MOM GUILT
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 33.
Hello, friends. As I record this podcast, I'm in Vegas for a dear friend's 50th birthday party. This friend is like a sister to me.
We met in New York City right after college, and we literally grew up together. As I traveled here the other day, I started thinking about all of the crazy times we had together in our 20s. Ironically, these are the times my boys will start having themselves, a time for such exploration.
Moving to New York City was a huge step for me. I had never lived in a city, never supported myself before. I had never had a professional job before.
So meeting this friend was like a life ring for me. She made everything more fun and a little less scary. And I'm so grateful that we've stayed friends for the past, wow, it's almost 30 years.
It's crazy. My friend and my lives took pretty divergent paths in our 30s. I got married and became a mother, and she's not married and hasn't had children.
We've both always worked, although she stayed in the world of finance and I moved on to working with nonprofits and life coaching. She travels the world regularly, and I've tended to stay close to home with the family. Both of our lives are busy, and although she lives in New York City, and I'm only about an hour outside of the city, we only get to see each other a few times a year.
I'm grateful that she's the kind of friend where no matter how long it's been, we always pick up right where we left off. Now that my boys are leaving the nest, I find myself connecting with her more often. It occurs to me in a crazy way that the structure of our lives are converging again, both of us, with the opportunity to build a life without the constraints of raising kids.
I find myself wondering why I haven't made more of an effort over the years to regularly see this woman who is one of my dearest friends, and I realize the reason can be summed up in two words, mom guilt. As we explore the goal of feeling better, I think the question of guilt is an important topic for us I kicked off the new year with a podcast about deciding who you want to be in 2003. So in my podcasts in the coming weeks, I'm going to discuss goals common to many of my clients and friends and myself.
I want to offer that one of the biggest obstacles all of us have when pursuing any goal is the way we feel. It's easy to pinpoint things outside of ourselves that lead us not to be able to stick to a goal or even to pursue a goal in the first place. One of the most common obstacles many of us think we face is a lack of time.
How often do you say to yourself, I don't have enough time to get everything done, or more to the point, I don't have or can't find time for myself, for my dreams, if I even have time to think about them. The other related obstacle is our perception of what's required of us when it comes to supporting our families and our children. More often than not, we put our family's needs well ahead of our own, and those needs can take up a lot of time when our kids are home.
And even when they've left home, our kids still take up a lot of space in our lives, even if it's just in the amount of time we think about them and still plan our lives around their needs and schedules. When it comes to finding time to pursue our own goals, and that includes, in my case, finding time to spend with girlfriends, we might think that we have other obstacles. For example, our husbands or partners, our work schedules, or volunteer obligations.
Maybe we think it's just because there's something wrong with us, that we're not motivated, too sad, or anxious, not sure what to do with ourselves, particularly as our kids become more independent and need us less. So it feels like all of these things are happening to us, that the obstacles are difficult to overcome because they exist outside of us. Time, our kids, our to-do list, work, and other obligations, the way we are.
So I want to acknowledge that many of these things do exist outside of us. Time is the way we measure our hours and days. We all get 24 hours, no more, no less.
Our kids, our spouses, they also exist outside of us as separate entities. Our to-do lists, well, we create them, but they're an infinite number of tasks we could be doing at any given time. So our kids, time, our list of things to do, we don't necessarily think of them as obstacles, but more like obligations, things we have to manage and constantly be cognizant of.
We never seem to have enough time, or our kids need us, or we find that even when they don't need us, we spend time worrying about them. And then when our kids leave the nest, it's not like they leave our list of priorities and worries. We still think about them.
So I mentioned I'd been wondering why I didn't spend more time with my dear friend while I was raising my boys. Up until a few years ago, there were quite a few relationships I had let flounder over the past few decades as I've raised kids. And the reason, as I mentioned, comes down to mom guilt.
Now I'm just going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're likely very familiar with this feeling of mom guilt. I'd be willing to bet, in fact, that you know exactly what I mean. We all have our own brand of mom guilt when it comes to our kids, but here are a few examples of what it can look like.
The first is that we have a lot of shoulds and shouldn'ts, like I should cook dinner. I should go see their games, all of their games and all of their performances. I should get him a tutor.
I should check to make sure that he didn't forget anything. I should have gotten her a college counselor. I shouldn't have gotten angry and yelled at my kids.
I shouldn't have taken on so many commitments because I'm not home enough for my kids. I could keep going. And these are just the I shoulds and shouldn'ts.
We also have these shoulds and shouldn'ts about our kids, like she should be doing better in school, or he should be more respectful, or they should be kind. They should apply themselves so they can get into a good college. She shouldn't ignore me and stay locked up in her room all day.
He should. She shouldn't. It's the list we have for our kids.
And the underlying assumption for many, almost all of us moms, is that if our kids should be doing something, that it's our responsibility to get them to do it. And if they shouldn't be doing something, it's our job to stop them. Enter a whole other to-do list for us as moms.
You might have heard the phrase before, don't should on yourself. We joke about it, but we actually do it all the time in big and small ways. On a daily basis, how many shoulds run through your mind about yourself, your kids, just about everyone else in your life? The other way mom guilt comes into play is in the way we tell ourselves, I have to.
For example, I have to pick the kids up from school. I have to send her a prescription refill at school. I have to be home in case they need me.
I have to run home because he forgot his lacrosse stick or his guitar or his homework. What you might be noticing is that these shoulds, shouldn'ts, and have-tos all sum up to a pretty long list of things to do. And it doesn't necessarily matter if our kids are home or they're away at school, we still have shoulds and have-tos.
So I want to offer what might at first sound like a controversial option. There is absolutely nothing you should or have to do in relation to your kids or anything else. I'll say it again.
There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you should do. I want to invite you to notice the immediate protest your mind is responding with right now.
But I want to help and support my kids. What kind of mother would I be if I didn't? And even it's against the law to stop supporting my kids before they're 18. So before you turn out, when I say there's nothing you have to do, I'm in no way saying that you can't choose to support your kids in whatever way you want to.
My point is that it actually is a choice that you're making. You get to decide. And look, even though we're legally on the hook for supporting our kids until they're 18, we could still choose not to.
In fact, mothers do it all the time. There would likely be a consequence to making that choice, but it's a choice. Now, if you're listening to this podcast, I'm assuming you are, of course, making the choice to support your kids financially until they're 18 and probably well beyond that.
So now the choice you get to make is how much financial support to give them. And there's no right or wrong answer. There's only the choice that you decide to make.
It's not a have to situation or even a should situation. It's just a choice. The other argument you might have against the statement, there's nothing you have to do, is that you might be thinking, what kind of mother would I be if I didn't support my kids? So you tell me, what kind of mother would you be? Or maybe more to the point, what are you afraid would happen if you didn't support your kids in all of the ways that you currently support them? So here we are at the heart of the issue.
You might be with me in understanding ultimately that the way you support your kids is your choice. But unless we examine what we're making all of it mean, the choice is unconscious. And here's what I mean by that.
When we're talking about taking away all of the financial support we give to our teens, we're very clear on the legal consequences of doing that. We all understand that that's against the law. But what's not as clear are the consequences of our choices related to supporting our kids and the way we support our kids.
For example, should we encourage our kids to do well in school so that they can go to college? Should we make sure they get a job in high school? Should we stop doing their laundry and make sure they do their own before they go to college? Should we be at every game, at every performance? We're all individual moms. And so we'll likely all answer these questions differently. There truly isn't a right or wrong answer that works for all of us.
The question is, if you believe that you should or have to encourage and support your child in doing well at school, for example, so that they can get into college, what does it mean if they don't do well in school or they don't get into the college of their choice? If we take on this responsibility, does it also follow that we've failed if things don't turn out the way we'd hoped? On the one hand, I think we can find peace in knowing that we can only do our best and there are things that are out of our control. But the example of college admissions is a poignant one because for many moms, getting their kid into college is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's our mission.
It's the culmination of all of our hard work. Well, and also our kids' hard work, right? It's natural, at least human of us, to equate success in parenting with successful college outcomes. And as I said last week, we don't necessarily take credit for our kids' wins, but boy, do we take it personally when they experience hard losses.
We want a Monday morning quarterback. If we'd only done things differently, we should have, I shouldn't have, they should have. The hard reality and one that we've all been increasingly grappling with as college admissions have only gotten more competitive, the reality is that we're pretty powerless in impacting those outcomes.
The best and the brightest are being deferred and denied. There are only so many spots to go around and the most selective or sought after schools. And so our kids become a statistic where the likelihood of success is in the single digits or low teens.
And look, college isn't the prize for all of our kids. Maybe it's the job they wanted, the boyfriend, making the team. We want our kids to be happy.
And we've noticed that when they realize success in something that's important to them, they're happy. And by the way, we also know what it's going to take for them to be successful in the world, the attributes they're going to need. And so we want to make sure we instill all of them in our kids, respect, confidence, a good work ethic, kindness, integrity, and it wouldn't hurt if they were a little risk averse, they made sure that they were safe.
So the bottom line is we're giving ourselves this long list of shoulds and have tos. And we're making it mean that if we don't, bad things will happen. The success won't be realized.
And it will be our fault. That's really where so many of the shoulds and have tos come from. We look into the future and we come up with a wishlist of dreams for our kids.
And we want to do everything in our power to help them achieve it. Their dreams, our dreams for them. And look, you might have gotten a taste of the immense guilt that comes with watching your kid fail or get into trouble.
If our child gets a series of bad grades, we beat ourselves up for not making them study harder. If they don't make the team, we worry that we should have taken them for extra lessons and practice. If they get caught doing drugs or alcohol or worse, overdosing, we feel ashamed that somehow we weren't able to stop them.
Parenting doesn't involve an official scorecard or grade book, but we're grading ourselves all the time. Judging. What should we do next? How can I fix it? What could we have done differently? We spend quite a bit of time agonizing over what we should do, but we don't actually do this from a perspective of understanding why it's so important to us to be responsible for whatever outcome we're trying to help our kids achieve.
In this way, we're not making a conscious decision. We're taking action, even choosing actions based on our instinctual need to protect and promote the well-being of our children, but we're doing all of this with the mistaken assumption that we actually have control over our kids' outcomes. So why does being conscious of our fears, our guilt, our expectation, why does being conscious of all of it matter? Who cares if the choice is instinctual or conscious? At the end of the day, you might be thinking, I just want to support my kids.
And if you're a mom who never feels guilt when it comes to your kids, and you have plenty of time to do all of the things, and you wouldn't change a thing about your life, by all means, don't bother to take time to understand your mind. But if you're like 99% of the rest of us, there are some parts of your life you wish were a little different. Maybe you wish you could get your adult child to do something differently.
Maybe you wish you could find time for yourself, or maybe you wish you could just feel a little bit better, less anxious or guilty. Whatever it is, the result you want to create, or the one thing you want to change, it all starts with your mind. Your mind perceives the world.
Your thoughts about the circumstances of your life trigger feelings for you. And from those feelings, you take action. So when we think we should find a way to get our kids, for example, to apply themselves at school more, or else they won't be successful.
When we think this, we feel responsible in a very personal and graspy way. Sometimes you feel like you have to fix it. I have to help my child avoid this terrible outcome.
So when we take on this responsibility, honestly, as if without our help, the bad thing is inevitable. When we feel like it's our job to keep our kids from failing, or even experiencing any setbacks, then we do all sorts of things to try and make our kids do things differently. We nag them, remind them to do their homework, we might ask to review it, we might hire a tutor.
And I want to be clear, I have no opinion on how you should parent. That's not up to me. What I want to show you is that when we take these things on as our responsibility, and we try to control our kids outcomes by doing the right things from our perspective, the only thing we're actually doing is justifying our own perception that we're responsible.
And what I mean by that is no matter what we do, we can't force our kids to study harder or want to do something they don't want to do. No matter what we do, no matter what we say, no matter what choices we make, we can't guarantee our kids success or their results. We only have the power to create our own results.
I was speaking with a client recently and she observed, it's like I'm basing my own success on my kids' lives. Take a step back and appreciate the powerlessness of that. Can we only be successful if our kids are successful? And who defines success? What if our kids are happy but they're not living up to our definition of success? Look, I share all of these observations from personal experience.
I know deeply what it feels like to be passionate to the point of obsession with my kids' success and happiness. We love our kids and we want the world for them. But we have this habit of layering on this obligation to help our kids avoid the mistakes and pitfalls of life.
And the kicker is we can feel guilty no matter what. On the one hand, we want to protect them so they don't experience failure. But then they go out into the world and we can feel guilty because we think we might have helped them too much, that maybe they really can't do it on their own without us.
But then, of course, if we don't give them enough help, we might look back and perceive there might have been something we should have done differently so they could have avoided some disappointment or heartbreak or failure. We beat ourselves up for that too. So much guilt.
And we wonder why we have so much to do. Is there any end to the list of shoulds and have-tos? We think there's a perfect list of things that we do that will somehow guarantee everything works out okay for our kids. I'm here to tell you that perfect list is a fiction.
Not only are all of us different, so we all have different lists based on who we are and who our kids are. But our list, our actions, the things we do and don't do, none of them change anything for our kids unless they want them to. You can hire a tutor, but it's going to be a waste of money unless your kid decides to engage with the tutor.
You can nag your kid to study, but that's not going to guarantee a good grade on the test. You can model respect, but it doesn't mean your child will act in the way that you think is respectful. We're all separate, autonomous beings.
And now that our kids are older, they're making their own decisions. And so our actions are a piece of the puzzle they observe and either accept or reject it. But it's up to them to decide, to make a choice about how they show up.
We're so responsible. We take the weight of our children's lives in our hands, in our hearts. What if we could let ourselves off the hook? And I'm not suggesting that we give up on our kids.
I'm the first one to agree with the statement, I want to support my kids. I want to do everything in my power to support them. I want everything for my children.
But I've learned it's not up to me. Maybe it was when they were little, but it's not up to me anymore. Their happiness and success, it's in their hands.
I'm here for them if they need me, whenever they need me. But if they fail or they struggle, it doesn't have to mean that I've failed to do something. Sometimes guilt still comes up for me.
I think I should be at the track meet or I should encourage them to do robotics. I feel guilt and a sort of pressure that makes me feel compelled to do something in response. And I've learned to allow it.
The guilt is simply a feeling associated with one sentence in my mind that's telling me I should be doing something. And I'm either not doing it, or considering not doing it, or haven't been successful doing it. So sometimes I feel guilty and it's okay.
It doesn't have to mean I'm doing anything wrong. In fact, I've started to switch the narrative to remind myself there's nothing I have to do. And more importantly, it's not my job to make them happy or successful.
It's not even possible. Instead, I have the privilege of supporting them, of being here when they need me. I have the privilege of deciding to go to the track meet, or the wrestling meet, or the concerts.
The privilege of being here when they need me. There's sometimes I think I should be doing something, and I do do it. But I make a conscious decision.
I'm not taking action because I have to, or because I think that if I don't, there'll be a problem, or that it'll mean that I'm not a good mom. I take action because I choose consciously to do something for my family. And the result I create is mine.
I cook dinner for my family, not always, but when I do, I get to spend dinner with my family, if they choose to be there. I choose to go to the sports events and the music events because I get to enjoy witnessing my boys' talents and passions, not because they'll be disappointed in me if I'm not there. I can't control whether or not they're disappointed in me, or how they react to the way I show up.
Think of the freedom of making choices to create your own results, rather than worrying that somehow, some way, you'll make the wrong choice and impact your kids' results. Look, all of it is a choice, but I invite you to make your choices consciously. Stop taking action from obligation, worry, and fear.
If you let go of just a few of the shoulds and have-tos, think about how much space you'll create in your life for something beautiful, something beautiful that you can create for yourself. This is the energy I'm taking into this beautiful weekend in Vegas with one of my dearest friends, and I get to create exactly what I want. Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, MOM 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
