The Midlife Feast
The Midlife Feast
#140 - Navigating Motherhood and Perimenopause: Embracing Identity Shifts with Jessie Harrold
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What happens when motherhood and perimenopause collide? In this episode, I sit down with my longtime friend and doula, and author of Mothershift, Jessie Harrold, to talk about the big identity shifts that come with these life stages. We unpack the messy emotions, the self-doubt, and the cultural pressures that make change feel so hard—and why it’s also a chance to rediscover who we are.
Jessie and I explore how small moments of curiosity can spark creativity and self-trust, even in the chaos. Whether it’s a quiet walk or just taking a deep breath, these simple shifts can help us embrace change instead of fighting it. Join us for an honest, dare I say even poetic conversation about navigating grief and discovering the upgraded versions of ourselves in midlife!
Connect with Jessie
The Website: https://www.jessieharrold.com
Instagram: @jessie.es.harrold
📚Grab the Book: Mothershift
Links Mentioned:
EP 119: Unfiltered Motherhood in Midlife with Tova Leigh
Click here to hang out with me on YouTube!
Looking for more about midlife, menopause nutrition, and intuitive eating? Click here to grab one of my free guides and learn what I've got "on the menu" including my 1:1 and group programs. https://www.menopausenutritionist.ca/links
Hi and welcome to the Midlife Feast, the podcast for women who are hungry for more in this season of life. I'm your host, Dr Jenn Salib-Huber. I'm an intuitive eating dietitian and naturopathic doctor and I help women manage menopause without dieting and food rules. Come to my table, listen and learn from me trusted guest experts in women's health and interviews with women just like you. Each episode brings to the table juicy conversations designed to help you feast on midlife. And if you're looking for more information about menopause, nutrition and intuitive eating, check out the Midlife Feast Community, my monthly membership that combines my no-nonsense approach that you all love to nutrition with community, so that you can learn from me and others who can relate to the cheers and challenges of midlife. Hi, jessie, welcome to the Midlife Feast, thank you so much for having me.
Jessie Harrold:I'm so excited to be here.
Jenn Salib Huber:So, backstory, you and I have known each other for many, many years, yeah, and for a long time our work hasn't really overlapped because you have been more firmly in the motherhood parenthood kind of support experience as a doula and as a writer and as a support coach, and I've been in this kind of midlife menopause world for the last decade or so. But I wanted to have you on the podcast because I have noticed, and I'm sure you have as well, and I hear from a lot of people about this overlap that is becoming more and more common where motherhood and especially perimenopause are overlapping, and the overlap that I'm in right now, which is parenting teenagers and being in post-menopause and having that overlap of this, is not great planning on Mother Nature's part to have these tumultuous times overlap. But, yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation, so welcome, yeah, thank you.
Jessie Harrold:Me too.
Jenn Salib Huber:So tell the audience a little bit about who you are and what you do, yeah sure.
Jessie Harrold:So I kind of started this path when I became a doula 17 years ago. So if people are listening and they're not sure what a doula is, it's someone who provides support for the perinatal time, prenatally, and then through the birthing process and postpartum. And then, a few years into that work, I noticed that the mothers that I was working with were changing everything about their lives. That motherhood kind of set off this cascade of other shifts in their lives, and so they were coming to me and I became then a coach and I started working with mothers and others all women through what I call radical transformations in their lives and rites of passage. And so, though kind of the beginnings of my work and you know, still a deep specialty and a thread of interest for me is working with mothers I've also kind of expanded this work to look at all of these transformations that we go through Because, as you allude to, there are these really common threads between them all really common threads between them all.
Jenn Salib Huber:That's a great explanation and I think what we're going to dive into is some of those transformations.
Jenn Salib Huber:But the first one that I'd like to talk about is this identity shift, and in the menopause, midlife world, perimenopause world, there's this collection of symptoms that we're calling not feeling like myself.
Jenn Salib Huber:It's actually a research term that's being studied, because there's a group of symptoms that includes not recognizing who you see in the mirror, feeling uncomfortable in your body, not sleeping, mood changes, and what I hear over and over again, and I can relate to having felt this way myself, is I just want to go back to feeling familiar, I want to go back to the person that I know. But kind of like, once you know anybody who has become a parent in whatever way, once you have a child there, you know, once you become a parent, there's no going back to who you were before, because it changes us in ways that there's no takesies-backsies on it and it's kind of the same. I at least feel, as we go through this transformation of perimenopause, that there's a lot of letting go that needs to happen, but a big part of it is this shift in identity. So I'd love to talk to you about that. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Jessie Harrold:Totally so. When we go through transformations, whether it's through matrescence, which is the word for the transition to motherhood, or through perimenopause or anything else in our lives, it's not just sort of a change to the things that we do, like we tend to in these kind of contexts. Think about the behaviors that are shifting. You know, and I know that's like a big part of the work that you do is like shifting some of the behaviors that we're engaging in, and you know it might be a sort of, you know, shift to behaviors that shifts to the things we're thinking or feeling or saying or doing. But actually, underneath all of that is this identity shift. It's this time in our lives when we're asking what I call the who am I now that dot dot, dot question, who am I now that? And we can use this question in a lot of different contexts in our lives and use an identity shift lens to think about so many things. So who am I now that I'm a mother? Who am I now that I'm in these perimenopause, menopause years?
Jenn Salib Huber:You, know one thing.
Jessie Harrold:You and I have talked extensively about my first book, which is called Project Body Love, my quest to love my body, and the surprising truth I found instead. And I talk in that book about the identity shift of who am I now that I'm no longer willing to diet? And so it's this deeper question that runs underneath the behaviors, the thinking, the feeling, the doing and into the who am I now? That, and you know, any transformation in our lives asks us to step into a new identity, a new way of being in the world and therefore therefore asks us to let go of who we are no longer. And we kind of have a real narrative in our culture that that is not an ideal thing, that you should not lose yourself, especially within the context of motherhood. Perhaps we say that losing yourself in motherhood is the worst thing that could possibly happen, that you should not change through that process. And yet you know, there's this tremendous potential, because what we don't remember, I think, is that we become someone new and often someone more deeply powerful and empowered and more ourselves actually, through these transformations in our lives.
Jessie Harrold:And you know, I think the missing piece here is an ability to work with the grief of letting go of our former selves. So we live in this culture that really we don't know how to grieve. Well, we try to kind of like get through to the other side of it and we relegate grief and those kind of feelings of ambivalence and loss to bereavement and death. Those are the only times that we sort of give ourselves permission to grieve. But if we think of this idea of letting go of a former self, you are grieving a loss, you're grieving the death of a former self, and I know that sounds really intense. I think it sounds intense mostly because we don't have the tools to work with our grief and to like confront it and be with those difficult emotions. And as soon as we do have access to those things, it becomes a lot more doable.
Jessie Harrold:And it's just this kind of season of our lives that we move through, where we feel the grief of whatever that might be in our former lives, and we allow ourselves to move through that. We allow ourselves to move through a time of liminality, of like betwixt and between I don't know who I am yet and I haven't stepped into this new identity yet. And then on the other side of that right, we have these beautiful potentials and powers that unlock. And again, this is like this is a parallel process for mothers going through matricence and for those of us who are going through perimenopause and menopause right now. It's, you know, I call it transformation literacy, right? It's like how can we become more skilled at traversing change? And these are some of the building blocks of that.
Jenn Salib Huber:Oh, my gosh, I love how you described that. That was beautiful, Like that was poetic, honestly, and I think what I was, what was kind of going through my mind as I was listening to you describe this, especially that the expectation. So we don't talk about listening to you describe this, especially that the expectation. So we don't talk about what to expect in midlife and beyond. We don't talk about that. It's normal and expected to go through these things and that also the grieving is normal, you know, and we can grieve something without feeling like it's a forever loss.
Jenn Salib Huber:You know, and I described it to somebody my dad passed away almost 20 years ago now and in the year before he died, when he was really sick, and in the first couple of years after, I was very much in the space where I just couldn't imagine ever being able to talk about his death, think about his death, remember him, look at pictures without being filled with grief.
Jenn Salib Huber:I could not imagine it. But now, 20 years later, I said to someone you know what I'm so thankful when the anniversary of his death comes up because it is a reminder for me to think of him. I no longer grieve that date. It is now a welcome date. I don't look at it with sadness. It's like, oh, here's this one day of the year when I always think of him. I'm so grateful for this day. And so we need to change every conversation around grief, but especially around, I think, what we're losing, because, you know, it's like you said, there's this transition in this liminal space, and on the other side there could be something good. I like to say this perimenopause thing. It's going somewhere good, but you've got to hang in for the ride.
Jessie Harrold:It's so true. I think you know there's this term called ambiguous loss and it was originally coined to describe, you know, kind of what you're talking about as a site. Well, it was originally coined to describe the feeling that people had when it was, you know, generally in the context against hope that their loved one would return, and so it's a really, it's a really complex experience and I have kind of borrowed that term to talk about you know it's it's very much kind of the condition of both matrescence and perimenopause. Is this question of you know, will this part of me return or not? And I think we, you know, sometimes we don't know the answer to that. We don't know.
Jessie Harrold:If you know, I don't know, whatever a particular hobby that we enjoy or something pre-motherhood that motherhood makes impossible, will return on the other side, or maybe some of the experiences of perimenopause that feel so unmooring and disorienting, will I feel like my old self again? And I think that's a really tricky feeling. And the same tools and resources apply when we're working with ambiguous loss as as we do with regular kind of, you know, the loss of something that we know that is not coming back, and I think what you speak to with your dad is so you know. So true is that our griefs become right-sized over time. That's what they're meant to do, and so you know it may feel really big for people listening right now, like maybe their body is sort of feeling or working in a different way than it used to.
Jessie Harrold:Maybe their brain is feeling or working in a different way than it used to and maybe some of those shifts are forever and there might be a part of you that kind of holds on to those memories of the way things used to be and that that becomes right size different time.
Jenn Salib Huber:Well, I love that Right size. That's such a good word, you know. Speaking of some of the physical changes, you've heard me and probably lots of people have heard me talk about hormone soup and that the hormone soup that we're swimming in before we go through parenthood or pregnancy and before and after perimenopause and menopause, that soup changes and your brain actually is going through a remodeling, and that's kind of what some of Dr Lisa Moscone's research talks about is that our brain goes through a remodeling. So it is very likely possible that we do become a different version of ourselves. I like to think it's an upgraded version, because I'm a much happier person and nicer person to be around now that I am not having cycles. But you know there's this change is happening in ways that we're just starting to understand, and the same is true with pregnancy, you know there's. So what you know about what? What's the research around?
Jenn Salib Huber:like we carry part of our children's DNA in our brain like you know this intimate connection with these biological life processes, with these biological life processes, events we don't really fully understand, and so the only language we have is to hold on. What culture tells us is the best part of our life, which you know, is when you're 18, or when you could fit into your wedding dress or your high school jeans, or when you were most physically attractive whatever it is. When you were most physically attractive, whatever it is. But who defines that right? Who gets to say that that is the best version of me?
Jessie Harrold:One of the things that I have done in my work and research, both in motherhood and in transitions across the life course for women, is to map some of these transformations that we go through against what we know about adult development psychology. You know we maybe talk about childhood milestones and is your kid hitting the milestones, right? Well, we as adults actually also have milestones. We continue to develop and mature as we go through our adult and elder years and what I've noticed is that a lot of these shifts matricence, perimenopause especially when they're well-supported and we can dive into that a little bit, but especially when they're well-supported, they act as like rocket boosters for a deepening maturity. So some of the kind of hallmarks of you know, mature adult development are things like interdependence, like that ability to kind of call on support and offer support to others and kind of be community minded or village minded, and you know nothing, if not motherhood for sure, rockets us into like, oh, my goodness, most of us are lacking the village and we desperately seek it right. And so interdependence becomes this kind of initiatory firewalk that we have to go through or we're not going to make it. Some of the other things are the ability to grapple with complexity and paradox. And I mean, my goodness, there is like no experience like becoming a mother or going through perimenopause, to again kind of initiate us into this ability to grapple with complexity.
Jessie Harrold:And another one is and I'm sure your listeners will really appreciate this, you know, from an intuitive eating lens is another one we start to insource our knowing. So, rather than kind of looking to the external world, to you know, figure out who we should be and who we should please and what's good, you know, we begin to insource that knowing and we become what a researcher, harvard researcher, robert Keegan, calls self-authoring. So we become the author of our own lives and again, like all of these transformations, when well supported, like give us the rocket boost into these beautiful markers of maturity, and I really think of those things as being not just important for us individually and maybe things that can support us well during these changes in our lives. But I actually think this is what the world needs more of. But I actually think this is what the world needs more of. And, oh, my goodness, you and I are talking at quite the time in the kind of global political landscape and, my goodness, do we ever the kind of people that the world needs us to be.
Jenn Salib Huber:Again, beautiful, poetic even. You know when I think of the emotional changes. So the anxiety, the mental rage, the irritability, the feeling like you're prickly all the time. A lot of the resistance or a lot of the discomfort is in the resistance to change or accepting that now, with your lived experience, there probably are a lot of things that are rightly pissing you off, and for damn good reason, and some. You know the cultural programming that we receive about you know being good girls and about being quiet and cooperative and helpful and what our roles are.
Jenn Salib Huber:We get to this place of midlife where we have no more fucks to give and we give them out very selectively. And so when somebody is telling us you should be doing this, you should be doing that, you should look a certain way, you should go to the gym at six in the morning every day of your life, you should only have certain kinds of foods or never have other foods If it doesn't align with what we're feeling, if there is that disconnect between what we know to be true in our bodies and what the rest of the world thinks we should do, it's hella uncomfortable, but that change, that resistance, is worse. Resisting what you know to be true on this journey is even harder. So I'd love and you're nodding your head for anybody who's listening and not becoming a parent, becoming a mother. So how do you kind of reconnect those timelines? How can, how do you help people to realign or what? Where can they start? Because you probably can't answer that in like this podcast, but like, where do people start that realignment?
Jessie Harrold:Yeah, totally Well, my book Mother Shift is kind of, you know, goes through sort of the process of how you can begin to kind of grapple with these changes. Because it's true, there's like this resistance. Oftentimes when I see resistance and sort of like like people describe it as being stuck almost in my clients, that to me is a sign that it's grief work that's needed. We often look ahead when we feel stuck and see like, can I push through to the next thing, whatever that is? Can I set a goal? Can I do better, harder, you know, whatever this is Actually, oftentimes we need to look back and give ourselves permission to feel the feelings we're having about what you know, what we're letting go of. But so in I've created this kind of roadmap really for transformation that I use in both Mothershift and with all of my clients and I liken it to. You know, I love to hike and so I liken it to trail markers. So I often will be hiking and just when I think that I've gotten myself lost which happens more than I'd like to admit I'll look up and I'll see a trail marker and it's just like the best feeling, like oh, I'm not lost, I'm on the trail and it's, you know, and so there's. This metaphor can be kind of pulled into this idea of the changes that we go through. I'm not lost, there's nothing wrong with me, and that's sort of something you alluded to earlier that we tend to pathologize these processes so many of women's processes actually, of becoming mothers and going through perimenopause and menopause, and, like you know, we can kind of normalize and support these experiences. So the first step of this model that I've created, the four elements of radical transformation uses the element of earth and in earth it's the simplest thing, jen, it's just naming the change. It is literally getting our toes in the earth of what's true for you now, because our lives as humans and women are ecosystems.
Jessie Harrold:When one thing changes, everything changes right. When one thing changes, everything changes right, and that kind of you alluded to that when we kind of can't tolerate one thing, there's a you know kind of all the dominoes start to fall. When we're noticing all of the areas in our lives that we've been performing or masking or you know not being authentic and so naming it, oh, my goodness, I don't feel the same in my body. My body is like foreign territory these days. My marriage feels like such and such. I feel a certain way about my job. It's literally kind of inventorying these shifts, because otherwise it just feels like this super nebulous oh my god, everything is changing and it's really overwhelming. And so that's kind of step one.
Jenn Salib Huber:I love the visual of like grounding Because it does, especially when you're not sleeping, especially when your clothes don't fit, you're not sure what's happening, especially if you're in that like is this perimenopause or am I going crazy? Kind of state, just having something that you can, like, stand firmly on and say, okay, regardless of what the label is, this is where I am, it doesn't matter why. This is where I am, this is what I'm feeling, and I think that that holds a lot of power and I think that's a really good thing for people to hold on to. Yeah, totally, I had another thought and I'm trying to remember it. I should have written it down. Okay, let's just keep moving on, it'll come back to me at some point.
Jenn Salib Huber:But so the last thing that I wanted to touch on was that, even through the discomfort or the suck, as I sometimes call it, of these changes, it is an opportunity and that's kind of a cringy word, but it's a chance for us to reconnect with ourselves today, the person, the body who we are today, and go through the process of grieving but maybe not holding on to trying to get back to who we were or who we thought we wanted to be and I sometimes have a hard time convincing people I guess is the right word that it's worth it because there's so much emotional investment in oh, but back when I was I felt so, or it was easier. Because we hold on, we like those rose colored glasses, get really strong and when we start looking back to what we perceive to be a better version of ourselves. I'd love to hear how you kind of introduce this concept of like, if this is an opportunity for growth and reconnection and getting to know the new version of you.
Jessie Harrold:Totally. So. I'm going to kind of like bring us back to this four elements model. We have earth, we have water, which is the grief and the sort of like working through some of that that we've talked about. Then there's air, which is this liminal space of like. Okay, I'm no longer, you know, this age or I'm no longer, you know, premenopausal, how you know, I'm no longer not a mother, whatever you want to say, but I haven't kind of fully stepped into this new identity yet. And then we move into fire, which is this place where we get to explore who we are becoming. And it's very sexy.
Jessie Harrold:It's very like we want to skip to the fire part because that, like grief time and liminal time, is so uncomfortable. But I think, kind of what you're speaking to is this liminal space of like. You know, I've let go of all of these things, gosh, I. You know, I really wish that I could go back, because I can't see what's ahead of me. And you know what I say in this time is that when nothing is sure, everything is possible.
Jessie Harrold:So you have this like kind of in many ways, blank slate, like kind of in many ways blank slate, and the liminal time again so uncomfortable, but it's filled with possibility and potential. And in fact we know that our brain kind of shifts into sort of a different mode of operating when we're in liminality, when we're kind of everything is up in the air, as it were. And if you kind of want a very concrete example of this, it's like when we're in the shower and you know how you have your best ideas in the air, as it were. And if you kind of want a very concrete example of this, it's like when we're in the shower and you know how you have your best ideas in the shower. Showers, long walks in the woods, those are microliminal spaces in our day-to-day lives and we're often so creative and so like kind of paradoxically productive in these times that appear unproductive. Right yeah?
Jessie Harrold:You know, we all know this to be true, even if we don't kind of heed that beautiful advice to just rest, go for a walk instead of keeping on, keeping on.
Jessie Harrold:And so there's this really beautiful quality to this not knowing time, and what I encourage the clients that I work with to experiment with here is something that I call the art of the possible. So like, given this new set of givens, given this kind of new landscape of your life, what is possible? And this is a time where I really encourage my clients to kind of blue sky it. Like, do you want to open up a cupcake stand at the local farmer's market? Okay, write it down, like, make a list of all of the things that could happen here. And you know, I'll say that it's more possible to access that kind of creativity and curiosity when our nervous systems are regulated, when we've done that grief work, when we're feeling like about what's next, it can be really fun. And then, as we move into fire, I encourage people to start experimenting with that. So like, okay, you want to open up a cupcake stand at your local farmer's?
Jenn Salib Huber:market.
Jessie Harrold:Brilliant. Go look for your favorite cupcake recipe. There's a tiny experiment you can do to kind of nudge your way into who you're becoming. And it's not a time to like set long-term goals, because this is a developmental process. So it means that who you are now is different than the person you will be in a year. So we don't set long-term goals because by the time you reach that goal it won't be relevant anymore. You will not be the same person.
Jessie Harrold:So we take these tiny incremental steps and we use that beautiful intuition that we've developed to feel into okay, I looked up my favorite cupcake recipe. How did that feel? Oh, that was good, I got really excited about that. Okay, what's the next step? I love it, you know. Or we use that intuition to be like, yeah, you know what that felt? Really crunchy, I did not know. That is not the path, and what I think is that it really allows us to step into the most authentic version of ourselves. And I mean I think that like authenticity and liberation are really like what's at hand here, what's possible here. So hopefully that gives people like some tangible ideas, but also like, wow, this could happen.
Jenn Salib Huber:And so much of what you said is rooted in, you know, acceptance of like this is what it is. We can't go back and change time. We can't go back and choose a different. You know, it's not like a choose your own adventure book where you can go back to the beginning and start again. Where you are is where you are. We don't have to know why. We don't have to overthink it, but we do have to be curious and we have to be open-minded, and this theme of curiosity people will recognize, especially people who've worked with me.
Jenn Salib Huber:We need to get curious about what do you like, what foods do you like, how do you like to eat, when do you like to eat and who do you like to eat with? Even what's your favorite plate? How can you experience satisfaction and not just nutrition and nourishment? And for so many people who have maybe been on a lifetime journey of dieting, they have never considered do I enjoy eating this? It's always. Should I? Is this good for me? Is this, you know, okay? So I love that you have introduced lots of little food for thought moments into this conversation. I can't wait to go back and listen, because I'm going to write lots of them down too. Thank you so so much, jessie. So I have one question, two questions for you. The first is what do you think is the missing ingredient in midlife?
Jessie Harrold:I know you told me you were going to ask me this and now I feel like, do you know? Okay, I think, based on our conversation today, I would say that it's this transformation literacy and maybe, very specifically, some grief literacy because, honestly, the possibility that opens up when we're able to really get with, yeah, there's no turning back. Those times were great and what's possible next. I think that's really powerful.
Jenn Salib Huber:I love that and I absolutely 100% agree. And my second question is where can people find you? Because I'm sure that lots of people will want to learn from you after listening to this.
Jessie Harrold:Yeah, totally so. My website is jessieheraldcom. I'm mostly on Instagram, that's kind of my social media spot, jessieesherald. I also write a monthly newsletter called Imaginalia, which is kind of this. It's really fun, people love it and it's this kind of support and resources and some field notes from my own life just regarding and supporting transformation. And then, if people are interested in Mothershift, this is Mothershift and it's available wherever books are sold. I know so many of my clients are going through perimenopause and matrescence at the same time and that is just like a whole thing. Oh my heavens. And hopefully this book can really support you through that.
Jenn Salib Huber:Amazing. Thank you so so much for joining me today, Jessie. Thank you, it's such a pleasure. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Midlife Feast. For more non-diet, health, hormone and general midlife support, click the link in the show notes to learn how you can work and learn from me. And if you enjoyed this episode and found it helpful, please consider leaving a review or subscribing, because it helps other women just like you find us and feel supported in midlife.
