The Shit That Helps the Shifts — Slow Motherhood, Boundaries & Why Your Kids Need a Healthy Parent, Not a Perfect One
Episode 6 of Wellness Me Up with Psychotherapist & Slow Motherhood Mentor Émilie Avon-Green
Can we just take a second to appreciate that this episode accidentally coined the best accidental tagline in podcast history?
The shifts to get through the shit.
You're welcome. Now let's get into it.
🎧 Listen to the episode here:
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Slow Motherhood Isn't a Pinterest Aesthetic. It's a Revolution.
Émilie is a psychotherapist, registered with CRPO and a Canadian certified counselor, and she mentors moms who are done being told how motherhood is supposed to look. Done with hustle culture. Done performing wellness while running on empty.
Slow motherhood isn't about prairie dresses and making sourdough bread from scratch. It's about slowing the f*ck down and actually building a life around what you and your family genuinely need... not what society decided you should want.
And Émilie will be the first to tell you she didn't always believe that was possible for someone like her. Twenty-year-old Émilie would have looked at the slow living crowd and thought... must be nice, they clearly haven't been through anything hard.
Spoiler: she had been through plenty. She just hadn't found her way through it yet.
Why Supporting Moms IS Supporting Kids
Émilie spent years working as a therapist with teens dealing with self-harm, suicidal ideation, and emerging mental health challenges. And what she kept noticing over and over again was this...
When the mom was doing well, the kid did well.
We pour so much into identifying the child as the problem to fix. But we forget that behind every struggling kid is usually a parent who is also drowning with nobody asking how they're doing either.
Most of us weren't taught how to manage our own emotions. Our parents weren't taught. Their parents weren't taught. And now we're expecting an entire generation of moms to just figure it out with zero support and a side of judgment for good measure.
That's not a personal failure. That's a systemic one.
The Lie We Were Sold About Motherhood
Here's what Émilie keeps seeing with the moms she works with...
They come in knowing something is wrong but not knowing what. Because they were sold this image of what motherhood is supposed to look like. Beautiful. Natural. Instinctive. And if you're not finding it beautiful every single day then clearly something is wrong with you.
So they scroll Pinterest. They compare themselves to other moms. They tell themselves they should be able to handle it because their mom did. Their grandmother did. Because the moms on Instagram seem fine.
And underneath all of that is a woman who has never once been asked what she actually needs.
The first thing Émilie does? Name it. Bring it out into the open. Not with a cheerful yeah but you're doing great! — but with an honest yeah, that's really fcking hard. You're right. It shouldn't have to be like this.*
Sometimes that's the first time a mom has ever heard that. And it changes everything.
Values — The Thing You Think You Know But Probably Don't
This is the part of the conversation that made me sit up straight.
Émilie has clients do an exercise where they imagine themselves at retirement age writing a letter to their current self describing the life they lived. What comes out of that letter is almost always a direct reflection of what their actual values are.
Not the values they think they have. Not the ones they were told they should have. The real ones.
And here's where it gets uncomfortable... most people say their values are family, health, connection. But then they look at how they're actually spending their time and it doesn't match at all. That gap between what we say matters and how we're actually living? That's where the burnout lives. That's where the resentment creeps in. That's where the what the f*ck is happening with my life feeling comes from.
Émilie’s values right now are health, family, and connection — in that order. And she revisits them every three months because values are seasonal. What matters most in winter looks different than what matters most in summer. What you need in a season of building looks different than what you need in a season of rest.
Knowing your values means when decisions come at you — and they always do — you have a filter. You're acting from intention instead of impulse. You're choosing instead of just collecting obligations like rocks on a walk with your toddler.
Boundaries Are Just Decisions You've Vocalized Out Loud
This reframe from Émilie is one of the most practical things said on this podcast so far.
A boundary isn't a wall. It's not an ultimatum. It's not aggressive or selfish or high maintenance.
It's just a decision you've made that you're choosing to communicate to someone else.
Émilie doesn't see clients on Fridays. She doesn't do evenings. She says no to board positions and commitments that don't align with where she is right now. And what she's found? People respect it. They work around it. The clients come anyway.
The hardest part isn't setting the boundary. It's holding it the first time someone pushes back. Because they will push back. Especially if you've been a yes person your whole life and everyone around you has gotten very comfortable with that.
But here's the thing... if you don't respect your own boundary, nobody else will either. And every time you make an exception you quietly teach people that your boundaries are negotiable.
They're not. Or at least they don't have to be.
The WTF Wheel Question: A Belief About Wellness You Used to Hold That You Now Laugh At
For Émilie it was the belief that slow, peaceful, intentional living was for people who hadn't been through anything hard. Hippies who had it easy. Not for someone like her with generalized anxiety disorder and real lived trauma.
She hit complete burnout in 2021. Six months off work. Three months on the couch barely functioning. Three months slowly rebuilding and asking herself... there has to be a better way than this.
She even admitted — and this takes guts to say out loud — that she found herself wishing she'd get a serious diagnosis just so she'd have a reason to finally change her life.
And then without trying, during her burnout, she got pregnant. And she realized she could not bring a child into the life she was living. She didn't want that for her daughter.
So she started building something different. Slowly. Imperfectly. One small shift at a time.
Small shifts to get through the shit. There it is again.
Your Kids Don't Need a Perfect Parent. They Need a Healthy One.
This is the line from Émilie that I keep coming back to.
Children don't treat themselves the way you treat them. They treat themselves the way you treat yourself.
You are modeling what it means to be a human being. What it means to rest. What it means to ask for help. What it means to set a limit and hold it. What it means to prioritize your own health not because you've earned it but because you're worth it by default.
That is the inheritance you leave them. Not the activities you planned or the lunches you packed or whether you managed to make it to every single school event.
The way you treat yourself is what they'll carry.
What Wellness Me Up Means to Émilie
Prioritizing yourself.
Because for so long she didn't. And it was only when she started that things actually started to shift. For her. For her daughter. For everyone around her.
Your family doesn't need a perfect parent. They need a healthy one.
Want to work with Émilie? Émilie Avon-Green is a registered psychotherapist and slow motherhood mentor supporting moms who are done with hustle culture and ready to build a life that actually feels like theirs. Bilingual in French and English. Working with clients across Canada and worldwide. instagram.com/authentic_living_with_emilie
Her tagline says it perfectly: It's their childhood, but it's your motherhood — and you deserve to be present and enjoy it.
If this one hit home... share it with a mom in your life who needs to hear that it's okay to slow down. And subscribe to Wellness Me Up wherever you listen.
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