As a new mom, Shaker resident Sarah Brody saw a need for community and responded with a regional resource new moms can rely on.
By Sharon Broussard
Moms, toddlers, and babies connect and share every Tuesday at the Van Aken District Events Center. Photos by Robert Muller
The soundtrack of babies – cooing, squawking, laughing, crying – weaves through the quiet but intense conversation of their mothers.
Yet the eight women attending this afternoon session of Mamahood don’t miss a beat as Sarah Brody, the group’s founder, starts the chat about motherhood at a meet-up at Van Aken District.
It all spills out as they rock their children, breastfeed, or in one case, scramble after a toddler, doing “what you need to do,” as Brody says before the meeting.
This is a space where we try to relate to each other – moms want a space where they can get something off their chest.”
With little prompting from Brody, they discuss how women are expected to be superwomen when they are at their lowest, the exhaustion of dealing with a helpless child, and how many women are left in the dark about the demands of being a mother to a newborn.
“We all get a lot of advice,” says Sarah Brody, a Shaker resident and the mother of two daughters. “This is a space where we try to relate to each other – moms want a space where they can get something off their chest.”
Brody looked for that community when she was a new mother alone at home with her newborn baby for the first time. Her husband is from Shaker Heights but she is not.
She says she discovered there were activities for babies and toddlers – music classes and the like – but few spaces for women who wanted to talk to other mothers who were also going through one of the happiest, and the hardest, times of their lives. Or as Brody calls it, “the paradox.”
So she created it, starting in 2022. The first week, six mothers attended the free nonprofit Mamahood meetings; the next week 10 moms. “It just kept growing,” Brody says.
The nonprofit, which also holds weekly daytime meet-ups at the Van Aken District and on the West Side, is free and open to expecting mothers and new moms with babies under a year old. The group is experimenting with evening and weekend meetings for women who are working, says Kristin Betz, a volunteer and a new board member of Mamahood.
The group also holds monthly evening social hours around town that welcome mothers who have babies over a year old – often they are Mamahood alumni. Attendance varies at all of the events but 150 mothers attended the group’s Mother’s Day celebration last year, says Betz. And many women make friends with other women in the group and socialize together.
The meetups were a lifeline for Betz when she was home alone with her newborn two years ago, and she really appreciated Mamahood’s “judgment-free zone.” Advice is only given when someone asks for it, the talks are confidential, and people are allowed to be vulnerable, she says.
“You walk away feeling so not alone. You got this. I became a more confident parent,” she says.
Mamahood founder Sarah Brody.
Her comments are echoed by other women who attended a Mamahood meet-up recently. First-time mother Ann Marie Virost says she is happy she joined the group because she was going “stir crazy” with a baby. Her son Mason is eight months old.
“I felt welcome from the start,” she says. “New people come in and there is no pressure to talk. You can share and it is received well. No one is critiqued unless you ask for it.”
Kendall Durst says she liked that “you could say what you needed to say without any judgment. If you want advice you can ask … it’s not just ‘Here, try this.’ You can just kinda come in and air it all out. It’s nice to be able to air things out.”
Reminding new mothers that there are others on the same journey, loving their babies but frustrated with the demands of a little one, is just what Brody set out to do. “It’s so jarring as a new mother. Nobody talks about it. You feel like something is wrong with you but no, this is just normal,” she says. “You are not alone in this.”
Learn more at joinmamahood.com
