Ep #31: Re-Defining Mom

I'm Mikki Gardner, and this is the Co-Parenting with Confidence podcast episode number 31, Re-Defining Mom. [music] Welcome to co-parenting with confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who wanna move past the conflict and frustration of worlds and show up as the mom they truly wanna be. My name is Mikki Gardner, I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey, I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother, and I'm here to help you do the same, if you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, well get ready and let's dive into today's episode. [music] Welcome back, friends. I'm so excited that you're here with me. And if you're new to this podcast, welcome, I really want to, in the month of May, focus all the episodes on honoring and celebrating women and moms, right. Mother's Day is in May, so we're just gonna go all month long celebrating moms. And I wanted to address something today, and that's really what... I wanted to start the conversation today about, what does it mean to you to be a good mom? We all have different definitions, whether we're aware of those definitions are not... They play a part and how we're showing up every day, and when we get divorced, it is rarely one of those times that we focus on the definition that we have ourselves and if it's serving us or not, and that's what I wanna talk about, because if there's one thing that I hear over and over in my conversations with my clients, with listeners like you, and even from my own experience, is that after divorce, there is a massive identity shift that happens, it seemed logical, of course, but so many times we're surprised by it, we wonder why it's happening, or act like it shouldn't be. So many women I speak with you know have made the decision to divorce and to leave for themselves and for their children to make life better, maybe though the decision was made for you, and maybe you're just trying to make the best of it, but either way, there is a version of a good mom that you are expecting yourself to be, whether it's from society, from religion, from culture, from your own family upbringing, you have an idea of what a good mom should be and you should be able to do it. Do you hear all the shoulds in that sentence? But here's the thing, when you get divorced, there's added complexities, there's just some changes where there may have been two people sort of pulling the weight, now there's one, or there's just time differences, there's just some things that change and so when we don't take the time to really look at those changes and reset our expectations, reset our definition, we can get ourselves into trouble in a few different ways. So what might this look like? Well, there's a couple of traps that I see that happen often, the first we call the compare and despair, right. And you can pretty much tell what this is all about, and I know it rings true for me in many times in my life. But as women, we often feel inadequate because we've been comparing ourselves to other women, maybe it's the mom next door who has everything put together, or at least the picture of her in our minds, that's how she is. And our moms back in the day, at least I can speak for mine, she could basically compare herself to the other six moms on the block that she saw every day, but now with social media, we have an opportunity to not only compare ourselves to the women that we see around us at school or church or in our families or just in our communities, but now we can compare ourselves to the 6 million different posts that we see on Instagram, it's a steady stream of mommy perfection and highlight reels that are delivered to our phone every second of every day, and when we compare ourselves to those versions, those sort of highlight reels that people put out, we end up feeling awful and inadequate. Another way that I see the compare and despair cycle happening, maybe the other co-parent is doing really, really well financially, and maybe you're not, so maybe there's some real differences that the kids have in the experiences from house to house, and now you're judging yourself for not being able to measure up, or are you comparing yourself to maybe other single moms who have different financial opportunities, different families, maybe nannies to help them out? And it seems like you should be able to do all this. But is it really accurate? Teddy Roosevelt said "That comparison is the thief of joy." And it's so true. So we have to really be willing to ask ourselves what way are we comparing and then despairing with unrealistic expectations, especially those sneaky ones that sound like Well, it's just being a good mom. So it's your job to protect your kids with your life, but don't be overbearing. And oh, by the way, you can't do anything when they're with the other parent because that's not on your time, or it might sound like don't yell at your kids because you'll be setting a bad example, but sometimes we get frustrated, always be organized and ready. But don't be rigid. Take care of yourself, but not too much because you really have to put your kids first. Have boundaries and stick up for yourself but don't be difficult, don't let your ex intimidate you, but you need to keep the peace. Can you hear these confusing contradictions, they go on and on, and when we are allow ourselves to be held to this high standard, the mom who never yells, the mom who has boundaries, the one who's always protecting and then we don't measure up, you can see where that goes. The second trap that so many of us fall into, and I know that I can raise my hand on this one is perfectionism, and the impossible standard. I came across a quote by Maria Shriver that I loved. It said, "perfectionism doesn't make you feel perfect, it makes you feel inadequate" when we have an expectation of doing it all, never letting them see us sweat, meeting everybody's needs, but then suddenly you find yourself divorced and you're one adult in the house full of kids, by the way those kids have all the same activities, all the same schedules that you're expected to get them to with one person, two hands and two feet. And you might expect, well, I need to be able to do all the things that I've always done. Because that's just the way it is. When you have these thoughts that are unrealistic, you wouldn't expect a friend who are in that situation, you'd probably tell her, You can only do so much. But when it comes to ourselves, we think that we should be able to do everything, and you should be able to do it with a smile on your face. But this isn't realistic. Perfect doesn't exist. And so when we are holding ourselves to these standards and then we're not measuring up and we're feeling inadequate, we have more and more thoughts that create more and more inadequacy in us, and whenever we feel like we can't measure up, we feel more discouraged, and then we act more irritable, we get more disorganized, we're more frantic, and we show up in the opposite way that we intend to. So why am I bringing all of this up? Because really what we have to do is start to understand that when life changes, when things shift, when we get divorced, when we are suddenly a single parent, we can't expect things to go the way that they used to... We need to be realistic, but first we need to start with defining what does it even mean to be a good mom? What does it mean to us? And what is most important that we value in being a mom? Why is this important? Because when we understand who we want to be in the big picture, aligned with our values, showing up in a way that fills us up, we end up being the best version of ourselves, we end up showing up for our children in the best way that we can... We end up creating the life that we want, but we have to be willing to first figure out what's my current definition, What are my current expectations and are they in service of that? So what I wanna offer to you today is get out a pen and a paper, and I want you to go through an exercise with me, we're gonna do one now and one in a couple of minutes, so maybe write down the questions and you can always do this after the podcast. But when we have these expectations in our head, they might seem reasonable, it might seem like we can totally do it, if we just figure out how we can be more organized, so what we wanna do is we wanna get all of this out of our brain and on to paper, because when it's actually on paper, it's more clear and it's usually completely unrealistic for us to expect ourselves to do all these things, it's not humanly possible to do it, or we might see these things and we actually don't even agree with them. So like everything else, we wanna get it out of our brain and on to paper so that we can decide what we wanna believe and what serves us... Okay, so grab the pen and the paper and do this right now, I want you to write down all of the things that you expect of yourself to do in order to fit that version of being "a good mom." I want you to keep going until you've listed at least 20 things, maybe you'll even get a 100, but go ahead, hit, pause if you want and write them all down. Now, tell me something, what did you discover? What did you see on that list of all the things that you should be to be a good mom? And here's a question, would you ever tell another woman that that's her job to do all of that? That's an interesting question to ask, isn't it? 'Cause do we expect others to do what we're expecting of ourselves, right. So often we'll cut other people slack that we won't cut ourselves. Listen I have high standards and strive for excellence, but I don't wanna have unrealistic expectations and unrealistic perfectionist beliefs that create detrimental thoughts that hold me back, and that's why getting this out of your head and on to paper so that you can see what kind of thoughts you have about what it looks like to be a good mom, so that you can choose actually what you believe... Maybe some of them are just from the past recycle. Maybe you see that a lot of those thoughts are from your past, maybe from religion, maybe from the media, but do you even agree with them? I know for me, I had my identity wrapped up in being the mom who was present at everything, right. Who made the baby food, who always had the homemade treats, who took care of everything. Right, but being with my son physically all the time, I had to do that, plus I worked full-time, plus I did a number of other things, plus, I was volunteering, right. So you can see I was constantly butting up against things that I couldn't do because there are only 24 hours in the day, and then my belief of being this "good mom" was in direct assault once I became divorced, because if being present, every moment of every day was part of being a good mom. And now that I had to share custody, where did that leave me... It left me feeling like a part-time mom, it left me feeling out of the loop, I experienced the worst kind of FOMO. I was devastated, right? Then I started blaming my act for taking my son away, I blame myself for making the decision to get divorced, but most of all, I got really, really frustrated and constantly felt like a failure, it became clear through a lot of pain and suffering and emotional work that if I wanted to feel better, I had to change the expectations in the story that I was telling myself, I had to redefine what it meant to be mom, now that my circumstances had changed, when your go-to thoughts are of comparison, failure and inadequacy, you will only create more failure and more inadequacy, it's just the way it works, it's a cycle that keeps you feeling trapped, frustrated, and never making the change in the improvements that you really want to. If you want a positive change in your life, it will require a useful definition of what kind of mom and woman you wanna be, and then from that place, taking a lined action towards becoming that person today. But we have to be willing to look at what is the definition that I'm holding today? And getting that out of our head and on to paper, and then step two of that is to define what do we want, right, who is the version of us that we desire to be, what do we believe a good mom is... Is she compassionate? Does she make mistakes? Does she have compassion for when she makes mistakes? Does she keep showing up and trying? What are those qualities that she has? And the reason that we wanna do this, is because we wanna create a vision that we can bring to mind at any moment, but when I say bring to mind, I mean really know who she is, so that picture becomes so vividly clear in our mind. It generates a feeling, the feelings that we wanna have, the feelings of strength and empowerment, and courage and love, and the thing about our imaginations, when we create those thoughts... Our mind can't tell the difference. This is why creativity is so important because it is the part where our thoughts and our feelings all start to come into play, and then we attract that, we start to take action from that and we build a new life from that place, our brains will start to register that vision as true, and it'll look for more evidence in the world that we are that person, and then we keep acting on it and it snowballs and we become her each and every day. So I'm gonna ask you to take out the paper again or have a new sheet of paper this time, maybe a clean slate, and I want you to write down these questions, you can either hit pause after each and do them, or just write them down and then spend some time afterwards really sitting with these questions, allowing yourself to be still and to listen and to dream and connect with and create a new definition for yourself. So I want you to take a minute and close your eyes, and I want you to bring to mind a version of you, maybe it's two years, maybe it's five years, but this is the most fulfilled, authentic version of you. She's living the life that you dream of living, she lives a life where all of her desires are her reality, so I want you to ask these questions and answer them. How do others feel when they're in her presence? What do her children say about her as Mom? How does she handle disappointments in life? Does she have a motto that she lives by? If so, what is it? What is she completely unapologetic about? And how would others describe her? How would her children describe her? What do they absolutely love and admire about her? You know, this question really goes to what are the qualities of her that they love so much? Is it her sincerity? Her trustworthiness, her transparency, her passion, her optimism, her kindness, her love, her devotion, her dependability, her generosity, her graceful-ness, is it how well she takes care of herself and understanding she is? Is it her curiosity? Her compassion, her courage, her calm, boldness, is it her attention, her presence? Whatever it is, I want you to really write down those qualities, so once you've done that, I want you to spend a little bit of time with her each day, and what I mean by that is maybe it's in the morning when you first wake up, you bring her into your line of vision, you imagine her with your eyes closed, you step into her, right, you start to feel what she feels, maybe through the day when you're overwhelmed, when you're frustrated, when you're sad, when you feel like you're not measuring up, maybe you've got three kids that all have to be in three different directions and you've gotta make some hard choices, maybe it's needing to ask for help when you really don't want to? What we do is we create this future vision of our future self, and we literally use her as our guide, what would she say in these struggles? What would she say when we're faced with a problem? What would her approach be? Because when we actually start living into that version of ourselves today, this is when change happens. Because I'm sure that she's not gonna tell you that you are expected to be a good mom only by doing all of the things all of the time in perfect order. She wouldn't say that comparing yourself to everyone else and then beating yourself up for not measuring up, that version of you is the version of you that you need today. And so you ask yourself, What would she do? What would she give herself? How would she handle this? And then you step towards that as best you can today, right. Here's the amazing part of it, I truly, truly believe, the universe is good, it is balanced, and it is always bringing us exactly what we need even when we can't see it, when we believe from this place, when we're always understanding that we have 95% of what we need at any given time. We start to get curious, we start to look for it, and we start to find ways to be more resilient, to be more courageous and to be more empowered, so in these times of change, when maybe you're divorced, newly divorced, maybe it's still been a few years, maybe it was your choice, maybe it wasn't. Whatever the situation is, really taking the time to decide, "How am I defining what it is that I'm expecting myself to be?" "And is that definition supporting the future version of me?" Is it filling myself up, Is it supporting me or is it cutting me down? And then choosing intentionally what you want to decide what it means to be mom... Redefining motherhood for you now, at every stage of every season, we need to constantly be redefining, who am I? And who do I wanna be? And how do I show up in that way today? It is completely possible, and I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not trying to oversimplify it. And I'm here if I can support you in any way. But so often, we use these outdated definitions to just beat ourselves up, or this fabricated idea of what it looks like to parent after divorce, what it looks like to be a family after divorce, what it looks like to be a good mom. After Divorce, we have to intentionally choose those definitions and choose the ones that serve us, so our children and serve our families, because you are the one with all of the answers, you hold all of them within you. And so when you define it for yourself and you set a standard that you can not only meet, but you can literally blow your own mind of the life that you can create, we do that by creating really honest definitions for ourselves and then supporting ourselves to create the highest standard in our life. And if you're in this process of redefining maybe what it looks like to be a mom, you might wanna join me for a free workshop that I'm hosting on May 19th called Redefining Family After Divorce. Because we're gonna take the same ideas, we're gonna apply it to the picture of what family should look like and start defining that in a new way, in a way that supports and celebrates the family that you have today, not the one that you "should have." There's a link in the show notes that you can sign up or you can go to www.mikkigardner.com/workshop, and sign up there. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I really am so grateful. I know you can be doing a million things, and I am so grateful that you're here with me, I'll see you next week and in the meantime, take really good care of you. Thanks for listening to Co-Parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit co-parentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week. [music]