Episode 66: Healthy Cycles For Ourselves & Our Kids with Aviva Romm, MD
/For this week's episode on The Balanced Parent Podcast, we will be tackling a topic that I am very passionate about, and I know many of us struggle with: Our relationships with our bodies. Particularly for anyone who menstruates, getting comfortable with our bodies, how they change as the years go by, our cycles & hormones, can bring a layer of stress to our daily lives that can make peaceful parenting just that much harder. And our kids are watching and learning from us all the time, including how we think about, feel about, & take care of our bodies. I have been working hard the past few years to shift my mindset and beliefs toward my body, not just for me, but also for my children. I want my girls to develop a sense of confidence, wonder, & joy in their bodies, and I know that starts with me.
And so this week on the podcast we will be talking about our health, cycles, hormones, and how we can raise a generation of children who have healthy relationships with their bodies. To help me in this conversation, I am thrilled to introduce a world-renowned expert on this topic, Dr. Aviva Romm. (totally #fangirling over here!) She is a Yale-trained MD who aims to redefine women's health by bridging traditional wisdom and modern medicine. She is also a mother to four grown and a grandmother of two (9 and 6).
Here's a summary of what we talked about (Buckle up. It's going to be interesting.):
Body Beliefs and Our Cycles (and how we can identify and shift beliefs that may be getting in our way)
Hormone Imbalances (and the impact on women’s health, and how trauma can show up in gynecologic health)
Debunking Birth Control Myths (and how to become empowered in making the most educated choices)
How to Encourage Healthy Body Image in the Next Generation
Okay so if this topic interests you and you want to know more, visit her website and follow her on social media:
Website: www.avivaromm.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AvivaRommMD
Instagram: @dr.avivaromm
And don't forget to check out her new book, Hormone Intelligence!
PS- Here is the link to her book if you want to check it out! Just a heads up, this is an "affiliate" link, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This is one way I am able to keep making amazing free content like this available!
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and in this episode of the balanced parent podcast, we're going to be talking about women's health are cycles and how we can raise a generation of women of, children who have healthy relationships with their bodies and to partner with me in this conversation, I am over the moon, so thrilled to bring in a world-renowned expert on this topic, Dr. Aviva Romm. Dr. Romm, will you please introduce yourself to the balanced parenting community and tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do, although I know many of them already know who you are.
Aviva: Thank you so much, Laura for having me here. Please call me Aviva, you don't have to call me Doctor or anything and it is such a pleasure to be here. And it's so nice to meet your community. So who am I? Well, I am a mama of four. My kids are now shockingly to me, 36 years old, down to 27 years old. I have two grandchildren who are nine and six. People are always like you have all these accomplishments Aviva, and like for me, my two happiest accomplishments aside from my own kids are that I got to midwife, my grandchildren at home. That to me it was like such a, just so cool you know trumps at Yale M.D. any day.
I grew up in... actually grew up in a housing project with a single mom who worked two jobs to make ends meet. I've seen you know like really the impact of working hard as a mom and what that means and support and lack of support to. And then I went off to college when I was 15 to be a physician and got exposed to alternative medicine. There wasn't actually a term for it back then, it wasn't even called alternative medicine, it was just weird stuff that I was doing, I had to find the other people who were doing the weird stuff too. And at that time I got interested in home birth, midwifery and natural medicine, herbal medicine. And really it all started around this article that I read about how we birth and how we parent and set up so much of our psychology for our life and well I definitely I'm not all about blaming the mom, I think we need to stop always doing that what just happened so often and we blame ourselves.
But looking at the impact of early life imprints really deeply influenced me so much to go on this midwifery path and natural medicine path. And I basically spent 25 years as a home birth midwife and then what got my M.D as a mom did that at Yale, spent four years in medical school at Yale and the year Internal medicine. And then I did my rest of my residency in family medicine with obstetrics.
And it's funny like my passion is really women and children's health and I feel like the children's health is partly so important to me because you know when I was in my medical training, one of my teenagers was going through a really hard time and this wise ophthalmologist who I was studying with at the moment, she had four kids and she said you know Aviva you're only as happy as you're unhappy as child. And it was like the most true thing that I think anyone had ever said to me.
So for me, part of why I really love the pediatrics is that when you're a mom, if your child is suffering and you don't have answers, it's really hard. You know, it's like when your kid is screaming in the car seat and you're trying to go somewhere, it's not a very relaxed journey. And so to me, taking care of kids as part of taking care of moms and women. So now my practice is telemedicine. It actually was quite a bit before the pandemic. I do a lot of online teaching and I write books because I can only see so many patients and teach so many people one on one and writing books is my way to take everything I do in that one on one and try to make it as accessible as possible.
Laura: I love that. And you have a new book coming out?
Aviva: I do. It's called Hormone Intelligence. I'm really excited about it because it really is. You know, I started this work like I said when I was started studying this stuff when I was 15 and 55 the day after my book comes out. So a full 40-year journey, which is also crazy when I think about it out loud, but it's been a really long journey and I feel like this book brings together all these aspects of who I am, myself as a midwife, myself as an herbalist, myself as an MD and myself as a teacher and of course a woman because now that I'm almost 55, I've been through every life cycle, right? I've been through my puberty and my childbearing years and through menopause. So It's just really exciting to bring this experience and maybe even a little wisdom at this point to other women.
Laura: Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I think that likely to the field has grown a lot and what you get to have witnessed that growth and been a part of it too as it's growing as we're changing our understanding of what your hormonal health imbalance for women means.
Aviva: It is really exciting when I got my first period, I was 12 and I was at my grandmother's house and my grandmother has always been very reticent about talking which has passed away now, but she was always very reticent about nudity and sex and menstruation and body parts. So when I got my first period at her house and she was the one I had to go and tell. She could never say the word period. She always called it a what's it she called it a whose and it came from your, what's it like? She couldn't say it the word, yes, she couldn't say the word. And even back then, I mean women talked about change of life, that was the euphemism for menopause or time of month.
And I mean we still use those terms, but I think we use them more for fun or out of, you know, just like common language as opposed to, but we can say the word period or vagina or whatever we need to say even on national television. So it really is. You know, I've really seen some major changes, but also things like when I was first starting out herbal medicine and nutrition and food as healing, my family thought I joined a cult because I became a vegetarian, I was like, no, I'm doing this for environmental reasons and you know, ecology and animal health spirituality.
Whereas now it's just like it's so common that you can see a humorous tv commercial or a sitcom skit about it and people are really taking these things seriously is very, very exciting. The other flip side of that though, it means there's so much noise out there, you know, with the internet, there's so many experts, there's so much information, there's so many different opinions and it can get really overwhelming. I mean even when we think about things like sleep training or potty training or attachment parenting or bottle-feeding or breastfeeding or pacifiers or like it goes on, it's enough to make you just your head spend. You know.
Laura: I do think that there is something to be said for that. It's wonderful how much access to information we have as parents in this time period and at the same time, we have to have really strong filters and healthy boundaries and a sense of self in order to know who to trust and how to filter the information that's coming in through our unique lens of what's right for our family, our goals and our values. You know.
Aviva: I love how you said that it is and we have so been taught by the medical model and we've been taught by parenting experts, but even just as women and mothers that we are not the expert, we are not the ones who know our own children or no, our own body. So I think we can often end up deferring rather than running it by that internal barometer, that filter, and saying, okay, wait a minute. Actually, I do know what's going on here and I can trust that, trust my sense of this information.
Laura: This is something I've always appreciated about you Aviva, is that intuition piece of it. I don't know that I realized that you had been following your intuition since you were 15. And you know that's a beautiful thing that many of us, many of the parents I have the blessing to get to work with. We have to kind of strip away our cultural conditioning of quieting that voice.
Aviva: Grow up with a very strongly feminist single mom. I don't know if it was just because it was the seventies or what. But I can remember funny little moments as a child where I would say the phone would ring and I would say oh that's you know, so and so it could be like a friend of my mom. And then it would be and my mom would say you have really strong intuition or she would say you have E. S. P.
But I can also remember being in third grade and I had done this art project. I still can visualize it was on that brown butcher paper. And I had painted these three women with these Victorian outfits and I was really proud of this artwork. It was like a rolled up scroll and then got put on the wall. And my third grade teacher, Mrs. Amron said at the end of the school year, you can have those back because they were on display in the hallway. It was the last day of school and I asked Mrs. Amron for my artwork back and she said, “no, they’re school property, they’re on the wall.” I just remember putting my hands on my hips and stamping my foot and saying, “well I'm not leaving until I get my artwork back.” And I wasn't a difficult child. Like I was like the star student kind of like, you know, goody goody kid in a way, but I was like, I'm not leaving in.
My mom got called. My mom, single working mom, she got called in to pick me up at the end of the school day, which was not small thing for her to have to come home and do. And she came in, in the classroom and she said to Mrs. Amron, “did you tell her that she can have her schoolwork?” But her artwork back at the end, I mean, I thought I was being in trouble. My mom was like, did you tell her she could have her artwork back at the end of the year? And said, well I did. And my mom said you told to give it to her. There was always this like early instilling, trust my voice, trust my instincts, stick up for myself, that I think really guided me in my life.
Laura: That's beautiful. And I think really encouraging to hear because lots of my listeners are working to instill that in their kids as they are claiming it for themselves, so they're reclaiming it for themselves and are working to not instill the fear of speaking up for themselves. And so that's beautiful. And I feel like that brings us really nicely to this conversation that I'm so excited to have with you.
Many people in my community who have children who are kind of growing up getting older and are starting to approach the 40 years, kind of starting to process their own experience around their body and their cycle. Many of us are kind of as we are shifting our own hormonal experience to our kids, they're kind of were growing up alongside them and for me personally, to starting to reflect back on that I didn't necessarily, I don't want to have my child have the same experience that I do and… and I want them to feel differently about their body, about their, about their cycle, about their period, I want them to know certain things that I don't even necessarily know myself and so I was just, can we have that conversation?
Aviva: I would love to, So I will say one thing, you know, as a mom who has four grown kids, I was like a very early like attachment and my four kids were born at home, breastfed family bed, homeschooled, you know, we were like really in that kind of model of parenting. My kids are amazing human beings that have a son and three daughters and they're all so beautiful and incredible and smart and strong and capable and independent and really couldn't ask for more and their own people and I will say like all the everyone listening, there is no one recipe for a healthy adult. There are so many factors intergenerational, like some of my kids have struggled with anxiety or various things that have come up that I was just talking with my daughter in law recently about this and how like you can't fully account for genetics for the intergenerational influences and you don't even fully while you're in it, know what you're transmitting, like what you think is transmitting may be very different.
So my mom, for example, she grew up in a very repressive home. Again, my grandmother couldn't say period or like any of it, but it was more than that was just a very repressive kind of like post-depression, first-generation American parents who had left Europe because of persecution, just a lot of stuff right? That you don't really necessarily understand how it's fully affecting you and then you raise your kids trying to do your own best next. So my mom, she kind of like swung in the other direction.
So for example, we lived in a tiny apartment, when you walked in the apartment, you were kind of in our little dining area and she had a poster of a woman who was like sitting on her haunches. I remember 1972 and I was six years old and the woman had a calendar on her back. Like that was the calendar and it was basically a naked woman, but you couldn't, you just saw her back, you know, and like curve of her butt and then her feet and even at that age was mortified.
My mom could be in the bathroom and I could have a friend over like sixth grade. My mom could be in the bathroom and call and be like, hey, can you bring me a tampon from the hall closet? I was mortified. I mean just like on and on, remember when I was an early teenager and I wasn't even remotely thinking about having sex for saying to me, you know, whenever you're starting to think about sex, just come talk to me, we can talk about the pill again. I was like, let me die right now.
And how did I get you as my horrible mom? I mean, she was the mom that I was so embarrassed to have, I cannot even begin to tell you and my friends thought she was cool. I was like, please can I trade for any other mother? And what's really funny is that like nudity and like all of it like over the top, like over the top rebound from what her parents did. And so for me growing up, it's funny, like on the one hand, I hated it, but on the other hand, I grew up and I'm a midwife who takes care of women's health, sees a zillion vaginas and like has no problem talking about tampons and period. So it's weird, right?
Laura: Like it obviously had some effect, right?
Aviva: Like there's this deep cellular comfort. The other thing is that I think the fact that my mom would just scream out, hey, bring me a tampon even though I was cringeworthy about periods and didn't have any clue about my own first period really. Other than kind of what I learned in fourth-grade health class, there was a certain normalization about it. Similarly, my mom, you know, again, she's like this feminist, you know, she's like, yeah, I was playing softball when I went into labor with you and then I went to the hospital and had you four hours later.
There was always this like, ha ha ha I laugh in the face of danger. But on the other hand, I grew up with such a normal belief system about birth, right? Like, so you can play softball and then you go to the hospital and have your baby. What's the big deal?
So, I think that there's a lot about what we, how we express our attitudes, but it doesn't mean that our kids are going to like it or be comfortable with it in the moment.
And honestly, it took me until well into my thirties to start to get it that my mom had a clue because I spent most of my parenting, my early parenting like I'm going to do it exactly different than my mom did. So for me, I was much more respectful of boundaries with my kids. I mean we had family bed, obviously all of that, so it wasn't like we weren't naked around our kids, that kind of normal stuff, or take a bath with them.
But when our son got to be like seven or eight I would close the bedroom door, he had his own room by then if he wanted to come in the door jar so he knew he could come in. But it wasn't like let me just take my clothes off in front of you while you're talking to me about yourself all practice or like your little league practice. So for me, I tried to have more boundaries but still maintain that really healthy open at it.
I read this story one time. I think it came from maybe like a Waldorf school story or something like that. It was about how something around like Waldorf psychology I think it was, but it was how kids don't so much learn from what they see us doing as much as how they see us doing it. And the story was about a kid who was, the dad was hammering something like he was putting something like a dog house or something and he invited his son to help him and the dad was ruminating on something that was really bothering him and was angrily hammering and the kid, the mom came out and saw that the kid was really angrily hammering and the mom noticed like the kid was just literally emulating the dad's facial expressions and body movements.
So you know, looking at how we're embodying, you know, how do we talk about our menstrual cycle? How do we normalize it? How do we express our physical comfort in terms of our intimacy with our partner in front of our kids? If we have a partner or another person who might be in your life, how do we answer our kids' questions?
I remember one time I was in the kitchen and my kids were like, probably I'm going to guess like 14 down to five at that time or a little bit older. I think the youngest was like six or seven when this happened. And the third one down and the second the last or two years apart, and the third one down said, I'm just getting the kitchen washing, sink washing dishes, and she's sitting at the island looking at me, she's like, so if you and dad had sex just like, and I was about to answer and the little one I'm guessing is just six at the time. She said, well obviously they've had sex four times for kids. It was like, it was just kind of funny like how it was this normal where I could see somebody like, okay, we don't talk about that. Do you know what I mean? And how we respond is really what shapes that.
Laura: Right? Yeah.
Aviva: It was a very long answer.
Laura: No, no, no. It was so good. And you spoke to the heart of what we do here on this podcast is so we are really focused on as opposed to changing our children, Changing ourselves, taking a good look at our we modeling and showing up in our lives as… as we would want our kids to be showing up too. So I mean, and this is like this is the work, this is the healing ourselves, you know, and also leaving space for our kids to be themselves, understanding that it's not all on us, some of it is there too, you know, and there's going to be work for them to do, but it's not gonna work.
Aviva: Yeah, the more of you know, when I was raising my kids, I would think I was so concerned to have them feel loved and supported and safe and all those things are so important. I think if I were to write a book now on parenting, I would write how to raise a healthy adult. And think about, you know, how are we modeling resilience? How are we modeling self-care and self-love? How are we modeling self-compassion? Like sometimes I'll have a woman in my practice who is struggling with hormone problem and I'll talk about how important it is to or she's struggling with anxiety or depression or inflammation or whatever it is.
And I'll talk about how important it is to sleep more or to take some time to meditate or exercise or just take a long shower or anything that's self-nourishing and how often women will say I don't have time because of my kids. Like I'm busy being a mom and I'll say I'll find myself saying more and more because it's funny sometimes the way to appeal to moms is still, how is this going to get a few kids? Yeah, I'll say two moms like.
So here's the thing if your children, whether it's your sons or your daughters or your nongender binary children, whoever they are, if they are having the role modeling, that being a mom means you're now not a human being who has any needs, that's what they're going to grow up and think being a parent actually is. So actually, if you want to model that mom role in a way that you want your kids to learn whether you want your son to internalize that so that when he becomes a partner, if he becomes a partner to a mom or another, any human being, they see that in a lens that's really hole and your daughters grow up either to not want to rebel against that and be like, heck, I'm never going to be like a mom like that or falling into that being a mom means I don't have any rights to self-care anymore.
And I know from the intensive way that I parented my kids, it's really important to dive into. How do you really feel? It's a big question I ask my patients. I tried to ask myself, how do you really feel, because if you're turning your... yourself inside out to do it and you're not enjoying it, you're modeling that too. It's not that we love being a mom every minute that we don't, but you know, being honest about that is really important. And then that comes through with everything. You know, if you hate your period, figure out why if you hate your period because you're in horrible pain.
Just here's a story. I was teaching some of my students the other night and we were doing a mock patient situation and one of my students was saying how her mother had just the periods from hell, just doubled over in pain every month, like hemorrhagic, horrible, horrible periods. Her mom, it turned out, had endometriosis, but wasn't diagnosed too much later. But my, the woman who was talking to me, she had the same kind of really horrible, painful, miserable periods. She thought it was normal because that's what her mom went through.
So there was no kind of exploration. She was just assuming that the hell that she was going through was normal cause my mom went through hell. So if you're hating your period, if your period’s miserable figure out, you know, what's going on there. Is there a medical issue going on? Is there something that you learned about periods that you internalize that makes you hate it? Was there trauma that you had growing up that shows up through your periods birth to a lot?
You know, there's so much work when a woman is pregnant to unpack her family's birth history, you know, like my mom had a C section and my aunt had a C section on, my sisters had C sections. So for sure I'm going to have a C section or maybe they don't want to and now they're in this inner anxiety in her battle and not to say there's anything wrong if you need to have a C section.
But that story that we recreate and then how do we talk about birth in front of our children? Like, I can't tell you how many women I've heard talk about their birth story with their kids there and saying, oh my baby almost died or I almost died and then the kids are just necessarily internalizing birth is dangerous. You know, these stories that we don't even know how? I think the psychologist once told me that these thoughts are called Interjects. Have you heard that term as a psychologist?
So like thoughts and actual sentences, things that we actually hear almost like a voice saying it, but it's our own voice that sound like truths, but that aren't like, oh, marriage is awful or were so trying to believe them too because you don't you don't know that it's not true because you've heard it for so long. Those are some of the things I like to work with women to unpack and mom's unpack partly as the way that we're showing up for our kids.
Then of course, there's what we directly communicate like when our kids ask us about our bodies or how do we make space for the conversations. And you know, it's funny because as we were steeped in midwifery and home birth and all of it when my kids were growing up and my daughters didn't want to hear any of it from me. I mean they actually start to talk about periods la la la la la la la. I don't want to hear it from your mom talk about sex, la la la la la.
So I think one of the things that's also really helpful is to have other people that your own children can trust. So whether that is your sister or your best friend or your child's best friend, that you as the parents have this sort of like complicit understanding that if my daughter comes to you and talks to you about birth control, that's cool and you don't have to actually tell me everything because I want my daughter to respect that there's privacy unless here's where the boundary gets crossed that we tell each other. Yeah, that is really powerful.
Laura: It's really powerful. You know, my kids are this thing, they call me a feelings doctor and they have very little interest most of the time in learning about their feelings from me. They'd much rather learn from a book or a therapist or their guidance counselor. They have no interest and not at all.
Aviva: But then I will say one of my daughters was in college and she was in college on a different coast. So three hours earlier than I was and my phone rang one in the morning, which isn't unusual as a doctor on collar midwife. So it wasn't surprising. What was surprising was that it was my daughter on the other line saying mom, she and her boyfriend, we were just having sex in the condom broke, what do I do? And it was so funny because she started to tell me more detail.
I was like you could stop with the detail right there, that's all good. I got the condom broke up and it was really funny. My husband slept through the whole conversation, I hung up the phone and I literally physically patted myself on the shoulder and said, well done Aviva. You know when your kid is calling you up at one o'clock in the morning in college, had sex in a condom broke and is actually asking you for advice? Whatever you did communicate was okay.
Laura: Yeah, I think it's so important that we do pat ourselves on the back about those things. So I was really intrigued by a little bit about what you were talking about a little bit ago on the kind of how we talk about and think about our cycles and… and you know, this combination of our intuition. So, if we have the feeling that things aren't quite right or we're noticing we have some thoughts about or some stories about our cycles, that this is just the way it is. But now we're starting to question it because of this conversation. What is the first step that you would recommend a person take? What do you want a person who is starting to think about those things, start to question things, Where do you want them to go first?
Aviva: Yeah. So, you know, we're so not educated about what is normal and what isn't horrible. And because of so many aspects of modern living, so many women are experiencing painful periods and heavy periods are irregular periods or fertility to whatever it is, we've kind of just come to think that common is the same as normal. So a great starting place is to learn what normal is and what normal isn't.
And there is a wide variation in that, but there are some general patterns. So for example, a normal menstrual cycle. So from when you get your period to the day before you get your next period, that's the menstrual cycle versus the period, which is the bleeding time. So normal menstrual cycle should be 26 to 34 days long. So if you're regularly having 24-25 day cycles or cycles that are more than 34 days long, then something might be amiss. That's worth checking out.
If you're having a healthy woman, you shouldn't be blowing through more than six or so tampons or pads in a day. So if you're having to change your tampon every hour, not because you want to, but because you're flooding it or you're bleeding into your, you know, your underwear, through your clothes, something's going on. That's worth checking out.
So learning and the bottom line is that, you know, I say in my book, being a woman is not a diagnosis. So what I mean by that is so often we go to the doctor and they're like, well that's normal because you have a cycle and you're a woman. So it's normal to have PMS and feel like crap, you know, for three days or a week or whatever it is before your period. It's normal to be doubled over and cramps just take ibuprofen. It's normal for your cycles to be different, wildly different every month. It's normal to skip three pairs. Normal is normal as normal as normal. And so it's normal. Take the pill, take Ibuprofen.
But I really want to rethink what we just accept as normal. Because that part about being a diagnosis. Being a woman is not a diagnosis. To me means sort of code for saying being a woman is not should not be about suffering. And so many of us are going through our cycles, going through our life cycles really uncomfortable or miserable and not knowing that that's not just something we should accept.
Learning what is normal and what isn't And then learning what you can do to realign with this very in a blueprint that we have for how our cycles can work is really important within that. I do want to say much like we can't control who our kids are, increasingly think that our kids and our health, our bodies. There's a lot of it that were dealt a hand of cards by genetics by circumstances. It could be where you're born, it could be your socioeconomic status, it could be your cultural or genetic inheritance and how that plays out in the culture we live in.
So we’re dealt this hand of cards and then how we play it is where we have some options. And so you may be dealt a hand of cards that includes a family history of endometriosis or a family history of depression or a family history of diabetes. And so we know that that might be part of your story. But you don't have to keep writing. You can write a different ending to it with the choices that you make. It's always... they start with learning what's normal.
In this new book, I've written Hormone Intelligence. There are three chapters on what's normal, what's not. And here are a bunch of questionnaires to help figure out where you are. And then once you know what is and isn't, you can also learn what basic things help keep our hormones healthy. So what are the foods that are sort of on an evolutionary biology level? Our hormones need to be healthy. So for example, we need certain healthy fats because hormones are made many of our hormones are made out of a cholesterol foundation.
So we need good healthy fat to actually make the hormones, we need fiber for our body to break down and eliminate the hormones once we've burned through them and our body is trying to get rid of them. We get our ancestors like our paleo ancestors got about 100 g of fiber a day from their diet. The average American gets about 15g of fiber a day. And even just from a colon cancer prevention perspective from like conventional medicine, we need 30g of fiber for that.
So learning what things that we can do on a day to day basis to support hormone health. And then, you know, as we've been talking about, what are the stories we have about what it means to be hormonal or what our emotions mean? I'm sure this is much more your area of expertise in mind. But lately I've really been exploring what does it mean to dismiss our emotions as women as hormonal? Like how often do we actually express something we really think or feel and maybe it comes out more explosively premenstrual because our filters down.
But then we apologize for it and backpedal saying, oh, I was just hormonal until the next month when that exact same thing comes up, like, what's on repeat that we're not dealing with and why is it that expressing something in a really emotionally heightened way is not acceptable?
Like why have we come to have to turn the volume down and live at this sort of flat line of emotions unless we're happy? Like that's our culture is like you're either common, peaceful or you're happy and that's acceptable, but rage, grief, sadness, anger, disappointment, all those things that do often come up premenstrual li are suppressed and then they come up and we're like, oops, I was hormonal, I've just apologized for myself, forget everything I said.
Laura: And I think that you're bringing up this really important point of like it leaked through when you were hormonal with air quotes. You know like it but that doesn't mean it hasn't been there under the surface all along, you know? So I have had my own journey with hormone imbalances and had major mood issues at certain points in my cycle because of some of those imbalances, what helped more than anything else, was dealing with the underlying issues that when my window of tolerance was so narrowed during a time when I didn't have the hormonal resources or capacity to cope well that's when those things would come out. Those underlying issues were the problem and reducing my stress load, embracing radical self-acceptance and self-compassion, prioritizing my rest. Those things helped just as much as my functional medicine doctors help with totally those things, you know.
Aviva: I mean those supplements and things can help certainly. And there are a lot of factors like endocrine disruptors from our environment or gut disruptions that we get from maybe antibiotics that we've taken in the past. But I mean I have two chapters on just the emotional capacity in the book because I have one chapter just on stress and one chapter just on sleep because they are so important and I agree. I mean there's a lot that we can't control in our lives and as parents, we learn that pretty quickly, then there are the things that we can use to support ourselves.
And it's the same for me, I find that like when I experienced the greatest disruptions or mood disruptions are always when I have too much on my plate when I am falling into this like sort of performance perfectionism mode and then I'm internally stressing myself out. Or you know, I think with the way our menstrual cycles work from an evolutionary biology perspective. We do tend to feel a lot more elevated and social and connected around our population and we do tend to want to be more private and maybe cave a little bit more during our menstrual cycles.
When I was 17, I spent a month with a first nations group out in Nevada and the women were required to go to Moon Lodge. As soon as their periods started, they dropped everything and they went to the moon lodge. If they had a breastfeeding child, they were allowed to bring that child with them. It was really disturbing to me. I was at that point in my life, you know, very much in my midwifery, feminine sacred moon time consciousness.
And here basically women were being told they were dirty and unsafe and they had to be cordoned off somewhere else. But I'll tell you what the women they look forward to that time like you wouldn't believe because they were like relieved of their work duties, they were relieved of their parenting duties unless they had a little baby. And then they were just hanging out with each other because sometimes women would cycle together and we don't have that ability in our conventional culture to honor and flow with how we feel.
So if you are someone who leans more into a PMS kind of pattern even more so you might want and need that little bit of a day off. And then the idea that we would get menstrual leave is something that stigmatizes women because it's sort of implying that we're not as capable and it's not true. Every study shows that were completely just as academically and intellectually and physically capable, pre-menstrual.
But it's not what we want. We tend to want to go inward. And I think if more women were given permission and we gave ourselves permission to experience those emotions, to allow ourselves to rest, to allow ourselves to clear our plate a little bit, then we would actually see those PMS symptoms, those pain symptoms. They would go down.
Laura: Absolutely. I had the distinct privilege to be involved with a local Moon Lodge that was run by a beautiful Ojibwe woman and she was very clear that the separation was not in any way about that. This was... that we needed, there was any stigma against it was a reverence separation. It was a protection, you know, that these women were in a spiritual and holy time in their cycle and during that time you needed to honor yourself and the entire community wanted to honor what was her love that.
Aviva: It's so important. And here's the funny thing. So you know, here I am Miss Hippie's mom doing all this stuff. You know, like I always said my moon time, I was using like cloth recyclable, not recycle like homemade menstrual pads, but back in the day really in touch with my cycles. And my daughters were like mom, why do you have to say moon time? Can't you just say period like everyone else? So back to the parenting aspect of it.
You know, I think my daughters as adults have very healthy relationships with their bodies and their menstrual cycles for the most part. But again, it's sort of like maybe what seeps in then, what they would have embraced at the time. They did not like my daughters did not want any kind of ceremony acknowledgment honoring.
So I would have ceremonies for my friends who sometimes were my daughter's age and my daughters would come along. We do like a girl's gathering where we would talk about periods and I would have like I give them their own cloth pads pattern and we'd make these little menstrual tiny dolls and talk about it. And so my daughters by proxy would be part of that, but hells no, they didn't want to hear that.
Laura: That's so interesting. I wonder you know, so my oldest, um was able to attend some of these with me before the pandemic, you know, and so she got to see some of the beautiful ceremonies and this is again, we were very privileged to be invited into this space. And this is something that I think you have to be really careful with from a... a cultural appropriation standpoint.
But all traditional cultures, all cultures in the past have traditions around a moon time or your cycle. They all do their available in all of our home cultures too. So I don't know. I think it's powerful to get to see that and that, you know, I grew up in a home that was like the one that your mom grew up in. You know that was, I mean, she was more open. My mom was more open and talking about those things than her mom was certainly. But it's not the way that we talk about those things in our house, you know.
Aviva: About them in a way to educate me or make me feel comfortable. It was more like I had the sense that the rebound for her was I'm not going to do anything repressive. So there was almost a level of shock value in it. And I think that's what I was trying to shield my own kids from. Was that shock value. Like the in your face, you're going to get exposed to this whether you want to or not. I will say that the one time that I found really, really helpful especially to talk with my kids about stuff was in the car.
So, my kids, my kids did traveling soccer and other sports or we were going to events. So when I'd have one kid in the car, one on one, if they were sitting in the back seat or they were sitting in the passenger seat either depending on their age or you know what, where there happened to be sitting. Um, it's really nice because you can be driving, they're a captive audience. So they can't just be like, oh mom. And I mean they can say that and then also you don't have to have, I don't have to have any contact with your eye on the road and then you can have a little conversation and then let it go and that was, that was a good time to do that I found.
Laura: Yeah, I think those are so important to have those touchpoints that again, I really do appreciate the point that you're making that kind of in taking care of ourselves, in committing to being kind to our bodies to understand, into checking in with our bodies and our own cycles that we will be passing on a legacy so that our kids don't have some of the same hurdles and at the same time there they will go on and be themselves.
Aviva: And you know, each kid is different and I don't think I appreciated that quite as much until they were a bit older, but especially if you have more than one child. Each child is so different. You kinda have to meet your child where they're at, one kid may want to know some things one kid may not, one kid may be inherently more outgoing about certain things. Some kids are just inherently more shy. So yeah, learning what each kid needs and wants by listening is really helpful too.
Laura: I love that. Thank you so much. Okay, so why don't you tell us one more time about where we can find your beautiful book?
Aviva: Okay, thank you so much for allowing me to share about that. So you can find out about all of my books over on my website at avivaromm.com. If you just go to the navigation tab on the homepage, you'll see a tab that says books, and then for my new book, Hormone Intelligence you can get that anywhere books are sold.
I definitely encourage you to support your local independent bookstore if you can, but anywhere books are sold. But then once you've got your copy, go over to my website, go to Avivaromm.com forward slash book, just the word book and you're going to get to a page that has some really astonishing actually gifts that come with the book because I was just really all about celebrating this book and getting it out there in a major way.
So there is a 28-day gut reset that if you get this book by June 8th as a pre-order you have. It's a gorgeous course. It's like this whole beautiful gut self-care program um that's 28 days long and also I'm running an event. It's a weekend conference. It's a Friday night and all day Saturday. In fact, Ricky Lake, the television talk shows is interviewing me. Ricky and Abby Epstein are interviewing me about my book on a Friday. We have some phenomenal guest speakers and guess what? That's free with the price of one book too.
So all I have to do is go at avivaromm.com/book. You'll see a place in the middle of the page where you just put your Dietzen and that will automatically get you all these freak episodes. It's really cool. Yeah, for that, that's really you're welcome.
Laura: I really appreciated this conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and just your beautiful spirit with us.
Aviva: Thank you. It's a beautiful conversation. I really appreciate your energy and your questions and what you're doing, so thank you.
Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.
And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out um, and definitely go follow me on Instagram. I'm @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes. Look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family, and plus I share a lot of other, really great resources there too.
All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this.