Host Dr. Flowers, Co-Host Robin French and VIP Guest Gabriela Gerhart talks about recognizing the signs of post-partum depression in new mothers and what to do. She discusses in great detail all that they are/do at the Motherhood Center and how it greatly affects the emotional well-being of mom, baby, and the family as a whole. Gaby also updates James and Robin on the Motherhood Center’s exciting new projects!
Guest Social Media Handles:
Instagram: Motherhood Center
Facebook: Motherhood Center
LinkedIn: Gabriela Gerhart
JFHI Social Media Handles:
Facebook: J. Flowers Health Institute
Instagram: J. Flowers Health Institute
Twitter: J. Flowers Health Institute
LinkedIn: J. Flowers Health Institute
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Listen to the podcast here
Episode 22: Mental Milestones Of Motherhood with Gabriela Gerhart
Welcome to Understanding the Human Condition with Dr. James Flowers. We’ve got a special guest that I think you’ll enjoy, Gabriela Gerhart from the Motherhood Center.
Thank you for coming.
I’m excited.
I thought I’d start with a bio, and then we’ll take it from there. Gabriela Gerhart is the founder of the Motherhood Center. She established this haven for mothers in 2000, turning a lifelong dream into reality. Gabriela discovered her passion for babies and child care at an early age while growing up in a small village in the Czech Republic. She received her degree in pediatric nursing and worked in the pediatric ER before accepting a position in the United States. Once here, she quickly realized that women lacked the village and family aspect of pregnancy and support.
The idea for the Motherhood Center grew out of Gabriela’s desire to provide women with a resource they can trust, a place where they can access current information, instructional care, and professionals who will cater to their individual situations throughout the adjustment of pregnancy and motherhood. The Motherhood Center is her way of offering these amazing women not only her expertise but all the best Houston has to offer the mother, the child, and the family. Gabriela touches the lives of thousands of infants, parents, and families through the Motherhood Center in Houston and virtually all over the country.
Motherhood Center
That’s amazing. That is so cool. Tell us about the Motherhood Center. What is the Motherhood Center? Where is it? Tell us everything about the Motherhood Center.
I started the Motherhood Center in 2000, and it essentially is a one-stop shop for expecting and new parents. It’s a non-medical facility or non-medical center, and so we try to take a holistic approach to pregnancy and motherhood, everything from educational classes, exercise classes, child care services, different mommy groups, and support groups. One of our clients called it the Mommy Country Club.
There you go. Sounds pretty cool.
Very cool.
Robbin, did you do anything like that?
No, never. Mine was trial by fire.
That’s what we are trying to prevent because we do have a lot of grandmas who say, “I wish there was something like that.” We’ve been around for 21 years, but a lot of older moms or ladies who are in their 50s are like, “Why didn’t we have something like that?” Because, really, the Motherhood Center is the only center in the world. Sadly, but hopefully, we will be able to change that.
Is your goal to have one in every major city?
Yeah, I think every city should have a Motherhood Center in it.
That’s amazing.
It’s a great idea.
You’re right here in the River Oaks area of Houston. Wonderful.
Prenatal Services
It says that you combine luxury, education, and support for expectant and new moms, and we’re intrigued by everything that you offer there, but it mentioned parenting classes, prenatal yoga, nanny placements, breastfeeding classes, and private services. So I was asking you earlier, what does that include?
In general, all of our services and classes can be private, so clients can schedule them around their convenience and their schedules. But we also do a lot of our services where we go to our clients’ homes, and that would be the lactation services, in-home massages, postpartum doulas, baby doulas, nanny placements, and babysitting services.
What is a doula?
I know it’s an odd word, a little bit. Doula is really a Greek word, and it means mothering the mother. When I started my career in Houston, I was really called a baby nurse, and for a lot of people, the term doula replaced baby nurse. Initially, people viewed it as meaning labor, like a labor doula. As this term became more familiar to our expecting clients, we started creating the differentiation because there is a postpartum doula, nobody likes the word postpartum, it doesn’t have a nice connotation, unfortunately.
We carved out the term baby doula. You have labor doulas and baby doulas, which naturally means taking care of the mom and the baby. There is an antepartum doula, which is generally during times when clients are on bed rest, so they can still have support, someone coming to their home and taking care of their needs there. It’s still non-medical care. Over the years, we even have death doulas, and there are all kinds of fertility doulas. The term doula, really meaning mothering the mother, has been evolving over the years.
What’s the average length of time, would you say, that you work with a family or a mother?
I would say it probably depends on which service we are offering. With the postpartum doula or baby doula services, that can be from when we see the client once a week for a few weeks, to being there every day or every night for a few weeks. Some clients’ desire is for us to stay until the baby is sleeping through the night, and sometimes they say, “Can you be here until they go to college?” It could be something like that. With lactation services, ideally, it’s maybe just that one visit, and we take care of things. For nanny placement, we have clients where we’ve already placed numerous caregivers over the years.
I know you probably have office hours, but you probably have a 24-hour service type of thing, right?
Yeah, our office hours are pretty much 24/7.
Just like ours, Robbin.
Babies come unpredictably. There are definitely plenty of calls at 10:00 at night.
It seems to me such an important aspect of that part of a family’s life. I know in my own life, I had a nanny. My mother didn’t have a doula or anything like that, but I know that once I was born, she had a nanny who had been there for my sisters before me. She ended up working with my family for almost 50 years and was really like my grandmother, and at times more like my mother. It was just such an amazing, nurturing relationship. What you guys do seems like such an important part of the human condition, part of a woman’s life, part of her child’s life, and really the husband’s and everybody’s life in the family.
For sure. I always say we have such an honor and privilege to be there during these special times. Physically, it’s obviously a major transition for a mom and dad, but it’s really for the whole family. I always tell people, you can be talking to a woman who is 90 years old, and she remembers those times.
Doulas have the honor and privilege to be with mothers during one of the most special times of their lives.
That’s right.
When you start talking about things, you can see her tearing up because it is such an emotional time. So as hard as it is to be available 24/7, and it is every day of the week, we just never know what kind of call we’ll get or what kind of need a client has. Hearing those stories and how grateful clients are that we are there, it could be just for that one day when we walk in and check on things, make sure everything is going well, and just give reassurance to this family that they are on the right track, or when we suggest adjusting a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and things will be smooth sailing. That is such a great reward, and it’s just very positive.
Baby Nurse
When you were in the Czech Republic as a nurse, I was visualizing this, you came to the United States, and you started working probably in a hospital system, and you were like, “This is so different.”
I never worked in the hospital system here. I worked in the Czech Republic, and we have a little different educational system. When I came here as an au pair, I took care of four boys, ranging from 10 days to 9 years old. Actually, the nine-year-old is now one of our clients, and we are taking care of his little girl. It’s really come full circle here in the U.S., too. When I met my husband, I had been here just four months. We fell in love and got married. Naturally, I thought that, because of my nursing background, I would probably start working in a hospital here. However, due to my education, the credits didn’t match, so for me, it would have been like starting completely over.
At that point, I was like, “I don’t want to be back in school,” and it just happened that my husband got a call from a friend of a friend. They said, “We just got home with a baby and have no idea what to do, and we’ve heard that your wife does.” That was my first assignment. They called me baby nurse. I was like, “Okay, I’m a baby nurse.” One job led to another, and I started training other women pretty soon on the techniques I knew and brought in, and the rest is history.
That is so cool. Almost 21 years. How many employees have you grown to?
We do have a lot of employees and contractors. Within the internal staff employees, I think we have 12 and about 50 contractors.
That’s fantastic.
We are able to touch many lives throughout Houston and really beyond, too.
That’s so cool.
Career Differences
How has it changed in those twenty-some years? Is there any difference? Have you seen a difference in your clients?
Sure. When I started twenty years ago, pregnancy was not trendy. Motherhood was not trendy. At that time, it was still like if you had an oversized shirt, that was your maternity wear. Now, the fashion is so different. As for information, when I created the Motherhood Center, women at that time were still being told, as far as exercise, “Just take it easy, you can do a little light exercise.” When we started introducing prenatal yoga classes, it was new. Now, everybody does yoga. There’s a yoga studio on every corner. Prenatal exercise is given naturally. We pretty much have nine different businesses or departments within the Motherhood Center.
Each went through different transitions over the years in education, the information, what we taught clients twenty years ago versus ten years ago versus a month ago is different, kind of little tweaks on what we are learning. But how clients are receiving information. Twenty years ago, there was no Dr. Google. Literally, in every aspect of the business, we’ve been going through so many transitions. For me, it’s about being attuned to our clients, what they want, what they need. Sometimes we try some classes because clients are like, “How about this? What about that?” We’re like, “We can give it a try.” Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, and so we go with the flow a little bit on that, too.
I know you had your child prior to twenty years ago, so what’s the connection between you two?
We met on LinkedIn.
Nice.
As we got to know each other, then I joined the networking group. We share that connection, but then I said, “It’s lovely to have you on the podcast. What do you think about that?”
That’s so cool.
I think what you do is just so amazing.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Post-partum Depression
Something that you probably deal with, families and mothers and probably children as well, is postpartum depression or maternal mental health awareness. I read that 1 in 5 new mothers experience postpartum depression. Tell me a little bit about that and your experience with it or anything you want to talk about.
I did want to share that we are not specializing in postpartum depression. I’m definitely not an expert on that, but I see it on daily and hourly basis. Sometimes we are the ones who discover that there’s attention needed whenever we are in clients’ homes. My first experience, as much as I wanted to be a pediatric nurse, I also wanted to be a psychologist. I had a lot of interests in my life, and I still do. Mental health is a big component of what we do. Our massage therapists are there for the clients, who miss our exercise program, nurturing the mom so she can nurture the baby. It’s being able to get in tune with your pregnant body, and just really like where you are.
If a mother goes to a massage therapist, they nurture not just themselves but the baby as well.
In every aspect, what we do, we are touching on the mental health. I have a couple of stories where I realized that that’s going to always be a big part of what we do. This is early on, when we started, we had a mom-and-baby yoga class. This is probably nineteen years ago. The yoga instructor stepped out for a second, and she asked me, “Will you be here after the class?” I said, “Sure.” She said, “There’s a client I think you need to talk to.” I didn’t know anything about what was going to take place. After the class, it was a mom-and-baby class, one of our staff was holding the baby so the mom could just visit with me. The baby, I think, was probably four months old at that point.
During the class, she realized something was wrong. She started seeing interactions between the other moms and their babies. She was realizing something was not sinking in. Later on, she and I had a visit and a good cry, both of us. After that, I referred her to a therapist, and she was going through postpartum depression. At that point, I don’t want to say severe, but she definitely needed professional help. That was like, wow, things I was not thinking we were able to address or help with, even just with our exercise class.
Another story, and I shared that with a lot of our clients and staff, this is probably eighteen years ago. One of our clients said her mental check-in was that she loved to go to a flower shop and create a little flower bouquet. That’s just what made her happy. It’s something she enjoyed. Once she had her first child, when she would go to this flower market, it didn’t do anything for her.
It didn’t give her any joy.
It was just like, I’m here. That was it for her. When she and I had a visit, she said that was her ding ding, something is happening. I do that for myself. I love making flower arrangements and all that. That’s almost my weekly check-in. It’s like, are you good? It can be something even simple like that. We incorporate that into our training and onboarding for our staff.
That’s amazing.
Helping clients and giving them hints on maybe the check-in.
That was a great segue to what I was wondering, how do you recognize the signs? What are some of the signs?
Definitely, from the baby blues, postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, we see it a lot of times. Specifically with our postpartum help, whenever we’re in clients’ homes with our baby doulas, when the mom is, you see maybe the interaction with the baby is not there, or the mom is just very quick to step away, or she’s crying a little bit more than maybe you would expect. Sometimes it’s insomnia. Whenever we work overnights, which, the majority of our assignments are overnights, maybe the first day or two, the mom is not able to sleep because she has a new person in her home. But every new mom should be able to fall asleep like that. She’s exhausted.
If we see that the mom, it’s 2:00 in the morning, and she’s still keeping herself busy in the kitchen, saying, “I cannot sleep,” it’s like, that’s not normal. Sometimes, with postpartum anxiety, it could be things like we are changing the baby’s diaper, and the mom comes back to check to make sure that the diaper is clean. It’s a little bit obsessive. Clients are having a hard time just getting in the car and driving. There’s just so much fear in which, normally, it would not be a big deal. There are a lot of different things like that. Definitely, the sadness and just not feeling like themselves.
We were talking earlier to my niece, who is pregnant, about how it’s so different for her now, her pregnancy, than for the rest before. I’m sure you’re probably seeing a lot more anxiety because of COVID.
The pandemic definitely hit hard on everybody, obviously, and it was really interesting. I had to get myself through being there for our clients because you cannot put pregnancy on hold. When Houston got shut down, and really the world, all of a sudden, we had clients still needing childbirth classes. They still needed to learn how to labor, how to nurse their baby. They still had all these needs. For us, converting our classes and services immediately into a virtual format, it was really a matter of just days. Hours, really. Because we had classes scheduled.
How do we get this done?
Our educators had never experienced teaching virtually. It was just these big transitions. I’ve had this internal fuel, and at the same time, we were celebrating twenty years of the Motherhood Center. It was almost like, are we going to make it next week or not? I had that business side and how to strategically get through this. The emotional side of being there for our clients and still making their pregnancy as happy as it can be. Because, emotionally again, the incredible stresses and the anxieties, clients learning that they might be laboring by themselves because their partner cannot be there.
Many mothers face incredible stresses and anxieties just because their partners cannot be at their side during labor.
COVID-19
How did you make it through an incredibly stressful year of COVID in itself, but then running a business and owning a business that really depends on you being there for these families, and not being able to be there in person probably as much as you were? How did you personally handle all of that?
I have a picture of that because we had to quickly transfer into virtual learning. I put on my warrior head, and I had a yoga pose, and that was my vision, my mission. I’m going to fight for these clients and for our staff, for our team. I just felt like I cannot, not that I would fail them, but it’s like the outside forces could get to me too. There were times, I have to be honest, because all of a sudden, everybody’s jumping on all these podcasts, everybody’s doing all this. I was feeling like we need to be there too, but I had to hold myself back. I’m a little bit of a perfectionist. I love 100% client satisfaction and really delivering the service to the 100% satisfaction of our clients.
I tasked myself with that, but at the same time, being realistic. This was probably like three or four weeks into it. We all heard like, you need to recharge your battery. We were running on full speed ahead and just trying to figure out things and making decisions on things we didn’t even know anything about. We didn’t know about this virus. The doctors didn’t know. We had to make decisions for our clients, for our staff, with very little information. One time I was doing a virtual class, a virtual Facebook Live. I had my phone plugged in. They had all these electronics tied. My phone went dead. There’s this little robot, and I was like, so is my phone fried? Is it like, what’s happening? It was really just the battery.
The battery on the phone was drained. I was so in it. I was like, this is a reminder. I need to recharge my battery. Otherwise, I cannot take care of my staff. I cannot take care of our clients. From then on, again, I was like, every day I need to be doing things to replenish my battery so I can be there for our staff.
That’s exactly right. It’s so important that we take care of ourselves so we can take care of others.
For sure.
Giving Back
There’s a great book that you might want to look at. It’s called Compassion Fatigue. It’s called Prayer for Compassion, written by a friend of mine, Dr. Terry Eagan. It’s an amazing book for caregivers because we get compassion fatigue, and we’ve got to take care of ourselves. The book talks a lot about how to take care of yourself. Have you come, not full circle, but are you back in homes and able to be there more present?
Yeah. Again, because we have eight different departments. Each was opening up in phase one, phase two, phase three. We were, in some parts, an essential business. We never closed down because, even for things like you would not think about, clients needed to rent a breast pump. Hospitals were shut down. You could not go to rent a pump at the hospital. We were really the only facility clients had access to. We were working remotely. We were curbside pickup. There were just so many things. I would say as a business, we definitely are affected, I would not be lying about that. Some parts of the business actually evolved and grew.
We actually have more clients than we even would have if the virtual offerings were not in place because, with our virtual classes, we have clients from California to New York, clients from the UK, Australia, who are utilizing our classes and services because, virtually, they can, whereas before, we were not having this.
It’s amazing how we didn’t even think of that, like prior to Zoom. It was there, and we were having office meetings and things like that every once in a while, but now you’re actually able to grow your business in a way that we didn’t think of. Did you ever think, back in the Czech Republic before you came here, that you’d have this amazing business?
No, definitely not. I was just really following my instinct, and I cannot even say I was following my dreams because it was just that the business evolved from one day to another. I guess somewhere I have an entrepreneurial background and desires, and so that really helped me to get through.
That’s amazing.
New And Upcoming Projects
Tell us about your projects. We’re working on some projects, the mom check-in and some other things going on.
We like to always listen to our clients. One of the first offerings we are rolling out actually this month is a new mommy and baby check-in. It started with a lot of our European clients. They are used to having a midwife go to their home for checkups. It’s not like here, where you deliver, you go home 24 to 48 hours later, and the next time you see your OB is six weeks later. A lot happens within six weeks. With this new mommy and baby check-in, we can go to a client’s home and just literally check in. It could be just having a conversation about how things are, answering any questions the client has, maybe weighing the baby, making sure the lactation is going well, patting the mom on her back, just giving her reassurance.
Obviously, dads, we don’t want to forget about them, just being there for them. We can be there just for a couple of hours, just to make sure things are how they need to be. If not, what can we adjust? Because sometimes clients, even if they don’t know, especially if they didn’t take classes with us, don’t know all these little tricks and tips, which we can show them at their home. Maybe we can see that the nursery, the way they have it set up, looks really cute, but it’s not practical, and they have diapers here and clothes there. Even safety measures or a car seat, they can check, making sure everything is going well, the sleep patterns for the mom and the baby. That would be one of our newest check-ins, and that can be done virtually but also in person.
How do most of your clients find out about you? Is it through word of mouth? Is it through their gynecologist? Is it through their OB doctor, I should say? How do they find you?
I guess all of the above. I feel like we have a pretty strong word of mouth. As soon as clients are expecting, their friends are like, “You need to go to the Motherhood Center, get a massage, or you need to do their yoga,” kind of like baby shower registries or different things like that we can arrange for clients. Definitely word of mouth. A lot of OBs and the medical community know about us, so letting them know that way. Definitely the internet, social media, and us being around for twenty years. Our website is pretty strong and has a strong organic search. But we have clients for just a few months at a time, and they are always new. This is more on the business side, not so much the mental health, but it’s interesting because so many of our clients are professional women, and they are focusing on their careers.
They have the whole boardroom listening to them, and they are expecting. I do maternity consultations, and I can help clients process things too, but from the time you see the positive test, your world is completely different. All of a sudden, clients have questions like, “Can I sit this way? Can I think this way? Can I eat this?” You are still maintaining your career, and you have this overload of information. That’s why, with the Motherhood Center and our classes, we are trying to really give them the most study-based, nonjudgmental information. They don’t have to read twenty books while they are still working full-time, just really helping them through this journey.
We are trying to give mothers the most study-based and non-judgmental information so they do not have to read 20 books while working full-time.
With that too, it’s been interesting because it takes them a while before they share that they are expecting, for many different reasons. Maybe the lady who really needs to know about us is already in the first trimester, still secretly maybe checking our website, but she’s not clicking the “like” on our Facebook page because now she’s announcing to the world. It’s like, “What are you trying to do?”
So amazing.
Episode Wrap-up
We’re running out of time. I usually do a two-minute warning, but I haven’t even done that. We’re actually over our time.
This is amazing. How do people find you? I know all of those things, but what’s your website?
It’s MotherhoodCenter.com. That’s our website.
Wonderful. So amazing. It’s a whole world that is somewhat foreign to me, but it’s amazing hearing about this. I know that it’s so important to so many people. Thank you for what you do for so many women and families, really.
Definitely. We have grandparents’ refresher classes.
That is so cool. I was sitting here thinking, in my entrepreneurial mind, I was like, you could apply the same concept to aging parents. You could have the same Motherhood Center for the Daughterhood Center. You know what I mean? You could do it in so many different spectrums of our lifespan, I think. So cool that it starts with you.
A lot of my friends are like, “What are you doing for empty nesters?”
There you go. I was thinking of my own niece just real quick before we go. She has a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old. I thought, “God, you could even do this beyond infancy. Just do the Motherhood Center all the way through.”
People need support.
Until they’re eighteen.
For sure. Dr. Flowers, how does someone reach you if they want to reach you?
JFlowersHealth.com is our website, or 713-783-6655 is our phone number.
Thank you, everyone, for listening. Thank you again for being here.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you. You too.
