Catherine Belknap - Cat and Nat’s Mom Truths: Embarrassing Stories and Brutally Honest Advice on the Extremely Real Struggle of Motherhood

CATHERINE BELKNAP and NATALIE TELFER have been friends since they were teens but grew closer after motherhood when they chose to confide in each other about the more taboo topics of parenting. It wasnt long afterward that they decided to bring the conversation online in hopes of helping other moms feel less isolated. Their rapidly-exploding community of like-minded moms tune in every day to watch them rewrite the paradigm of the perfect mom. Cat and Nat share everything that moms think but are too afraid to talk about. Find them online at catandnat.ca or on all social media channels @catandnat.

We hung out a fair bit in high school, but we werent BFFs. A decade later, we became the first of our group of friends to have kids, and we both found it so much to handle. We felt like failures a lot of the time. We stressed and we beat ourselves up. But we found comfort and confidence in one another.

Today, we are best friends who have seven (!) young kids between us. Nat has four and Cat has threealthough to be honest, its usually just the nine of us together as a roaming pack of noise, mischief, and chaos. We live near each other in Toronto. We are married to guys named Mark and Marc. Yes, really. They hang out with each other, too, and we assume they spend most of their time talking about how lucky they are and how well they married. ;-)

We are not helicopter parents or Tiger Moms or whatever kind of overbearing mother is trendy right now. We are not parenting experts (whatever that means). We havent studied at some fancy school. But we have been in the Mom trenches for a decade, and heres what we do know:

• We know what its like to hear your baby start wailing in the middle of the night, four minutes after you fed and changed her.

• We know how it feels to ask yourself the question Is 4:30 p.m. too early to send the kids to bed?

• We know the comedy of not being able to go to the bathroom without your children following along. You just want forty-five seconds to pee in peace and suddenly its a family meeting in there!

• We know about husbands who want sex, and children who want a seventeenth bedtime story, and the other tightly wound moms out there who want to make you feel inferior because you didnt stay up until 2:00 a.m. baking organic, gluten-free, sugar-free, artisanal scones for the school bake sale.

In other words, we know the reality of motherhood. Thats why weve written a book thats easy to pick up, easy to readand easy to put down when you hear the sound of one thousand Rice Krispies hitting the floor in the kitchen. Come back to us whenever you can find a free minute or two. Well be here waiting.

We also know that being a mom can change who you are, and not always for the better. Like a lot of mothers, we went through a phase where we tried to mimic the seemingly perfect moms of the world. We became overanxious, overly controlling overanalyzers. Somehow, we managed to be incredibly self-conscious and to judge other moms at the same time! We had to let go of that nonsense, and we are here to help you do the same thing.

Lots of days, we felt like we were barely hanging on. Then we found each otherand, just as important, we found a new attitude. We started laughing at the absurdity of it all. We bonded over the hardships and the hilarity of motherhood. After a while, we kept coming back to the idea of helping other moms deal with the challenges and the stress and the isolation that motherhood can bring. Thats why we started making our little videos. Thats probably how you know us, those four-minute videos of us sitting in a car and talkingsometimes rantingokay, usually rantingabout motherhood and its challenges and frustrations and its awesome moments and whatever else comes into our heads. Sometimes we dance in the car. Often there are props. It can get a little crazy. And yes, from time to time, people who are walking by on the sidewalk stop and stare and snap a few photos of the two nutcases bopping around in a parked SUV.

It all grew from there. Now we are part of a community of womenmoms who celebrate who they are, how they raise their kids, and how they treat themselves. We want to share that experience with you. We want you to join us. So be sure to hit us up on Facebook or Instagram and let us know what you think of the book. We are easy to find.

Our goal is to make you laugh when youre feeling low, inspire you when youre feeling overwhelmed, and reassure you when youre feeling defeated. We are not going to lecture you or make you feel bad about yourself or any of your decisions. (Thats what the Internet is for!) We want to support you. We want to build people up. We want to make motherhood a sisterhood!

As we said earlier, weve got seven kids between us. And heres the ridiculous thing: We still dont have all the answers. Not even close! Were figuring it out in real time. Were flailing and failing a lot of the time. So if youre looking for some flawless, superbrainy parenting advice, you are going to want to step slowly away from this book! But weve got a lot of experiences to share, stories to tell, and maybe a few thousand mistakes to laugh about.

We are finally in a place where we can write the book that we desperately wanted to read when we first became mothers. An honest and candid book for mothers who dont necessarily have a Cat or a Nat to call upbut want to know theyre not alone. Something to help moms through the hard times. A book that says: The struggle is real. Its huge and its overwhelming and its disorienting. But you can do this. You can definitely do this.

We can do it together.

Okay, theres one last thing we want to tell you before we get started. In this book, we are going to talk a bit about husbands because we happen to be married to guys (and not to each other, as some people assumethough we would make a hot, kick-ass couple). But when we mention our hubs, you can just sub in whatever applies to you: boyfriend, wife, life partner, girlfriend, significant other, full-size Ryan Reynolds cardboard cutout, whatever. We are down with however you live and whomever you love.

And we bow down to the single moms. Both Nat and I come from families where our parents split up and got divorced. And both of our mothers were extremely independent and self-reliant. Thats where we both learned to respect the strength of an independent woman. Its awe-inspiring what women can accomplish without anyones help. If youre on this journey without a partner, youre amazing.