversation to be guided by mothers,” she says.

“In order for that to happen we need to reduce shame and stigma. Talking and putting your feelings into words is one of the most helpful things you can do to protect yourself against social isolation and depression.”

Dr. Sacks wants moms out there to take up this challenge. Confess something you’re struggling with to another mom. Take time out to do something that you used to do.

For more information about matrescence and Dr. Sacks, visit AlexandraSacksMD.com.

Photos courtesy of TED/Ryan Lash.