What if preparing for motherhood began long before we decided it was time to try for a baby, or possibly even long before we knew for sure if we wanted a baby?
For many women such as myself, the idea of preparing for pregnancy doesn’t become real until there’s a timeline — and possibly a lot of fear — attached to it. It doesn’t show up as a priority until we meet the person we want to have children with, or we reach the age when we realize that if motherhood is something we want, we need to start thinking about it more seriously. We might come off birth control after years of suppressing our natural cycles, and we realize we don’t actually know what our bodies are doing from month to month, or what they need to work well. We begin trying to conceive and discover that getting pregnant isn’t happening as easily as we expected it would. These are all common scenarios that I see all the time in the women I work with.
It turns out that when we build our life around avoiding pregnancy at all costs, potentially for years and years, an easeful and straightforward path to motherhood isn’t always available to us right away when we decide that we want it.
And for many women, the questions about their reproductive capacity begin after a diagnosis, a miscarriage, irregular cycles, PCOS, endometriosis, anovulation, chronic monthly PMS, or the confusing experience of being told that their infertility is “unexplained.” Fertility specialists have years of medical training and specific focus in this one area of medicine, only to tell us that our inabilities to get pregnant are, simply, unexplainable! But for many of us, our fertility issues CAN be explained… if we’re willing to get to our our whole bodies more deeply. Our whole selves.
Some of us arrive at these fertility questions and experiences while considering IVF and wondering what we can do to support ourselves before or alongside that otherwise invasive and expensive process.
Some women, such as myself, simply wake up one day in our thirties or early forties and realize that we do actually want children after years of uncertainty—and suddenly we feel as though we’re already behind. But I think there’s another way we can conceptualize preparation for motherhood; we can begin conceptualizing and preparing for motherhood long before there’s a pregnancy to protect, and long before there’s a fertility treatment to consider out of desperation. Before there’s even necessarily a partner or a firm decision about whether motherhood is the path we will ultimately choose (or, will choose us, depending on how we’re looking at things).
We can begin preparation with the woman who may someday become the mother.
This means we prioritize learning about our female bodies after years of ignoring, overriding, controlling, or simply not understanding them much at all. It means becoming familiar with our menstrual cycles and the information they give us about our health. It means prioritizing daily replenishment of what’s become depleted and supporting our metabolism by understanding even just the basics of how it works beyond weight maintenance. It means understanding our stress physiology, and developing rhythms that allow us to feel better resourced, safer, and more tolerant of life’s many stressors.
But preparation also means looking beyond the body itself, because motherhood will ask something of our emotional lives, our relationships, and our connection to ourselves, and, for some of us, our spiritual lives too.
This is the philosophy behind The Nourished Mother Method, the signature process I use in one of my coaching containers with women.
Rather than waiting until conception becomes urgent and then focusing exclusively on fertility, this process asks us to look at the conditions in which a woman is living right now. What does her body need? What has she been carrying emotionally and unable to process? How supported is she in her friendships, family, and marriage? What are her relationships like and is she chronically dissociated? Where does she find meaning, rest, connection, pleasure, trust, and somewhere to place the parts of life she cannot control?
Because motherhood will demand a lot of us and remind us of the areas where we don’t have full control — as all spiritual initiations do.
Whether we’re preparing to conceive soon, imagining motherhood several years from now, struggling with our reproductive health and stuck in survival mode as a result, questioning whether motherhood is right for us for ethical or logistical reasons, or already raising children while realizing how damn depleted we’ve become, all of these questions matter.
And they give us somewhere to begin.
The Nourished Mother Method Preparing the Whole Woman, Not Just Her Fertility
The Nourished Mother Method is part of the work I do inside Nourishing the Mother, where we address the different dimensions of a woman’s health together rather than assuming that one isolated intervention will explain everything she’s experiencing.
In the modern post-birth control world, women can live their entire lives as if fertility is something separate from the rest of them, as if its this part of them they can put on a shelf somewhere in the basement and then come grab it and utilize it at any time. As a result of this, not only are we usually poorly prepared for conception when we DO decide this is what we want in life and are finally ready for, but it also works against us when we become mothers and realize how depleted we are, having spent 10+ years ignoring the systems that expend so much in the entire pregnancy and motherhood process.
The intention of my work in this area, as laid out in this coaching container, is to support women in integrating all of these parts of themselves — for the sake of their overall health, their chance at healthy conception and pregnancy, and for creating a healthier experience as a mother.
The process has four interconnected areas: Nourishing the Body & Rhythms, Nourished Mind & Emotions, Nourishing Relationships, and Nourished Soul.
Although I’m describing them individually here, I don’t work through them as a rigid checklist where we finish one and move permanently onto the next. Human beings don’t work that way. Our physical health influences how much emotional capacity we have. Our relationships affect our stress. Our internal patterns affect whether we can actually follow through on the changes we know would support us. Our sense of meaning can influence how we experience the circumstances in our lives we cannot change.
For one woman, physical replenishment may need most of our attention at first, and as a nutritionist, this is the area that I tend to focus most of my time with clients.
But another woman may already eat well and understand her cycle beautifully, but she may be profoundly lonely, overwhelmed, or disconnected from her own emotional needs, needing more support with these areas before she can feel stable enough to pour so much into growing and caring for others. Some women may have spent years trying to perfect every health metric while their lives have become smaller, more anxious, and increasingly centered around controlling their bodies — a pattern I’ve seen countless times in my work and personal patterns, and one not conducive to easeful motherhood.
The purpose of the work I do here with women isn’t to become perfect in four different areas before we have earned the right to become mothers, the purpose of this work is to become more aware of what we need, where we’re under-resourced, and what we can begin tending to now.
In this article, I’m going to share each step in this method with you to give you an idea of how I support women with their fertility, regardless of whether motherhood is only a possibility in the distant future, an immediately goal a woman’s needing help with now, or something she’s already immersed within, having already given birth, and needs help with regulation and nourishment. Let’s begin!
1. Nourishing the Body & Rhythms
In my work, we always begin with the physical body because we need to understand what we’re actually working with.
This part of my process looks closely at a woman’s physiology, cellular resources, overall nutrition, health history, hormones, thyroid patterns, blood sugar patterns, stress physiology, lifestyle, and daily and monthly rhythms. Rather than starting with a generic fertility diet or supplement list, I want to develop a much clearer and deeper picture of the individual woman in front of me, and what she actually needs to be well, fertile, and nourished.
An HTMA, or Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis, is one of the foundational tools I use for beginning this work.
I interpret these results alongside a thorough intake form and any additional labs a client has and would like me to integrate. I also have a few additional labs, such as serum ferritin, copper, and thyroid markers that I tend to encourage women to get checked in order to give us a well-rounded understanding of her physiological state. From here, we can also pay attention to the rhythms that organize our lives as female bodies: light and darkness, sleeping and waking, our menstrual cycles and fertility signs, and the everyday patterns that often get lost when health becomes something we only think about in terms of diagnoses or annual bloodwork.
Depending on the woman, we might track temperature and pulse, macronutrients, fertility signs, symptoms, or information from apps and devices she already uses.
Some women love having more data and want to understand their bodies in greater detail in this way, while 0thers become overwhelmed by too much tracking and do much better with a simpler approach. The amount of information we use should support the woman rather than turn her body into another full-time project and obsession. This is one of the reasons individualized work matters so much to me.
Our goal is always to understand what her particular patterns are telling us and use that information to create a nutritional and lifestyle protocol that reflects her physiology, temperament, resources, and goals.
Over time, I want women to become more familiar with their own body rather than more dependent on someone else to interpret it for them. I want them to understand their cycle well enough to recognize when they’re is ovulating and become more aware of the signs and symptoms that can give them useful information about their reproductive health. I want them to understand that their menstrual cycle can be a meaningful metric that we pay attention to alongside how they sleep, eat, feel, exercise, recover, and move through their daily lives.
There can be tremendous agency in knowing our bodies this way, particularly for those of us who’ve spent years disconnected from our cycles or feeling as though fertility was something mysterious that we would only need to understand when or if we finally wanted a baby.
But physical information is only one part of the picture of who a woman is and what her needs are.
2. Nourished Mind & Emotions
We can know exactly what we want to change and still find ourselves unable to make that change effectively, or at all.
We can have the right nutrition plan, supplements, morning sunlight, bedtime routine, fertility tracker, meal plan, and every other tool we have been told will make us healthier—and still find ourselves returning to the same disruptive patterns, the same psycho-emotional states, the same limiting beliefs about ourselves, our bodies, and what’s possible for us.
This is where I believe our emotional and psychological worlds deserve ample attention.
I am not a licensed therapist, and my coaching work is not a substitute for therapy or appropriate mental health care if a woman is dealing with something deeply disruptive, such as a serious mental or psychiatric illness. I do, however, have certifications and coaching experience in mindset, neurosomatics, emotional processing, and approaches informed by NARM, IFS, AEDP, and embodiment work. When appropriate, I draw from these tools to help women notice and work with the internal patterns that arise as we try to change our lives and our health for the better.
This work tends to move much more slowly and requires more patience and safety.
I don’t bring a woman into a coaching relationship and immediately expect her to expose the most vulnerable parts of herself in our sessions, even if she consciously feels up for it. During our earlier sessions, we’re getting to know one another, going through her health history and data, and building the relationship that makes this deeper work possible. Emotional work is led by each woman’s capacity, interest, and willingness to go there, and pacing is an essential part of these practices integrating into sustainable psycho-emotional changes.
This matters because many of us have spent years living from the neck up, relying heavily on what we can consciously intellectualize and control.
We think about our health constantly, we research different symptoms and supplements, we analyze our illnesses and symptoms, and we often consume more information about hormones, fertility, trauma, nutrition, supplements, metabolism, and nervous system regulation than we could ever reasonably implement. Meanwhile, we may have very little experience actually being with ourselves when fear, grief, anger, disappointment, longing, or uncertainty arise and demand our attention and care. For women living with chronic health problems or fertility challenges, this can become especially complicated because our body may no longer feel like a safe place to live in.
Our bodies can begin to feel like problems we’ve been assigned to solve, where every symptom becomes another clue that we must hyper-focus on. Every lab result becomes something to optimize, and every month can become another opportunity to judge whether our bodies are succeeding or failing based on whether we’re ovulating, bleeding on time, or having symptoms we know relate back to our hormones or fertility in some way.
And underneath all of that activity, we may actually be truly exhausted.
I don’t know about you, but some of us have spent years without feeling particularly safe or at ease in our bodies. Many of us have unresolved emotional stress we’ve become very skilled at functioning around and pushing through (raises hand here, seeing myself in these patterns). And some of us have a precarious or tense relationship to rest or pleasure because productivity, hyper-independence, perfectionism, and staying busy have become so familiar that slowing down feels uncomfortable, foreign, or simply impossible on our own.
If we never work with those parts of ourselves, our health plan can become another arena in which we reenact the same patterns, and our fertility will follow.
I’ve had several clients who tried every month to get pregnant without success, but were also unable to sit still with themselves or experience real pleasure and joy as a result of earlier traumas and chronic stress. They were doing all of the right stuff on paper, as far as nutrition and supplements, but their energy was stuck in survival mode, and this played out in their relationship to the very sexual contact that would leave to a pregnancy in the first place! While we have less solid data to point to the idea that being unhappy in our bodies and unable to slow down and enjoy life is a direct cause of infertility, I can guarantee you that the energy-demanding cells within our eggs are going to take a hit when we’re living in a chronically contracted state!
The goal here isn’t to psychoanalyze every symptom or suggest that infertility or chronic illness is simply caused by unresolved emotions — the goal is to recognize that we’re emotional beings, and those parts of us come with us when we attempt to change how we eat, rest, relate, set boundaries, ask for help, choose partners, connect sexually, prepare for pregnancy, or even imagine becoming mothers in our minds.
Sometimes we need more than instructions. Sometimes we need someone who can witness what comes up while we try to follow new instructions. Sometimes our healing is actually more contingent on us learning how to be present with ourselves than it is on what we’re consuming while we do this.
3. Nourishing Relationships
Relationships may be one of the easiest pieces to overlook because relationships are much harder to put into a health protocol.
We can (and often do) buy the supplement, stop skipping breakfast, go to bed earlier, and start tracking our monthly cycles. Those things give us a sense of control because they depend largely on us to implement and follow-through on. But relationships involve other people, and will inevitably kick up our attachment patterns, insecurities, past hurts, and any relational traumas we have that we may not even be aware we have.
Relationships require vulnerability, discernment, communication, trust, boundaries, disappointment, repair, potential loss, and the willingness to admit that we cannot meet every human need alone.
For all of us who’ve developed our sense of agency around what we actually have control over in life (what we eat, our environment, when we sleep), relationships can feel extremely threatening to this sense of control. And yet, if we’re preparing ourselves for motherhood or think this might be something we want in the future, I believe our relationships deserve serious attention. Many women are already lonely and under-resourced before becoming pregnant, and this can have just as much influence on our overall health as our diets. We may have friendships, family members, coworkers, and hundreds of digital connections, but still lack the kind of relationships in which we feel known, supported, cared for, and able to truly depend on someone when we’re struggling.
This can become even more significant when we imagine pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and raising a child. These are not meant to be isolated endeavors!
Who will help us carry life when our capacity changes and our demands go up? What’s our relationship with the man we hope to have children with actually like and is he reliable when the relationship is no longer centered on fun, passion, convenience, or a life of only two? Can we communicate our needs to him, and does he share our vision for family? Do we trust him in the ways that trust matters most? Is he willing to participate in the kind of family life we want, or are we hoping he will become a different person once a baby arrives?
This last question is an unfortunately common theme amongst modern women, and I’ve fallen into this trap myself; falling in love with a man for his potential, and hoping that he will become father material when the time comes, despite clearly not being father material in the present, and showing no signs of changing.
Therefore, I believe one of the first crucial steps in our preparation process is to work on our relationship and our attachment patterns, especially if we have a pattern of calling in men who: stress us out, trigger our abandonment issues, leave us feeling confused, avoid conflict or accountability, cannot meet our emotional needs, aren’t sexually and romantically trustworthy, or simply don’t want the same lives as us! Beginning to say NO to men who aren’t fit to father our future children or love us as mothers is a crucial way of committing to our future families, and it’s also a statement we’re making to (G-d, the Universe, choose your label) that we’re taking this path to motherhood seriously, even if we don’t know what all the pieces will look like, exactly.
And when you begin to discern between men who might fit this role and men who won’t, you better believe that G-d (or the Universe) will send you men who test your commitment to this path!
So, for women who aren’t partnered yet, preparing for motherhood can include becoming much clearer about what kind of partnership we’re actually seeking. It can mean believing that our desire for commitment and family is legitimate enough to influence whom we date rather than choosing relationships that fundamentally conflict with the life we hope to create. Many women, including myself, who were raised in liberal communities and grew up feeling unclear about motherhood, may find that they have a pattern of getting involved with men for reasons that have nothing to do with family plans or long-term compatibility!
Many women (again, myself included) without clear family goals themselves are more likely to date men for whom they find attractive, exciting, inspiring, or interesting, and may have to retrain themselves to choose men who clearly possess the qualities we’d want and need in someone we’re building a family with.
But this focus in my work also means strengthening female friendships, reconnecting with family where those relationships are healthy, finding and creating spiritual community, and practicing the uncomfortable skill of reaching out to others and receiving help. While I believe that who we choose to partner and build a family with is one of the single most influential choices of our lives, I also believe that strictly focusing on our partnership to the exclusion of a larger community is going to set us up for a lot of unnecessary stress and isolation. The nuclear family as we have nowadays is very new in human history and sets women up to carry a lot of the family and motherhood weight on her own.
Modern life gives us endless substitutes for connection; screens, entertainment, work, health research, busyness, self-improvement, and constant stimulation can fill our days without necessarily fulfilling our relational or intimacy needs.
For some of us, focusing obsessively on our health can even become easier than confronting how lonely we are, how under-supported we are, and can keep us from working toward building more sustainable and solid relationships. Preparing our bodies for pregnancy while ignoring the environment in which we hope to mother doesn’t make much sense to me because we’re relational creatures who never historically mothered alone.
Our future selves need people we can lean on, and we can begin building those relationships now.
4. Nourished Soul
The fourth part of my process is more difficult to define because it deliberately reaches toward what cannot always be measured or intellectualized.
Nourished Soul is the spiritual dimension of my work, and I want to be clear about what I mean by that. I do not believe a woman needs to be religious, follow a particular spiritual path, or hold any specific belief in order to become healthy, conceive, or be a good mother. and this area will naturally be more important to some women than others. For clients for whom spirituality doesn’t play much of a role in their lives, this dimension may occupy very little of our work together.
I include it because many of us do experience ourselves as having spiritual needs, however we personally understand them, and this is a common thread amongst the types of women who follow my work and seek out my services.
There are parts of being human that nutrition, lab testing, psychology, and even science cannot render painless. There are losses we cannot optimize our way out of, and there are questions we cannot answer with enough research or intellectualizing. There are circumstances—including illness, infertility, miscarriage, aging, grief, uncertainty, and death—that eventually confront us with the limits of our own control, with our own existential fears and confusions.
For women who want this dimension included, Nourished Soul may involve returning to a religious faith, developing a meditation or contemplative practice, spending more intentional time in nature, praying, journaling, or finding another way to engage with something beyond the analytical mind.
It can mean allowing ourselves to surrender what genuinely isn’t ours to control and building a regular practice around this surrender.
There’s an interesting tension here because so much of my work is about agency. I want women to understand the areas of their lives in which they have more influence than they may have realized. For instance, we can learn how to nourish ourselves differently, gather better information and learn how to discern between relevant and reliable scientific data and low-quality noise. We can change our habits, seek appropriate care from others, reconsider our relationships, and make choices that better reflect our core values.
But agency is not omnipotence.
At some point, healing can also involve changing our relationship with the fact that we cannot guarantee every outcome nor can we control how the world treats us, and how we feel each day.
Many of the women who gravitate toward my work already have a spiritual orientation, and they often tell me that reconnecting with it changes how they feel about what they’re experiencing. It doesn’t necessarily always change the circumstances themselves, but it gives them somewhere larger to place the uncertainty, grief, fear, or unanswered questions they’ve been carrying alone, and this matters immensely.
There can be tremendous relief in no longer believing that every difficult thing happening in our bodies and in our lives is our personal responsibility to fix, and I believe letting go of this belief is inherently spiritual in nature. The point of spirituality (for me) is to habituate the experience of letting go of this belief, for the sake of our whole selves, including our bodies.
What This Can Look Like in Real Life
One of my previous clients, whom I’ll call Jenna, came to work with me from a very different point in the motherhood journey.
She wasn’t preparing to conceive, she was already a mother of three young children under four and was experiencing firsthand what can happen when a woman enters motherhood with needs that remain largely unmet. Jenna was incredibly depleted and struggling to remain present with her children. As a stay-at-home mother, most of her time and energy went toward caring for other people who demanded her attention and her physical body non-stop. She also knew that experiences from her own childhood were influencing the way she was experiencing motherhood, but between the demands of three small children and the isolation created partly by where her family lived, she had very little space to develop a relationship with herself outside of being needed.
We began our work physically.
I had Jenna complete an HTMA and basic labs so we could look at both tissue and serum mineral information. Alongside her intake form, current diet, symptoms, and health history, her results gave us a picture of significant depletion in important cellular resources, including magnesium, calcium, sodium, potassium, zinc, and phosphorus, with patterns involving copper and iron that also needed our attention, as they were driving her respiration and cellular energy down, inflammation up.
This information became the basis for the nutritional and mineral protocol we used to begin replenishing her body.
But we didn’t wait until her physical health was “fixed” before addressing everything else. As our relationship developed, Jenna and I also began working with emotions she’d spent decades inhibiting or suppressing out of survival. I used coaching practices informed by my training in AEDP and IFS-based somatic parts work to help her develop greater connection with herself and more trust in the validity of her own feelings and needs. I gave her self-connection and embodiment practices to implement daily, even for as little as 5 minutes at a time, to increase her sense of connection to herself.
That internal shift began influencing her relationships.
Jenna became more able to open up to her husband about what she was experiencing and what she needed from him. Over time, this created more support with their children and helped them begin feeling like they were on the same page again after years of disconnection and conflict in the marriage.
We also made relationship-building practical for her.
Between sessions, I also gave her assignments to reach out to friends, even when all she could realistically manage was a tea date or phone conversation, and to create intentional time with her husband so they could begin rebuilding intimacy after a period of significant conflict and distance. I checked in with her around the goals she’d chosen, and she began noticing changes in her mood, energy, and confidence as connection became something she intentionally made room for rather than something she hoped would somehow happen when life became less busy. What she found was that she naturally felt more present with her children as her capacity to handle more increased.
Lastly, we returned to a spiritual commitment Jenna had identified as important to her, but hadn’t made any time for.
For her, this included meditation, mirror practices, journaling, and intentional self-reflection. None of this needed to become another impossible standard because she was a busy mother with small children and limited support. There were days when five or fifteen minutes alone in the bathroom was genuinely what she had available, and this is what she worked with. The purpose was not to create an impressive spiritual routine, but to create new neural pathways around connection to self, which over time, became more natural for her and easier to return to, even in moments of real stress.
This gave Jenna small, repeatable moments in which she could return to herself after spending so much of the day being pulled outward by people who legitimately needed her attention, care, body, and presence.
Through those practices, she began recognizing more quickly when she was dissociating, disconnecting from herself, or pushing beyond her own boundaries, only to react emotionally toward her children in ways that led to shame and regret. Within roughly four to five months, the combination of physical replenishment, emotional work, relational support, and spiritual reconnection helped Jenna feel more stable and centered in her experience of motherhood. She described being better able to rest and focus on her children, feeling less on edge, and experiencing more connection with herself and the people closest to her.
We didn’t transform every aspect of her life in four months, nor would I promise that we could. What we did was create a foundation for her to feel more regulated, present, and nourished each day, which increased the agency she felt over the rest of her life and her behaviors.
Jenna came into our work physically depleted, emotionally disconnected from herself, isolated, hypervigilant, and close to divorcing her husband because connection felt like one more demand she didn’t have the capacity to meet. Her needs as a woman had become increasingly difficult to hear beneath the constant responsibilities of being a mother and a wife in isolation.
Once we could see those needs more clearly, we had somewhere to work.
What Happens When We Override Our Needs?
When we don’t know what we need physiologically, emotionally, relationally, or spiritually—or we know but continually override these needs—we can develop patterns that eventually affect much more than the original problem.
We can begin trying to force our bodies to cooperate while living in circumstances that continually ask too much of us and deplete what little we have. This is something I see when women become consumed by achieving perfect numbers on labs, convinced that if every metric finally reaches an ideal range, they’ll arrive at the state of health they’ve been chasing. Meanwhile, relational stress, loneliness, lack of rest, emotional suppression, or an unsustainable lifestyle may barely enter the conversation at all if its not something they feel they can control or change.
I see versions of the same pattern when we become so desperate for certainty around fertility that we begin looking for something outside ourselves to guarantee an outcome.
Sometimes that can mean rushing toward increasingly invasive interventions without first understanding the nutritional, metabolic, lifestyle, or relational pieces we may also want to explore. For others, it shows up as spending enormous amounts of money on technologies, treatments, supplements, testing, or anti-aging strategies while the basic conditions of daily life remain profoundly undernourishing for us. This isn’t an argument against medical care, fertility treatment, technology, or testing because there are times when those resources are incredibly important. I believe we should use qualified medical professionals when our needs fall within their scope.
What I question is the belief that we can bypass ourselves, our energy states, our beliefs and self-concepts, and our relationships, and psycho-emotional patterns.
The Nourished Mother Method gives us another way of asking the important questions. Rather than only asking, “How do I make my fertility work?” we can begin asking, “What does this woman need in order to be better nourished for the life she wants to live?” For some women, the answer will be primarily physical and their health and fertility will get what it needs from caring for their physiology alone. For another, a relationship (or need for relationship) may need far more attention, and someone else may need appropriate therapy alongside our work together. Another woman may realize she’s built an incredibly healthy lifestyle while leaving almost no room for friendship, intimacy, pleasure, or spiritual surrender, and developing these is her work.
We don’t all need the same things entering this work, which is precisely the point.
“But Shouldn’t I Be Working With a Doctor or Therapist for This?”
You might reasonably be wondering why you’d work with me, a nutritionist and health coach, on something as significant as fertility, reproductive health, trauma, or preparation for motherhood when I am not a physician or licensed therapist, and I think that’s an important question.
I have enormous respect for licensed professionals, including doctors, nurses, dietitians, therapists, and fertility specialists, and I don’t position my work as a replacement for theirs. There are situations in which I send clients to physicians because they need additional testing, prescriptions, diagnosis, or medical treatment, and there are also circumstances in which I recommend therapy when someone needs concentrated mental health or trauma care beyond the appropriate scope of coaching.
My role as a woman’s nutritionist and coach is different.
My training and certifications allow me to work within my scope around nutrition, health, fertility awareness, nervous system function, and basic trauma-informed coaching, while the nature of a coaching relationship allows us to spend considerable time integrating these different parts of a woman’s life. That integration is one of the aspects of my work I value most, and it’s what tends to be lacking in many of these licensed professionals I mentioned.
We can talk about breakfast and mineral patterns, and we can also notice the part of you that feels guilty for resting or experiencing pleasure or expansion.
We can look at your menstrual cycle while also talking honestly about whether the relationship in which you hope to raise a child feels supportive and safe. We can discuss practical health changes and make somatic room for the grief that comes with realizing how disconnected from your body you have felt for years, holding space for you to feel whatever you need to feel. These conversations and kinds of sessions do not replace medicine or psychotherapy; they occupy a different space — sometimes a space that’s more impactful in women for whom medicine and psychotherapy haven’t moved the needle.
I’ve had women tell me that a few sessions together helped them understand aspects of their health in ways that they had not been able to piece together through previous appointments because we had the time to look across several areas of their lives at once, and hold it all with care.
This is where I believe coaching can offer something valuable: not by pretending to be a licensed professional, but by doing the integrative work that fits within our scope exceptionally well, and by offering women the time and attention many other professionals have neither the time nor the training to dedicate to one woman at any given time.
Motherhood Begins Before Conception
I don’t believe we need to wait until we have all our ducks in a row; a positive pregnancy test, the perfect marriage, or the right amount of savings to start thinking like women who are already preparing for motherhood.
Nor do we need to know with absolute certainty that we will become mothers.
We can nourish ourselves because we’re worth nourishing now, and this includes nourishing our reproductive physiology, our eggs, our sex hormones, and the parts of us that get deep satisfaction from caring for others. We can learn our cycles because understanding our female bodies has value beyond conception. We can address nutritional depletion because our energy and health matter whether or not there is ever a baby. We can work with emotional patterns because we deserve greater capacity to inhabit our own lives. We can choose healthier relationships because connection matters. We can build community because none of us were meant to carry everything alone.
And if spirituality matters to us, we can develop a relationship with something larger than ourselves because there will always be parts of life we cannot predict, fix, or control.
If motherhood does become part of our future, none of this work will have been wasted because we’ll enter that chapter knowing ourselves more intimately than we did before. And for those of us who are already mothers, it isn’t too late to begin replenishment and self-care. Postpartum replenishment does not stop mattering because our babies are no longer newborns. Our emotional lives don’t stop mattering because someone else depends on us, and in fact, these parts of us matter more. Our marriages, friendships, communities, inner lives, and our physical bodies remain part of who we are, and all need care and attention.
Becoming a mother doesn’t eliminate the woman, it makes caring for her even more important.
If You See Yourself Here, I’m Here for You
If you read this article and saw yourself in any of my words, consider that you don’t have to navigate this stage of your life—or prepare for the next one—entirely on your own.
Maybe you know you want to be a mother one day, but that day isn’t here yet. You want to use this time to begin caring for your body, understanding your cycle, tending to your emotional health, and creating a stronger foundation for the woman and mother you hope to become. Maybe you’re already in a relationship with the man you hope to conceive with, and you want to give your body the additional nourishment and care it needs as you prepare for conception, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum.
Maybe, like I was in my early thirties, motherhood still feels farther away for you. You haven’t met your life partner yet, or you know there are areas of your health, relationships, emotional life, past traumas, or sense of self that you want to tend to before you make the decision to conceive at all.
Maybe you’re dealing with irregular cycles, hormonal symptoms, unexplained infertility, previous miscarriage, or another reproductive health concern and want to understand more about your body rather than feeling as though you have no agency in what happens next. This will be especially pertinent if you’ve been (or are still) on hormonal birth control for any considerably length of time, as your body may need extra support coming back into naturally cycling hormonal state fit for fertility.
Or maybe you’re already a mother and feeling burnt the f*ck out!
I’ve you never had the opportunity to think seriously about replenishment after pregnancy and birth, and you’re now beginning to wonder whether depletion and years of putting your own needs last could be contributing to how you feel, this work will be incredibly valuable for you.And I’m here for women in each of these places.
We don’t have to wait until we’re actively trying to conceive—or until something has gone wrong—to begin nourishing the woman who may one day become a mother.
And our work doesn’t have to focus solely on fertility.
Nourishing the Mother is my coaching container for women who want individualized support with their health, fertility, preparation for motherhood, or replenishment after becoming a mother. We look at the whole woman: her physical resources and rhythms, her emotional world, her relationships, and, where it is meaningful to her, the spiritual dimension of her life.
If you feel called to this way of working, you can set up a free call with me here so we can talk about where you are right now, what you need support with, and whether Nourishing the Mother might be an appropriate next step.
If you’re curious about my work but aren’t ready to make a larger investment of time or money, an HTMA consultation is another place we can begin.
It gives us an opportunity to look more closely at your mineral patterns, nutrition, stress physiology, health history, and some of the physical areas we may want to support as you begin caring for your body more intentionally. There’s no single moment when we suddenly become worthy of this degree of care; we don’t have to earn it through pregnancy, infertility, illness, depletion, or motherhood. We can begin preparing for the lives we hope to have by becoming more attentive to the lives—and the bodies, relationships, needs, and inner worlds—we have now.
Because sometimes the earliest stage of motherhood has nothing to do with conception at all. Sometimes, it begins with how we learn to mother ourselves.
