Fresh Take: Dr. Margo Lowy on Living the Full Emotional Truth of Motherhood

What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood | Parenting Tips From Funny Moms

What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood

Kids & Family, Comedy, Parenting

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2026

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We often think "ambivalence" means indifference. Its actual meaning is quite different: ambivalence means having multiple and often opposite emotions in one moment. Motherhood contains much joy—but what about the resentment, grief, anger, fear, exhaustion, and guilt that can exist alongside deep love? Psychotherapist and researcher Dr. Margo Lowy joins us to discuss her book MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE: The Loving Moments and Bitter Truths of Motherhood and the emotional contradictions at the heart of parenting. Dr. Lowy explains why naming difficult emotions can actually strengthen our relationships with our children at all stages of our parenting, from postpartum anxiety to learning to let our children go. We discuss: Why the pressures of perfectionism are so damaging for mothers The taboo around negative parenting emotions How self-awareness and emotional honesty can improve parent-child relationships Here's where you can find Margo: https://drmargolowy.com/ @drmargolowy on IG Buy MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE: https://bookshop.org/a/12099/9798888455999 What Fresh Hell is co-hosted by Amy Wilson and Margaret Ables. We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.whatfreshhellpodcast.com/p/promo-codes/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:32.3	Hello everyone and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell, laughing in the face of mother.
0:37.0	This is Margaret.
0:37.8	And this is Amy.
0:38.7	Today we're talking to Dr. Margo Lowy.
0:41.5	She is a psychotherapist and researcher whose work explores the emotional complexity of motherhood.
0:47.5	She's also a contributor to psychology today.
0:49.9	And the author of the book we'll be talking about today,
0:52.9	maternal ambivalence, the loving moments and bitter truths of motherhood. Welcome, Marco. Thank you. And thank you for that lovely introduction. I picked up this book, Maternal ambivalence, as I think many people do when you introduce them to this idea, thinking that it was going to be about the meh moments of motherhood. They're like, I don't know.
1:12.3	I wasn't sure I wanted to have kids. It isn't going so great. I thought that was ambivalence. That is not what you're talking about. And it's not, in fact, at all what the dictionary definition of ambivalence even is. So let's start by explaining what you're really talking about. Thanks for that. I mean, that's so central
1:28.0	to my work because in fact the word ambivalence is not really understood and it's so interesting
1:34.2	that with mothering, it's also not understood. So I'll start with talking about it. A maternal
1:39.9	ambivalence is really the feelings that we have about our mothering, which are conflicting,
1:47.2	and which we don't really talk about the difficult parts. We might talk about them, but we don't
1:54.9	really explore them. What my work does is I go into the difficult, troubling moments, as well as the other moments.
2:04.2	And how I see mothering and these moments is that mothering is designed for us to have all these
2:11.1	moments, to think about all these contradictory feelings, and to actually find value in all of them, not only the enjoyable
2:21.3	ones. How I think about it is in terms very much of and we can have happiness and discomfort.
	...

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