One afternoon while I was making dinner, my toddler was carrying a broom around the house yelling, “You kids are driving me crazy,” and “I’m just so frustrated today!” My heart sank as I watched her mimicking me. I felt panicky as my head filled with thoughts like “You are a bad mom. This is all your kids see you as- angry, busy, and mean. Things will always be this hard. Other moms don’t struggle like I do. I am never going to get better.”
This one moment set off a spiral of my confidence as a mom. For a few weeks, my heart was so fragile as I tried to piece together who I was as a mom, who I wanted to be, and what I wanted our family life to look like. It is a tremendous amount of responsibility to be a mother and sometimes the success of the family can often feel placed on our shoulders.
After that hard day with my daughter, I started a deep dive into which therapists could give me advice on responsiveness to children, which only made me feel worse. I listened to podcasts on effective parenting, which left me confused by the polar opposite opinions on basically every topic around. I read books on gentle discipline for toddlers, and then felt like I didn’t know how to adequately put those skills into practice. It was all very overwhelming and ended up feeding my insecurities as a mom.
It wasn’t until my husband sat me down on the couch after the kids were in bed. I was sobbing, explaining to him the hardships of handling our three young children, and how I felt like a failure as a mom. I felt disconnected with my kids and so discouraged. Here’s what he told me. Maybe you need to hear it too:
You may not believe me at this moment, but you are a good mom.
He was right. I didn’t believe him, but this reminded me of a few good strategies to practice when all my brain keeps trying to sell me are lies.
Whether you know it or not, I’m reminding you that your brain lies to you. We are wired with a negativity bias, meaning that we not only dwell and remember negative events more readily, but it’s harder for us to focus on the positive ones at all. Once we see the negative, it tends to be all we see. When the negativity sets in, our brains write a story. It tells us just how bad things are going to be and how hopeless our situation will become. This is meant to prepare our brains for the worst case scenario, but ends up feeding our anxiety and depression.
So, let’s change that story. Something the experts will tell us is that we can’t replace the lies with other lies. For instance, I had the thought, “I’m a bad mom.” If I just tried to repeat over and over again “I’m a good mom” my brain wouldn’t buy it. I have to replace it with something that is believable to me, something that I can accept today.
Let’s take my thoughts for example, and do this together.
| Unhelpful Negative Thought | More Adaptive Thought |
| I am a bad mom | I am a mom who is trying her best to love her family |
| All my kids notice is that I am angry, mean, or busy | My kiddo just noticed that I was frustrated, but there are also moments when I am calm and practice patience |
| Things will always be this hard | This is a phase and our struggles and triumphs will change with time |
| Other moms don’t struggle like I do | Every mom has hard days and moments that she wants to take back |
| I am never going to get better | There is always hope that I can improve |
The power of this practice is that when we can invite a new thought into our brains, we can change those feelings of shame, anger, and panic into feelings of compassion, gentleness, and hope. With these feelings at the forefront, our behaviors will follow. Magically, instead of responding in anxiety or frustration, we can respond with patience and love.
Now that we’ve talked about how to heal some of our brain, let’s talk about how to heal with our kiddos. I came across a TedTalk about repair. To sum it up, she explains that good parents aren’t perfect parents, but are parents that have learned how to repair. This means that when we make a mistake as parents, we must admit to ourselves that we are good, forgive ourselves, and then seek to reconnect with our children. In this process we explain to our children that we responded poorly, affirm how that may have made them feel, apologize, and offer a solution moving forward.
I did this with my daughter and she looked me in the eyes and said, “I forgive you, mama.” How amazing is my kid! This therapist offers that this small encounter with our kids can actually make the biggest difference. Because it takes the blame off of them and their own negative script writing (i.e., “I made mom feel so mad. I must be bad. I did something wrong” etc.) and offers them a chance to connect and to feel safe again. Never underestimate the power of connectedness with mom. Kids depend on it.
When that mom guilt sets in, when you’re feeling like a failure and like nobody must struggle with these same things, please know that every woman I’ve ever talked to has at one point felt these same things. Everyone has a different family, with varying resources and supports, different stressors and hardships, different kids and different parenting skills. Nobody has lived your life. You are going to make mistakes as a parent, but the key is to maintain hope that you can always do better.
Be encouraged. You will gain confidence as a parent by reframing your thoughts, by repairing with your kids, and by remembering that your life and how you develop as a parent is going to be unique to you. You got this, mama!
