I AM ENOUGH
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 93.
Hello, my friends. I am so glad that you're here. Many of you may know that I am also a mom of two teenagers, two boys, constantly feeling torn between being responsible to help them be safe, happy, and successful, and knowing in my heart what they really need is to learn to do this on their own.
This is a place I call the empty nest straddle. It's being torn between motherhood and the responsibilities of raising our children, and the empty nest between holding on and letting go. And for me, this straddle started well before my oldest went to college.
Honestly, I think it started as soon as he got to middle school, when I started realizing that no matter what I tried, I couldn't make him happy. I couldn't take away his pain as he navigated rocky friend situations and insecurity over everything from his hair to interactions with girls. As my boys have gotten older, it's become increasingly clear that I can't guarantee their safety either.
As my baby counts down the days until he gets his license, in New Jersey he has to wait till he's 17. I can't help but dread those first few weeks, hoping that he'll be careful. I can't keep him safe.
I can't make my boys be successful. Look, none of this means that I don't try my best. And I know without a doubt that if you're listening to this podcast, that's where you are too.
Trying your best, and yet constantly feeling like it's not enough, or not the right thing. And let's face it, our teens aren't very good at helping us feel better about all this, are they? At best, they do tell us they love us, and might even be appreciative and kind most of the time. But then there are the other times, or the other kids, that shut us out entirely, tell us how terrible we are, controlling, focused on the wrong things, annoying.
They don't even have to say it. We can sense it, right? In their body language, the rolls of the eyes, or the stony silences. It's such an incredible and painful contrast to those days when we were our kids' whole world, the way they would want to cuddle or be held, the way they would look at us.
Sometimes I think about those precious moments with my boys, and I almost have a hard time believing that those moments happened with the same six-foot-tall men who are in my life now. I sometimes wonder if they would be embarrassed to know how much they adored me back then. And it's not as if I really expect my almost adult sons to cuddle with me or look at me with adoration.
That might even be odd. But the contrast between what we felt then and how disconnected we might feel now, it's crazy how different the two phases of parenting are. I remember about 10 years ago when I was first getting started on this journey with mindset work.
I was at Kripalu, which is a retreat center in the Berkshires focused on yoga and spiritual health. I was with my mom and sister, and we were in a session. I don't even remember the exact topic, but one of the exercises I ended up doing was practicing the mantra, I am enough.
As I look back, this felt like a pivotal moment for me because I remember so clearly thinking about this phrase and crying. I think even at the time, I was a little shocked that this simple phrase, I am enough, would have such a powerful impact on me. I honestly, at the time, thought of myself as a fairly capable, confident person.
When I was younger, I know I struggled with confidence, but it was something that over time I thought I had tackled. At this point in my life, 10 years ago, I was a mom with two beautiful boys, not yet even in middle school. So we hadn't even started the teen drama yet.
I had an important job. I'd held leadership positions on nonprofit boards. I had great friends, a loving husband.
I was finding time for self-care with my mom and sister. Honestly, on paper, there was absolutely nothing wrong with my life. And yet, when I heard the phrase, I am enough, there was a voice inside me that answered, not really.
Maybe it's because I was taking a rare moment to look inside. Life with kids and a job and all the responsibilities of life that we juggle constantly, it's busy. We don't have a ton of time for self-reflection.
And so the upside, or maybe the downside, depending on how you look at it, but the result of me taking this time away from my life, just two days, but still hours that I didn't typically take to just look inside myself, it was surprising to find that there was a big part of me that didn't really believe that phrase, I am enough. I certainly wanted to believe it. And so I made a promise to myself to practice this thought as a reminder, as I headed back into my crazy busy life to remind myself periodically, I am enough.
Have you ever done this? Found a mantra that resonates with you and you write it in your journal, or you put it on a vision board as a daily reminder to yourself. You hope that if you practice that thought enough, it will stick. Well, I practiced that thought.
And wouldn't you know that the next time I went to Kripalu with my mom and sister, it might've been two or three years later, I was still working on believing that thought. And life only got more complicated. As my boys grew older, the challenges that I faced as a mom got much more difficult with every passing year, it seemed.
Middle school was terrible, awkward, so many insecurities, issues with friendships. Of course, I'm talking about my middle school experience, but also that of my son's. But my boys used to tell me more back then.
So honestly, I don't know which is worse. When your kids tell you everything that they're thinking and feeling, you worry about that. Now that you have specifics, details to focus your worry on.
But then when they don't tell you, your mind fills in the blanks anyway, and you create your own hypothetical details to worry about. And so as life with my teen sons got challenging, I found it even harder to believe that thought, I am enough. Now, there are some of us who have a hard time believing we're enough because we might have low self-esteem.
And it's certainly possible, despite my assertions that I'd had become a confident woman, that there was some lagging piece of my psyche that still suffered from a lack of self-esteem. I'm sure a therapist would have a field day with that. But even at the time when I looked at my life rationally, I knew that I was doing my best.
I was always trying to be the best mom I could for the boys. I worked hard to support my family. I took care of our home, managed our crazy schedules, cooked as much as I could, and honestly, I don't love to cook.
I did it anyway. I juggled all of this. And so on the one hand, I could tally all of this effort and say to myself, surely this is enough.
But I had a hard time believing this thought that I am enough still, despite all of my intentional practicing. You could also look at the phrase enough and judge this against your own expectations of what is actually enough. Now this becomes a little more complicated and personal.
What is enough for you and your life? I've always been a list maker, and I'll admit I still get a hit of dopamine from the sense of accomplishment I feel when I check things off my list. But I also have the habit of giving myself a totally unrealistic list of things to do each day. Even when I write the list in the morning, I know I'm not going to get to all of it.
When I do this, I realize I am literally setting myself up for failure if success is judged by the percentage of things on the to-do list that I end up having completed. But even if you're not a list maker, you have in your mind expectations for yourself, the things you want yourself to do and remember. Everything from eating healthy and drinking more water, to being patient with your kids, remembering not to ask so many questions, or to stop bringing up that topic your team clearly doesn't want to discuss with you.
Whether these expectations have made it to the list or not, you have in your mind a certain way you want yourself to be, a way you want to show up in your life. And I imagine you, like me, often reflect back on your day and see all of the ways that you wish you had done things differently. Or honestly, maybe it's less about you failing to meet your own expectations and more about you trying your best and that effort falling flat.
Like you're hoping to get your team to focus more on their schoolwork and you thought of a new way to bring it up without being so annoying and yet you got a non-response, an eye roll or a slammed door. Or you've said to your team time and again that you're here to talk because they're clearly upset. You want to be there for them to support them, but they still don't engage with you.
They shut you out. No matter how much or little we do in our day-to-day lives, there is always the opportunity to say to ourselves that it's not enough. That there's something more that we should be doing to get the results we want.
Whether that be a better relationship with our kids, helping them be more happy and successful in their lives, or any other goals we might have for ourselves, there is always something more that we can do. So when is it enough? Is it ever enough? I'd like to say that one of the great opportunities we have in our life is to continue to pursue growth, to seek new challenges, and at times even take ourselves out of our comfort zones. Becoming a mother for me was definitely outside of my comfort zone.
Raising my boys has required me to continue to grow throughout their lives. Sometimes this growth was simply in learning the ABCs of that next stage. Learning how to diaper and swaddle, then learning how to baby-proof our home.
Eventually learning how to help them with their homework or support them as they made new friends. It was impossible to stay stuck in any of these stages because what our kids needed from us at each stage was so drastically different. And so we would naturally grow and learn how to handle that next stage.
Now with teens, that opportunity for growth feels quite a bit different because we start to realize that it's part learning how to support our kids as they become adults, but also learning how to let go of our need to support our kids as they become more and more independent. How much is enough support? How much is too much? These aren't simple questions, and what's right for your best friend and her kids could be very different for you and your family. Come to think of it, this question, what is enough, is a critical factor as we make each and every decision throughout every day.
How much is enough food, enough sleep, enough water, enough exercise, enough studying or practice, enough quality time, enough food in the house, enough things checked off the list. Our brains are constantly triaging these questions, making decisions in the moment about what's enough right now. Talk about decision fatigue.
It's no wonder we get to the end of the day and we're sick of setting limits and rules around what we should be doing, sick of restricting ourselves to what we thought at the beginning of day was enough, sick of having to be so motivated and disciplined. And this is true as much with our various personal goals as it is in our relationships with our kids. How many times have you said to yourself, I need to be more patient, or I shouldn't nag so much, or I'm going to listen more, or whatever strategy you think will work better than the one you've been using.
Only in the moment, when faced with that situation that triggers you, you find yourself impatient, nagging, not listening, the opposite of what you actually wanted to do. It's actually exhausting how often we find that what we do is not enough. If you can commiserate, let's just indulge in a moment of grace.
It's not a great feeling. Whatever you think you're doing that's not enough, or worse, not good enough. You feel disappointed, regretful, maybe even ashamed, possibly frustrated, angry, anxious, resentful, demotivated, hopeless.
These words, it's not enough, can carry a lot of weight. And it's honestly not just us perfectionists who are plagued by this belief that what we're doing isn't enough. If our thoughts tend to go to catastrophizing or all or nothing thinking, then we think that if we don't do enough, then something really terrible will happen.
This is the kind of not enough thinking that keeps us up at night, trying to think about the right way to get our teen to listen, or the right boundary, or the right punishment, trying to decide what will be enough to prevent the worst from happening. The stakes of doing enough are so high. Those of us moms who feel personally responsible for helping our kids be safe and happy and successful feel an enormous amount of pressure to do enough to support our kid, sometimes to do enough to help fix what might be wrong with them, or fix what's standing in the way of their happiness and success.
Of course, then we're also plagued by the concern that doing too much might also be a problem. We know that there are some things our kids need to do on their own. And if we're helping too much, then they might fail in some other way, fail to launch, to be successful when they're truly on their own.
Now we're trying to navigate some kind of Goldilocks scenario where we're just helping out just the right amount, not too much and not too little, just right, just enough. What does that look like for your teen? For each of your children, because they're all different, right? And then we might be caught up in what's enough from other people's perspective. Do my kids think what I'm doing is too much or too little? What do my parents and friends think? What are my friends doing with their kids? What did my parents do? My mother-in-law, what does she think? It's one thing for me to question what's enough, but now I'm in everyone else's head wondering if they think what I'm doing is enough.
We compare ourselves to others, we compare our kids to other people's kids, and maybe even wish that our kid was just a bit more kind like this one, or maybe a little more open like that other one. And yes, then of course, there are those of us who fall into the trap of perfectionist thinking, not trying to be perfect, but trying to stay safe, to avoid the pain of disappointment or failure, to avoid our kids having to face disappointment, failure, or worse. If we could just have everything fall into place exactly as we want it to be, then things will be okay, right? It's so tempting to hold on to the hope that we have some ability to control the things that really matter so that we don't have to feel pain.
So interesting that the goal of all of this, the catastrophizing, the comparison and perfectionism, it's all so that we don't have to feel pain, so that we don't have to feel some hypothetical future pain. You know the one, that pain you wake up in the middle of the night worried about, that outcome that you so desperately don't want to happen in your life because then, if that were to happen, you don't even want to look at it because it's almost like acknowledging that painful, terrible thing makes it more real. So we work desperately to avoid that pain that shall not be named, but are left feeling anxious and overwhelmed, afraid that what we're doing isn't enough.
It all comes back down to this, the question of what is enough. And in truth, while we tend to focus on the actions that we're taking, those measurable steps or effort that we take toward our goal, whether that be the way we interact with our kids or the actions we're taking to move towards our personal goals, in literally every area of our lives, we could create metrics for how we measure what's enough. And if you really think about it, even these metrics, even if we can quantify what we're doing specifically with some objective measure of what we want to be or think we should be doing, all of this is still subjective when it comes to what we decide is enough.
Even now in my life, as a master coach, I can tell you about all of the ways my mind wants to tell me that what I'm doing isn't enough. Am I texting my son enough at school? Or have I leaned too far toward giving him his space? Am I doing enough to support my younger son in his college search? Or am I doing too much by supporting him in other ways? Am I strict enough? Am I spending enough quality time with my family? And this is just my life with teens. Don't even get me started on the not enoughs my mind beats me up with when I get to the end of the day and my to-do list is only marginally completed.
Or that I'm not spending enough time with my parents. Or I haven't called back that friend. That I should be practicing my tennis serve.
You know that joke that we shouldn't should ourselves? Well, really, it's about what's enough. And I'm telling you that your mind, on autopilot, without supervision, your mind is going to tell you all of the ways what you're doing isn't enough. Or isn't the right amount.
Maybe too much. Maybe not good enough. In every area of your life, your brain is going to be looking for danger and finding it in the ways that you could be doing more enough.
My mind still does it, but here's how I've grown over the past 10 years since that moment in Kripalu when I couldn't own that phrase, I am enough. Now when my brain tells me what I'm doing isn't good enough, I answer, I decide what's enough. This is a decision that I am in control of making.
I get to weigh the options and decide in every single moment. I get to decide what is enough. How much is enough.
That what I'm doing is enough. Sometimes it's a decision I have to make over and over and over again, but it's a decision I get to make every time. Here's the power of taking control of this decision.
When it comes to my to-do list, at the end of the day, when only two things are checked off, I get to tell myself the choices I made today, that was enough. When it comes to my goals, I get to decide how much effort is enough. I get to decide even when I fail, that my effort was enough.
Even if that means that the result wasn't what I wanted, I get to honor the effort I made and learn lessons that I can apply moving forward. A growth mindset. I haven't yet achieved my goal.
That doesn't mean that my effort was wrong. Perhaps it means that I have something to learn about my effort for the future. When it comes to our own personal goals, this might be easier to wrap our head around, this having a growth mindset, but with our kids, it's not just our lives and our goals.
It feels like the stakes are so much higher because it's our kids, our kids' lives, their safety and happiness and success. And you may even be thinking, I've been trying to have a growth mindset. As I said at the beginning, we've been learning and growing at every stage of our kids' lives.
It's not like we haven't been trying to learn from our mistakes, especially now that the challenges are so much bigger. But my friend, I'm willing to bet that you've been more focused on your actions. That list of things you think you should do more or less to support your team.
That list of things you think you should do more or less of to support your team. You've been looking to find that right balance of enough, supporting your team enough, letting them have enough autonomy and freedom that they start to stand on their own two feet, holding on enough, letting go enough, constantly worrying about how much is enough. Just consider for a moment what an incredible level of peace you get to give yourself when you really settle into a belief that you get to decide what's enough and that you are inherently enough without doing one more thing.
Because if you can allow that to be true, then all of the choices that you make after that come from a place of growth rather than lack and insecurity, rather than needing some specific outcome or requiring some evidence that you've proved that what you've done is the right thing. And let me say this, I think we can shy away from the possibility that the reason we might want our kids' happiness and success is because it might reflect positively on us. And I don't necessarily mean to suggest that in a way that means we're taking credit for a kid's success.
It's not ego, necessarily, when we want our kids to be happy and successful. I truly think it comes from this instinctual desire because we love our kids so much, because we want so much for them to be successful and happy. It feels like the alternative to holding on to the possibility is to give up on our kids' dreams, right? But here's the thing, as much as I do truly understand that I don't have control over those things for my kids, that doesn't make me want those things for them any less.
But the balance of peace that I've been able to find is trusting myself to decide how much I want to support my boys and how much I want to let them figure it out on their own, finding that balance. And knowing that one month from now or two years from now, that balance may look drastically different. I'm willing to let that evolve.
And every step of the way, I trust myself to make that decision. And when I can both trust myself and detach myself from any thought that I can control what happens after that, that is when I find peace. Because I've also decided ahead of time that whatever comes, I'll have my back about my decision.
As I said, you are in the driver's seat. You get to decide how much is enough. But here's the key, the critical component.
You have to believe that you are enough. This isn't an exercise in how much or what you do. This is a journey of knowing yourself, trusting yourself to be the woman and mom who not only can decide what's enough, but who has her own back on that decision, even if it turns out that the result of that decision wasn't exactly what you wanted it to be.
Here's the truth. You can't predict the future. You can't control how your actions will land or be perceived.
You can't control your kids or other people. But your power is in believing that you are enough. Here's the truth.
When we mess up, we take accountability. We apologize. If we get it wrong, we can learn from our mistakes and make changes for the future.
You have total control over how you react and respond to the changing circumstances of your life, as long as you're grounded in this belief in yourself that you are enough. Even when my boys think I am annoying, I am enough. Even when my son doesn't text me back, I am enough.
When the house is a mess, I get nothing done. When things go exactly the opposite of how I'd hoped they'd go, I am still always enough. Do I experience disappointment, frustration, sadness, and even anxiety sometimes? Yes.
And even then, I am enough. So much of this deeply understanding ourselves comes down to observing our minds. And you know I've been covering these mindset traps for a while.
And I actually just put out a new mindset trap quiz. And in that quiz, I take you through 10 theoretical questions related to your life with teens. I ask you to choose the answer that best fits your instinctual response to each question.
And at the end of the quiz, your answers are mapped to five different mindset types. And this will give you an idea of the mindset traps that you might want to learn more about first. And there's nothing wrong with your mind if it falls into these traps.
As I said, my brain falls into them all of the time. The difference is I see the traps for what they are. My brain's way of keeping me safe and comfortable, keeping my life simple and easy.
And when I see my brain going down these paths, I get to decide if those ways of thinking are serving me or not. Is what you are doing enough? You are the only one who gets to decide if you are enough. Yours is the only opinion that matters.
Because ultimately, no matter what anyone else says, you will still have to be the one to decide what you think about yourself. You don't need to look for permission to believe that you are enough. There is no amount of action you can take to make you more worthy, more enough.
You are enough right now. All of this work comes back to the relationship you have with yourself. You trust yourself to make the decision to believe that you're enough.
Go check out that mindset trap quiz, my friend. And don't forget, you get to decide that you are enough. Why would you make a different choice? Until next time.
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.
