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Mothers Be HEARD
All Rights Reserved

Media Release

Felicity Chapman is the founder of www.mothersbeheard.com, and lives in Adelaide, Australia, with her husband and two boys aged 7 and 4.  She is an honours graduate in Social Work and has practiced as a Counsellor in a range of community settings.

What is mothersbeheard.com?

The website is a free online community for mums who want more than just advice about parenting.  It’s for mums who want to share the realities of what it’s like being a modern day mum, but also for mums who want to be recognised for the woman that they are.  Being a mum is not just about the relationship a woman has with her children, and so the site offers women a number of ways for them to get in touch with how being a mum has changed them and continues to effect them (the good bits and the hard bits). 

The site focuses exclusively on mums because most women who become mothers today still carry out the role of primary care giver and do the bulk of the work associated with childcare and household duties.  Operating alongside this is the fact that only in recent history has there been an assumption that women will combine domestic life with paid work.  Society's attitude toward women has changed considerably over the last few decades and that has had a flow on effect to beliefs about mothering.  When men become fathers their world does not usually change as much as when contemporary women become mothers.  Women today have unique issues and challenges as they transition into motherhood.

The website features a section called ‘Life BC’ (before children) which lists the accomplishments of women before they became a mum, and ‘Your Story’ is an up-close-and-personal account of what it’s like becoming a mum and/or being a mum.  There’s also a poetry and prose section in ‘Mother’s Voice’ along with blogs, book reviews, information on maternal health, and great links to other websites.

People like hearing about how other people live their life – being a mum is no exception.  It’s human nature to want to share our lives with each other, and the really honest bits are usually the most helpful!  Mothers Be HEARD makes public what is usually a private matter so that a community of mums can benefit from each other’s honesty and, in the meantime, get the acknowledgment they deserve.

When did you start mothersbeheard.com and why?

In 2005, after reading Susanna De Vries The Complete Book of Great Australian Women, I was mesmerized by the value of women having their story told.  I wondered how many incredible stories (past and present) there are of women, mothers, that have not been told because of their seemingly mundane content - content not celebrated in our performance focussed world.  I just became completely passionate about the voice of the mother. I began doing a literature review on research around the experience of motherhood and maternal health.  This coincided with intrigue over my own experience about becoming a mum, and the experience of my friends who had children at a similar time. 

Our society is so different now to what is was, say, 50 years ago – a woman’s expectation of her life is so different.  We assume that women can have careers and there is a much higher participation of mothers in the workforce now.  The extended family is having less involvement with childcare due to age, work commitments or distance; and women are having their first baby much later in life.

Mums can feel pretty isolated, have unrealistic expectations of life with a baby, be missing ‘life-as-they-knew-it’ more keenly than their partner (especially if at home full-time), and be needing to tell someone how they truly feel.  I experienced all of these things and I wondered if society’s love of modern technology could bring mums closer together from around the world into a community where they feel supported and heard. 

My training as a Social Worker and my experience as a Counsellor has shown me how important it is for people to be able to express themselves; how healing it can be to tell your story.  It’s not helpful to bottle things up.  It’s usually also the case that in recounting events people can not only find relief in expressing themselves, but can see more clearly the inner strengths that they’ve drawn upon and the things in life that are most important to them.  Being heard can help validate the present and also clarify one’s goals and direction for the future.

But what my experience has also shown me is how few opportunities exist to truly say how we feel; and this is even more the case for mothers.  We don’t want to sound like a failure, we don’t want to burden the other person with our feelings, we don’t want sound ungrateful or unloving, and we certainly don’t want to sound like we are whinging.  Mums are expected to be so many things but society still has a hard time listening to when mums find mothering tough; and there is perhaps even more pressure now for mums to be seen as coping – after all, mothering is natural and should be a piece of cake, right? 

I felt strongly about there being a venue where the ups and downs of being a modern day mum could be validated and where a global community of mums could be created to support one another. Voila!  The Mothers Be HEARD website went live in July 2006 and now has readers and members from around the world.

I love creating a space for mums to tell their story and to support one another.  I hope other people enjoy the site as much as I do!

by Felicity Chapman

last updated October 2008