From Pregnancy Myths To Postpartum Power: What Sarah J. Maas Sparked

What if the most radical thing a mother can say is also the most honest: I adore my kid, and I hated being pregnant. We open that door and walk through it, using Sarah J. Maas’s candid interview as a springboard to unpack the real forces shaping pregnancy, birth, and life after—especially for women who train.

We talk about cultural scripts that demand constant gratitude while ignoring grief, body changes, and athletic identity. Then we zoom in on the moments where care breaks down: weight targets that reignite disordered eating, induction confusion, a chaotic C‑section, and the silence that follows. Informed consent is more than paperwork; it’s shared language, aligned teams, and clear options delivered without shaming. We map out the questions to ask, why early pelvic health education matters, and how to set recovery expectations that respect timelines and variation.

Mental health sits at the center. Coping through intensity works—until it doesn’t. When training is limited by birth, injury, or grief, we need a wider toolkit: therapy, breathwork, mindfulness, yoga, nature, and reading that restores perspective. We connect those tools to practical postpartum planning so you can protect your nervous system and your goals. Finally, we confront the collision of work and early parenthood—deadlines, pumping, and the myth of “back to normal” at six to twelve weeks—offering strategies for advocacy and structural change that make performance sustainable.

If you’re an active mom, a pregnant athlete, or a partner who wants to help, this conversation gives you language, options, and the confidence to choose for yourself. Listen, share with a friend who needs nuance, and subscribe so you never miss our next deep dive. If this resonated, leave a review—it helps more mothers find evidence‑based support and a community that values the messy middle.

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Transcript

Welcome And Podcast Purpose

Why Sarah J. Maas Matters Here

Loving Reading, Anticipating New Releases

Motherhood Themes In The Interview

Hating Pregnancy And Cultural Binaries

Nuance: Joy And Grief Can Coexist

When Care Fails: Induction And C‑Section

Informed Consent And Better Communication

Processing Birth Trauma And PTSD

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello everyone and welcome to the Farm Mamas Podcast. My name is Christina Farman. I'm a public school, physical therapist, researcher, and exercise in pregnancy, and a mom of two who has competed in conflict, powerlifting, or weightlifting, pregnant post-partum, or both. In this podcast, we want to talk about the realities of being a mom who loves to exercise. Whether you're a recreational exerciser or an athlete, we want to talk about all of the things that we go through as females going into this motherhood journey. We're gonna talk about fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum topics that are relevant to the active individual. While I am a public floor physical therapist, I am not your public floor physical therapist, and know that this podcast does not substitute medical advice. Alright, come along for this journey with us while we navigate motherhood together, and I can't wait to get to it. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Barbell Mamas podcast. Christina Previtt here, and today I want to do a little bit of a commentary on the Call Her Daddy episode with Sarah J. Mass. On the personal side of my life, I am a huge reader. I am somebody who definitely reads well over a hundred books, sometimes over 150 books a year between audiobooks and fiction reading. I read everything nonfiction, litfic, historical fiction, fantasy, romanticy. And I am absolutely a huge fan of Sarah J. Mass's work. I read Crescent City, I've read all of Avatar, I read all of Throne of Glass, some of them I've read more than once. And so I was so excited to see that this podcast episode was coming out. Obviously, I'm super pumped with the announcements around Avatar 6 and 7 coming out. Definitely, I said to Nick that I am not usually like a midnight release person because I'm usually in bed by nine o'clock. The kids go to sleep just after eight, and then I tucker into bed, uh, tuck myself into bed and end up reading before I fall asleep. Um, but in this case, I will probably give a pass and I will try really hard to stay awake and go because I think it's just gonna be so fun to embrace that joy and that love of reading because you know that there's gonna be all these launch parties for when it comes out October 27th. That is not why I'm doing this episode. One of the things that came out that was a very central tenet of her podcast episode was this conversation around motherhood, working motherhood, processing motherhood. And I really think she brought up some incredible points that deserve discussion. I posted a reel on my personal Instagram page this week, just scratching the surface of my thoughts in this arena. I wanted to take this podcast episode to try and do a bit bigger of a deep dive. At almost the very beginning of the episode, it was pretty early on. She, um, Alex Cooper, who's the the person who runs the podcast, she asked about Farah's pregnancy. So spoiler if you haven't read some of the Akatar books, but there is a character in one of her storylines that ends up having a pregnancy. And in that pregnancy, she is very disenfranchised where she is very incubated. People know information about her, her condition that she does not know, stuff is hidden from her. And, you know, a lot of fans were very upset with how that storyline was handled. And this kind of opened up this conversation about how Sarah often uses what is going on in her personal life as inspiration to process some of the stuff going on in her personal life. In that vein, she goes on to talk about how she hated being pregnant. She felt very foreign. She didn't like the way that her body was changing. And then she had some really negative interactions with healthcare providers who made that experience so much worse. She talked about how she was a person with previous history of disordered eating, and how on one of her first appointments, they said, okay, here is your weight. This is the max that you can gain in your pregnancy. And instead of enjoying and feeling so much awe around the way that her body was changing, she started being very hyper-fixated on what was going into her mouth and what her body looked like and the weight on the scale, et cetera, kind of fed into that disordered eating pattern that she had worked to overcome in her earlier life. In that story, I think it brings up two really important points. Number one, our culture and our society would have us believe that every part of motherhood is incredible, that everybody loves being pregnant, that if you don't like being pregnant or you actually are just waiting for it to be over, that you are somehow missing out, or that you are somehow doing this wrong, or you are, I don't want to say bad mother, but but people kind of judge you. I feel like there's a judgment that can happen when you say you hate being pregnant. And in my clinic room, I hear from so many women who are either neutral. I was very neutral about being pregnant. It didn't feel like it was a huge, like I I loved being pregnant in some ways. I hated being pregnant in others, and it kind of schmushed to be neutral. But I have some people who legitimately hate it. And for some of my athletes, that is often this feeling of having to hold their self back or that they're gonna lose their fitness that they worked so hard for, and they feel selfish or guilty about that feeling. And we unpack a lot of where that feeling is coming from, who is influencing why they are feeling that way. And I try and give permission that it is 1000% okay to effing hate being pregnant. You still want to be pregnant, and then people will, you know, make this comparison of, well, I shouldn't complain because I know some people can't get pregnant or some people are having trouble getting pregnant, etc. Your experience does not remove your empathy or your feelings of sympathy towards another human, right? Both of those things can coexist. You are allowed to feel however you want to feel about pregnancy and be aware that being pregnant is a gift. What we love to do as a culture is to create binary storylines where it's either this way or it's that way. It's either you love it or you hate it, that you have to have joy or you have to have sadness. And as I grow up more and I am in, you know, this phase of grief, I understand so intrinsically that grief and joy are often interlaced together. And the older I get, the more that all of my experiences are gonna have that joy, but there's also gonna be potentially sadness, right? And that is okay for those things to coexist. And so for somebody as big as Sarah J. Mass is to go out on a very public platform, call her daddy as a very, very big platform, and speak to that and how she then drew inspiration from that feeling into her story is just really a powerful thing. What I want to kind of leave that with is that you can feel however you want about being pregnant and being postpartum. Um, and that does not take away from your love of your child or your desire to be a mother, right? I have had friends who have hyperemesis gravidarum, which means that they feel like they have the flu their entire pregnancy. They hated every day of being pregnant, but that does not make them less of a mother, right? That does not make them love their kid any less. And so it's really important that we stop trying to create or put things into simple boxes and understand how much of nuance and gray, especially in motherhood, motherhood is so incredible. And she even says, I love my kids and I hated being pregnant. And I think that is just such an important part that we kind of embrace this and not or type of philosophy. And if anyone follows me professionally on the Institute of Clinical Excellence side, that is an ism that we say a lot that most of the time these things are and not ors. In that, one of the things that she highlighted was how the people that were involved in her obstetrical care and management really made her motherhood transition so much worse from the nurse that told her what weight she was allowed to gain her first C-section. Her one uh OB had told her to have a big meal because she was going to be induced. And then her other doctor, after she actually did come in, and this male physician came in and berated her and basically told her that how could you have this big meal? You're going in for an emergency C-section. She didn't know she was going in for an emergency C-section, and then he made an error and botched her C-section where he did not go in the right place, he did not go at the right size or whatever in the surgery, and there was a significant error there. This speaks to the second big reflection piece for me from that interview, which is the power of education and the way that things are communicated to women in pregnancy and postpartum, and how pivotally important that is to have those right humans on your side in pregnancy. I talk a lot on this podcast about how you are empowered when you can make an educated, informed choice where you understand the nuance of what we do know, what we don't know, and where the risk profile is. I am often talking about that in the realm of exercise, right? If we don't know, the answer is no. Here is what we have learned over the last several years in the exercise and pregnancy space. You can decide what your risk tolerance is based on your comfort level, your perceived risk, and the expertise and clinical opinion of your clinician. Hopefully, that is using the evidence that we have to date in order to help make that decision. When it comes to pregnancy in all things, I have also done a lot of episodes trying to do my due diligence or help with having women earlier in their pregnancy or ideally before they get pregnant at all, to understand all of the things that are going to change within your body during pregnancy, what that could potentially mean from a change to the way your body looks, but then also the change to how your body feels during pregnancy and following delivery, and then expected changes to your body when you are now in your postpartum phase of your life. So often the education happens when the dysfunction is already there, right? Where you get diagnosed with something like pelvic organ prolapse, and then you understand what happens to your vagina following a birth, or a birth injury happens and you understand the variability in how a person will recover in the postpartum period. And when you are dealing with these symptoms and you don't know if they're normal, and then you're trying to do catch up on the education, it can become that much harder. It is so valuable. And having that person explain what is going on with your body, why you're feeling the symptoms you are, and then setting up a plan to help you recover from that. That is all I do in the rehab space. I just so wish that more people before they are thinking about getting pregnant would be able to have this conversation, understand that variability so that it doesn't take such a huge hit to your identity when all of a sudden your recovery isn't what you would expect it to be. And so, with that, the way or how we educate, first of all, is so important. In this interview, Sarah D.Mause clearly did not have informed consent. She was not privy to the information that was happening around her end of pregnancy and into postpartum care. Um, there was obviously disagreement with what that induction was going to look like between medical providers. And they were unintentionally fighting in front of her because they were giving her competing and very strong information. And so they were not a united front from a obstetrical care team perspective. And the person that suffered was Sarah. And I do not say this to cast shade on any of our obstetrical colleagues, but rather to reflect on how important it is. One, that as a provider myself, that I am very aware of my communication and the way that I am talking to somebody who is in a very vulnerable time of her life. And then also to be an advocate for my pregnant clients because they need so much support. And in that moment, Sarah was not in a place where she could be her biggest advocate, right? Because things were happening really quickly. She was getting prepped for her major surgery, and she was in this vulnerable space where she was at the mercy of this other doctor. And this is where this vulnerability, this stress response can lead to a lot of birth trauma. And Sarah, obviously, Sarah J. Mass clearly had birth trauma from the way that her first child came into the world. And we do see that there are many instances where there are feelings of chronic stress and trauma that even fit the criteria for PTSD, depending on what is going on. And acknowledging and coming to terms with that birth trauma is really important. And that is multifactorial. One, we have to address systemic issues that are going on in the obstetrical world. Two, we need providers to take ownership when they are responsible for some of those feelings of trauma. Three, we need to close communication loops when things go poorly or badly. That the doctor, the midwife, whomever is responsible for that adverse outcome, comes and has a candid and open conversation where that person can process and ask any question about what happened in the preceding moments so that they can process what happened to them. My mom, her end of life journey for in many ways was very unexpected. She had shortness of breath, but she was doing well with her care. She ended up in an eMERGE. Emerge went to a high needs medical unit that transitioned to ICU and she passed away within a week. Her doctor was there having conversations with us. And one of the best things she did was she called my dad after a couple of days, like I think it was seven or ten days after. So, like he was able to have the funeral. But as he began his journey of processing, she called him and asked if there was any questions that she could answer about my mom's end of life that would give him peace and comfort, or that he was uncertain of. And I was just so impressed with that because he was then able to say, like, why did this happen? Or, you know, we're in this moment and we kind of know why, but you're not really processing and you're just grieving in anticipation. And I just feel like how powerful would that be if the person who did that C-section would have walked into her room and explained what he was thinking, why he was thinking that, why it was such an emergency, why it escalated so quickly. And it's just such a huge area of reflection for me around what we can do better in healthcare and maybe what you can ask for if you are a person who is, you know, post-C-section, it happened really quick. If you could ask the doctor to go through what happened so that you can process that. And so this is kind of where number three comes in is that Sarah J. Mass was talking about how she used her books to process her emotions within her stories. And she gave a couple examples. I don't want to do too many spoilers, because if you are going to read the books, I want you to enjoy that journey. But she talks about how she processed. When she was postpartum, um, she was struggling with mental health and mood disorders, anxiety. She started to have panic attacks. And whether that was a direct postpartum mental health consideration or it was something that she was experiencing before, it's not really clear. It honestly doesn't really matter. It very much was alluding to how she had coping mechanisms that worked until they didn't. And when they didn't work, she had to escalate that help with therapy and helping getting someone else to help her process what was going on in her life and what had happened to her throughout her motherhood transition. And I think this was showing so much clarity and self-awareness as a mother. And it was such a good role model of how we can take our mental health into our hands and how it is so important, one, to have preventative or proactive ways to handle life's stresses. And we can talk about this in the realm of motherhood. We can talk about it in how much information we're getting on social media and how the world feels like it's on fire. We can do that when it comes to work-related stress. Many individuals use exercise and it is a wonderful coping mechanism. But then if an injury happens or you're postpartum and you can't exercise, you don't have that primary and predominant factor that you use for your mental health. And so if you can't push your intensity, it works until it doesn't. Again, a little bit more on my grief journey than my motherhood journey, um, grief from my miscarriages of my mom around how intensity didn't work for me because I was bleeding so badly with my miscarriage that my strategies worked until they didn't. And I felt so, I felt so much thankfulness to, or in gratitude, I should say, to her for talking about this because it mirrored my own in a different way. And I think that this interview was so powerful because so many moms could understand where she was coming from in a lot of different ways. Like there was a lot of mirrors that I think many people would relate to where she said, like these worked till they didn't, and then she had to think about something else. And so I am a huge fan of therapy. I think we get a personal trainer to help us train our body. We need therapists, trusted therapists, in order to help our minds adjust and recover when we need them to. And I just now have much more. I have my exercise-related coping mechanisms, but then I have my mind-related coping mechanisms of yoga and mindfulness and meditation and um spiritual reading and things like that, like nonfiction exploration. I do a lot of nature reading. Those are new tools in my toolbox. And when I was very early in my grief journey, I was, I was so, so in on all of them. And now I use them a little bit less. I still want to keep them proactive because I know that grief is a journey that comes in waves and doesn't uh have a straight line down where all of a sudden you're okay with it. But I was thankful that I was able to explore those non-exercise related ways of coping with, you know, the life stress that happens, that I was also really thankful for Sarah J Mass for having those conversations. And I think that there's so many of us that relate when your coping mechanisms work until they don't. And so that was kind of another thing that I think had a lot of parallels to a lot of people who listen to this podcast. The last thing that she mentioned that I think is really interesting, and it's really interesting as like kind of a commentary to the publishing industry right now in general. But she was talking about how she was postpartum with her second, and she was just about to publish Kingdom of Ash, which is the last book in the Throne of Glass series. Probably my favorite book that Sarah Day Mas has written, if I'm being really honest, was that last book. It was a thousand pages and I didn't want it to end. And how she was like pumping and trying to nurse and still recovering postpartum, and they had to chop five pages from the publishing, or she they were trying to chop five pages from her book, her publishing house was, and they were like really on her about this hard guideline. She was struggling and not really in her right mindset because she was still so super early postpartum and recovering. And then she did it and she sent it back to them and was like, oh, we ended up figuring it out. It's okay. And they didn't need her in that urgency that they said that they did. And the commentary on the publishing industry is that like there is such this huge pressure now with social media resurgences of books being cool, which I think is really awesome of like things like book talk. Like I'm only on TikTok in order to get book recommendations. Um, but it has caused brick and mortar stores like Barnes and Noble to be opening up new places, which I think is so cool. And here in Canada, Indigo is uh our kind of our equivalent. Um and it speaks to this like really churn and burn of this hot, like just fast-paced industry that is the publishing industry. And sometimes how, you know, it's to the detriment of the author, um, or sometimes to the detriment of the story that these things are pushed out really quickly. But it also speaks to this corporate culture as a working parent around how you are struggling, your early postpartum, your hormones are all over the place. You are trying to pump, you are trying to nurse, you are trying to bond, you are struggling with the transition from zero to one or one to two or two to three. And then you're just expected to go into work as if you don't have kids, and then go home as if you're not working, and how difficult it is, especially in countries that do not have supported maternity leave like the US, where um some individuals are going back at six weeks or 12 weeks is considered a good leave. Like when, you know, Scandinavian countries and countries like Australia uh and Canada have 12 to 18 months, and even that is a difficult transition. And how even moms who really love their job feel this sense of like their identity ripping apart in that transition back to work because at 12 weeks, you are just not ready to go back in many ways, even if you love your job and and you do it and you get through it and it's difficult. And for not everyone is gonna feel that way, and some people are gonna feel ready, depending on what their family supports and things look like. But for many, that expectation in corporate culture, I have had people who have been fired for being pregnant, like all of these things, it just really put a light on how hard it is to be a working parent. And I just so appreciated her candidness around how a lot of times like the systems are not set up for women to succeed. And she published this episode like kind of right in time for women's um month and uh International Women's Day on March 8th, which was this past weekend. And it just has been a lot of reflection around how much advocacy we still need, how much um International Women's Day was meant as a labor and advocacy day to try and support women's rights in the workplace, in the home, in healthcare, et cetera. And we still have a lot of work to do in these spaces. Um, and you know, it's just, I know I'm getting really deep. I don't know, 25 minutes into my commentary, I knew I would, but I just think that opening up conversations like this, even in a way that feels very benign, or you know, it's like we're talking about, you know, this fantasy book that all of us have enjoyed reading. I think it speaks so much to how reading and connecting with humans and getting to the human behind many of these books and their motivations really truly does uh open up a path to empathy and shared, shared community and shared connection with experiences of other people. And, you know, I started watching this podcast because I'm a huge Avatar fan. I'm a huge throwing glass fan. And so I wanted to hear this interview, but I left it feeling so much kinship to this author who has not struggled the same way I have, but had certain themes that I could absolutely relate to. And I feel like there was a lot of individuals who wrote or watched that podcast, wrote who listened to that podcast, didn't write anything, but listen to that podcast who probably felt the same way. That is my thoughts and feelings. If you have watched it or you are an Avatar fan, please let me know. I am so pumped. I cannot wait for her books to come out. And honestly, that interview made me an even bigger fan of hers because I can just so relate to her experience and her life and all that she has gone through as a trailblazer for the romantic fantasy genre. Um love her so much. I'm definitely in stan categories now. Um, and I just cannot wait for her new book to release. Let me know if you have any other comments or if you're just as excited as me for the new book release, and we'll see you all next week.