At Calma Mother, Alannah Wagstaff provides supportive, educational and honest infant feeding support, while empowering you through every step of your journey to motherhood. As an Infant Feeding and Motherhood Coach, she offers a holistic and inclusive space for women, mothers and parents, educating and guiding you to feel confident and empowered in the choices you make through birth, postpartum and beyond. With her honest and realistic approach, she helps you to feel prepared for what is ahead, and to have faith in your body and your abilities as a mother. Here she talks to The Natural Parent Magazine about the inspiration behind her business, how she balances work and family time, and the challenges she has overcome along the way.
The passion: What inspired you to set up your business?
This is a great question. I am a mum of two myself and I struggled first-time around with breastfeeding, due to having a huge lack of knowledge and support. I doubted myself and wish that I had known what I know now about breastfeeding, postpartum and the realities of becoming a mother. I had lots of mixed advice and opinions thrown at me (regarding how I should feed my baby) and that left me quite confused and unsure what I should be looking for to know if it was going well. I didn’t want this for other mothers.
The launch: How did you start out in the beginning?
I had already left teaching to become a massage therapist, which I thoroughly enjoyed – in particular treating expectant and new mothers – and was able to really start to understand what was missing, i.e. the physical and emotional support around feeding and what your mind and body goes through during postpartum. Too many of my clients were coming to me feeling unsure and unprepared, so I decided to take this into my own hands and retrain as an Infant Feeding Coach and Postnatal Doula and become that port-of-all for new and expecting mothers. I set up a group in my local area for pregnant mothers and new mothers and their babies to come along and meet other like-minded people and feel a sense of belonging. This led to lots of mums talking and opening up about their experiences and realising that the support wasn’t always there for them, again reaffirming that my change in career was the right decision.
The innovation: What was the biggest breakthrough for you with your business?
I am still very much at the beginning of this journey but the feedback I have received so far has been wonderful. It’s so lovely to be able to support a new mother and then to see them still continuing to breastfeed months down the line, knowing it was down to my support and their confidence in themselves as a mother, it is beautiful to see and their gratitude is immeasurable.
Yin and Yang: How do you balance work and family?
At first, I found this aspect quite challenging, but I try to balance it as best I can. There are times where I am able to be fully immersed in my work when the children are at school/nursery and then there are other times I need to put family time first and take the time away to be more present. However, I love what I do so much, and therefore it doesn’t always feel like work – so I feel as though I could do it all the time. This is a learning curve but we are getting there and my clients are always so understanding that I have boundaries and can’t always respond to an email the minute it pops into my inbox – they know I will always get back to them.
