Matthew Moore: First today, a national nonprofit advocating for mothers has launched its first two Arkansas chapters. Chamber of Mothers is setting up shop in Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas, and Anna Bryan is one of the facilitators for the NWA chapter. She says becoming a mother four years ago changed her perspective in countless ways.
Anna Bryan: In another life, I worked at Arkansas Children's Hospital as a health care provider, and I was very young and I knew nothing of this life, right? I would get so angry, not to someone's face, but when a parent would not show up to an appointment. I would get so frustrated when they would be an hour late and make everyone's appointments for the rest of the day late.
Now that I'm a mom, I know that even when I could get somewhere, you have no control sometimes when you have a little kid in your car, right? But now I know that some of those people were relying on a random member of their community to drive them three hours to Little Rock and get them to an appointment. And sometimes that just didn't happen at all.
Matthew Moore: When you think about being a mother now, and you think about moments like that, that really put into perspective how myopic we can be.
Anna Bryan: Yes, very.
Matthew Moore: How does that shape your perspective on community when you look back on a moment like that? How does that shape the way that you think about your life now?
Anna Bryan: Oh gosh, I think it makes me feel more like other people. If before this, I would have said, I'm nothing like them. And that could be a mom that has more kids than me. It doesn't have to be someone that looks or feels very different than me, but I think motherhood and the experience I've had in motherhood makes me feel like we are all part of something together. Like you're saying, this community. I can look at another mom in a park with her kid falling apart and have so much more compassion for her than I did before.
Before I would have been like, get your kid together. Come on. Now I realize she has zero control over that kid. She also has zero control over all the snacks he's had today, or who is babysitting him, or if did he take a nap, a million things. And then you just factor in the other really hard things too. Is that a single mom? Does that kid have special needs, and that mom is in the middle of finding that out? It just makes you see the world in a much more bright and colorful way. The way that I believe it's supposed to be seen.
Matthew Moore: What was it about the work that Chamber of Mothers does that made you say, yes, I want to be a facilitator?
Anna Bryan: There's so many things that you can look back on with rose colored glasses or whatever you want to say. Hindsight is 20/20, and where you think, man, I did that, and I didn't really leave it better than I found it. And motherhood is something that I don't ever want to feel that way about. And so you don't know what you don't know. I didn't know all these things about how I was going to feel and how hard things were going to be.
And then as soon as I did, this is what I was saying. I just want to be an advocate. I want to tell everyone. I just want no one to feel like they don't have the language. I don't want anyone to feel like they're alone, they're isolated. And I think for Chamber of Mothers, while it is an advocacy group, that is its core purpose. But I would say just right next to that is bringing moms together, just to use their voices, to tell their stories, to make each other feel less alone and to be reminded we are in this together.
Matthew Moore: Part of that advocacy also includes some policy goals, some ideas that you want to see make it perhaps easier to be a mother, to make it more approachable to be a mother. Can we talk about some of those goals here? One that stands out to me, that is a talking point here for Chamber of Mothers, is the access to paid leave for mothers.
Anna Bryan: Yeah, that's a huge one. I think when people think about maternal health, they are thinking about health care, right? You hear maternal health, and you think about keeping a mom healthy while she's pregnant, making sure she has access, and then making sure she's okay after baby's born. She doesn't have postpartum depression. Or if she does, how can we meet that need? But really, maternal health is an economic health issue, right?
So you think about a mom who is in one of those health care deserts. She has a job and she wants to see an obstetrician. That's who you should go see when you're pregnant. To do that, she has to leave her county and drive far away. To do that, she must have a car. To have that car, she must put fuel in it. So she has to take off her job. She has to leave and go do that. And you have a lot of appointments when you're pregnant. You might have a high risk pregnancy, who knows what it is. And then that doesn't stop when the baby's born. You have tons of appointments, you don't feel good. You need time off work.
If the mom does not have access to paid leave before and after her baby is born, it affects the workforce. She has to leave. That also affects her community, right? The economy in her community. If people are leaving the workforce, choosing to stay at home because it's harder to pay for day care, because you can't find a job that pays you well enough for the time you need to take off. It's just a cycle of, I can't leave my job because I need the money, but I need the money so I can send my kid to day care. And you can see how people end up in this position where they're having to choose between work and child care. And most moms are going to choose what's best for their kid, which means leaving work and staying home with that kid. And then there's a whole nother struggle story there that begins, right?
Matthew Moore: Well, let's move to that next point that we were kind of alluding to here, is the child care element of this. I know across Northwest Arkansas and Arkansas broadly, but we can specify here Northwest Arkansas, because I think that's where you and I are seeing it most acutely, is just a lack of access to child care. Not even thinking about whether or not it's affordable, just the access to child care is really limited.
Anna Bryan: It's very limited. And you said affordable. But another thing that's just important, you're a parent, I'm a parent, is a place that's good. A place where you feel good leaving your kid off. You look around and the place looks safe. There's enough child care workers that they're legally supposed to be, to take care of a certain number of children. So it's affordable, accessible and meets a standard that we feel good about as parents setting our kids back to day care.
And there was a study done in Arkansas voters about how parents feel good about dropping their kids off at day care and what they're actually experiencing. But only 17% of these registered voters that were polled say that the child care in their area is good, available and affordable. 17%. That's literally nothing. That is awful.
I feel very happy every day when I drop my son off at day care. But man, if there's a day where he's crying, if it has nothing to do with day care, he's crying, he doesn't want to leave me, it's awful. And our day care, the teachers, do a great job of getting him and redirecting his attention and things like that. Think about moms who do not feel good about that. Their kid is crying at the door and they just have to go to work. They have to leave them there. That is their option. So yeah, we need to do better. That is not okay.
Matthew Moore: There's an element of Chamber of Mothers that's Vote Like a Mother. And this is a nonpartisan organization. But when you get an opportunity to talk to legislators, you get an opportunity to talk to people who are running for office, what are the kinds of questions that mothers and people who support mothers should be asking politicians? What are the sorts of issues that you think politicians should be thinking about when they are in this election cycle?
Anna Bryan: I think a huge one for Arkansas right now, if you're talking to your people running for office or your current elected officials, is how do we meet that need of there being such a desert for this health care? Over half the counties don't have labor and delivery. And between 2020 and 2024, six more hospitals closed that had that. You really can't have a baby if you don't have someone who knows how to help you have a baby, right?
And so I think that's a huge part of it. How can we re-establish this health care that we did have at some point? Or how can we get trained professionals, doulas, other people that are in these deserts, or find a way to get them there a few times a month? How can we do that? How can our hospitals expand? How can the resources that we have meeting other health care needs that are doing the same thing, how can we expand that to maternal health, people traveling into those spaces and meeting the needs there? Because I think that is a huge part of it.
Matthew Moore: What about people who aren't mothers? What about people who don't ever see themselves becoming parents? How can they support, what are some shared goals that they can have with Chamber of Mothers?
Anna Bryan: Yeah, I think, gosh, that is a lot of people. When I met my husband, he had a daughter and he was the mom and the dad at his house, right? He had to learn how to braid. And he had to dress up to be the counterpart to a princess, right? And so I think there's a lot of people that are showing up in that role as a mom. You could be an aunt, a neighbor. I rely on so many women in my life that are moms and aren't moms to help me with my kids.
I think one, it's just perspective of, hey, have you thought of this? Someone just looking from the outside in, seeing the things you can't see. But I think for Northwest Arkansas, I've lived in Arkansas for 20 years, but I think in general, everybody wants where they are to be better, right? And it's kind of the through line. If moms are healthy and babies are healthy and families are healthy, our communities are better and they thrive.
Matthew Moore: This has been a really great conversation.
Anna Bryan: Yeah, this was fun.
Matthew Moore: Anything I missed, I want to make sure we touch on here.
Anna Bryan: Yeah. So we have two meetings coming up. There are kickoff meetings. You don't have to be a mom to join these meetings. You just have to want better for our community and for families and moms and babies. Or maybe you're just interested and you want to know what this is about, and I didn't do a good job covering it here, and you can come and hear from other people.
But our first meeting is going to be in Bentonville on Sept. 29 at Bentonville Public Library. It's free to park there. There's lots of parking. We're going to open our doors at 6. The meeting will start about 6:15. It goes to 7:30. And if you want to stay and hang out and network with other moms, when the library closes, there's a great porch you can sit out on.
And then the same week, Oct. 1, the meeting will be here in Fayetteville. It's from 6:30 to 8:30 at the university, at the Windgate Studio and Design Center. And there's parking located off Hill Avenue for that.
But you can go to chamberofmothers.com. There's a little part that says, join my local chapter. You go down to Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas are in the same block. You click that, you put your information in, you will get emails about this meetings, but you can also follow Chamber of Mothers on social media, and they will post about our events until our social media gets up and running.
Matthew Moore: Anna Bryan is a facilitator for the new Northwest Arkansas chapter of Chamber of Mothers. She joined me in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio One last week.
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