New York Family - May 2022

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The Cl ass

Moms

Five instructors from the mindfulness workout, The Class, open up about motherhood, egg freezing, and their new program, The Fertility Series By Cris Pearlstein

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his month I will be celebrating my fifth Mother’s Day. It’s pretty wild for me to type those words because there was a time when I thought it would never happen. It took my husband and I four rounds of IVF over the course of almost four years to finally have our daughter, and during that time I often felt alone. At first I kept the experience under wraps like a dirty little secret, but once I started talking everything changed. As I connected to more women, hearing about their unique journeys to becoming moms, the shame lifted. That’s the thing about motherhood—we’re all on the same team, though we bring different things to the game. We may not parent the same way, and we might not hold the same values, but we’re all in it. Wiping

HannaH SHelly Mom of 1: Edith, 16 months old Jersey City, NJ

Tell me about your journey to motherhood. My journey to motherhood happened within the metaphorical walls of the pandemic. I became pregnant in March 2020 and spent my pregnancy confined to quarantine. The whole experience felt largely private and more intimate than I thought it would.

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NewYorkFamily.com | May 2022

butts, cleaning messes, loosing our cool, loving so big. All of it. During my journey I learned that talking, venting, and asking questions of one another is all part of strengthening the team and becoming better players ourselves. That includes women who are still trying, ones who have suffered loss and ones who are undergoing treatments now to plan ahead for their future spot on the team. We’re all different versions of the same person. All moms, but different. This month, The Class—a unique workout that focuses on movement and mindfulness—is expanding their program to offer support to people on their conception journey. We chatted with five of their instructors about everything from motherhood to freezing eggs to the one piece of advice they would give to moms to be.

What do you wish you knew about being a mother before becoming one yourself? I’m not sure there is one thing that could possibly encapsulate it. Maybe that is the thing I wish I knew! That you have to feel it and experience it, and there isn’t any one thing you could know that would set you up. What is your one piece of advice for new moms or moms to be? My advice to new moms would be to let their


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