Top 3 Things Keeping You From Living Your Best Mom Life

What are the top three things holding you back from your best mom life?

These are things that I know I have struggled with and continue to struggle with depending on the day. They can be kind of tough.

I'm going to try to challenge these things so that we can start to shift the paradigm as to who we are as moms and how we're living and who we're really living for.

One of the first things that we tend to do that really holds us back is that we refuse to admit when something is wrong.

Tell me, are you one of those people that has the t-shirt that says it's fine, it's all fine? How many times do you catch yourself saying that?

Well, we’re probably not all fine on the inside, but we will wear that t-shirt. We decide that we just need to power through everything and that that's just kind of the way that it is. Well, unfortunately, when we power through things, we're avoiding them. Powering through can be an avoidance behavior.

In some cases, “powering through it” could be necessary depending on what's going on. But in most cases, it's really an avoidance behavior. When we start avoiding all of the things that are wrong and pretending that they don't exist in the background, they're actually snowballing. And you and I both know that when things snowball, eventually it all ends up smacking you in the face. And that's never good either.

So ignorance is really not bliss. Why do we do this? We really tend to downplay ourselves when we're prioritizing everything else and everyone else. There could be something physically or mentally that you're ignoring, or there's something in a relationship that you're ignoring, or you're just feeling totally overwhelmed with all these different things that you feel like you're expected to do…but you just do it anyway, you don't talk about it, and you don't try to do anything to change it.

It's become a the societal expectation is that we are just going to do and do and do and serve and serve and serve. In some cases, we may feel like we're being forced into acting this way and ignoring when something is wrong.

And that's no good place to be, either.

We don’t ask for help.

We're ignoring all of these things. We're not admitting when something is wrong. Even if that small little voice in the back of your head is saying something needs to change, we don't ask for help. We believe that we are superwoman. So when we're not wearing our it's fine shirt, we're wearing our superwoman shirt.

We think: I am strong-willed, I am independent, I can do it all. Somewhere in the back of our heads, we feel that we should be doing it all or that we're expected to be doing it all. Again, it's become ingrained in us to do everything on our own without help. We've started to wear our to-do list like another badge of honor.

I know I used to do this a lot when I first went from full-time work to part-time work after my kids were born. I felt like I needed to present everything that I had done for the day to my husband when he came home from work. And he didn't ask. I was just putting it out there that I did all of these things, and it made me feel better.

“I folded clothes today and I ran laundry and I got the dishes done and the kids are clean and fed”…and I would just go through the whole list. Somehow that made me feel a little bit better. But I was exhausted and even though he was always willing to help, I never asked for it.

This crazy little thing that we do is rooted in a couple of things.

A lot of it comes out of our people pleasing tendencies.

Our people pleasing tendencies are based a bit in our self worth and how we truly feel about ourselves. We're looking for external validation because we're not feeling it as a baseline internally from ourselves.

That all causes problems because when we don't ask for help and we start getting overwhelmed, then we start getting resentful and bitter and angry and there's stress on top of it and we're overwhelmed because we've got 15,000 things to do. When all we should have done was to ask for help.

And while we're not asking for help, we're not admitting that things are wrong.

The third thing we do to really hold ourselves back is that we don't allow ourselves to have more in our lives. We don't allow ourselves even small bits of happiness. We will push our needs and desires to the side just to make everybody else happy.

I know I do this even with small things. For example, I love fresh strawberries, especially when they're in season and they're actually sweet. But I will not eat the strawberries or any other kind of fruit for that matter. I won't let myself have one strawberry or one chunk of pineapple because I'm just going to let the kids have it.

I'm denying myself that little something that would just make me a little bit happier, a little bit brighter. And it's nothing big. It's not that I'm asking for the world there, but I choose and make that choice.

And why do I do that? Again, this loops back to how we were brought up as women. We’re taught to over serve and over give. We’re told we're supposed to do everything for everybody. Then there’s that “good girl” syndrome to follow all the rules and be quiet and make everything about everybody else. Serve, serve, serve, serve, serve. To the point of martyrdom, which can happen as well. And this may have shown up in your life in little bits and pieces.

Because by the end of the day, you feel like you've given everything you have. Then you realize you've given yourself nothing, and you're still waiting to feel that inner fulfillment from giving, giving and giving. And where fulfillment doesn’t fill the space, resentment, anger, and bitterness take over that void.

We do it to ourselves when we don't allow ourselves even little bits and pieces of happiness.

How do we fix it?

We’re going to ask some questions that will get your brain moving a little bit. These are questions you can ask yourself now, but also in the moment.

If you stop and kind of do a reality check, then it will help to reframe how you're approaching a situation.

For example, when we're looking at refusing to admit something is wrong, I want you to think about who actually told you that you had to look perfect on the outside?

Was there anybody that actually told you that?

When we refuse to admit that something is wrong and we keep going like the world is hunky-dory, we're looking perfect on the outside and we're putting out this persona.

But I challenge you, who told you you had to look perfect on the outside? Where did that idea come from?

It could come from any one of a number of places. It could just be the things that you see on social media. It could be the things that you see on TV or in movies or in shows. Or maybe there was an actual person who told you, no, you cannot look like you're falling apart on the outside because that's a sign of weakness (or whatever it is that people are telling you).

Who told you that you had to look perfect?

And also, when we're not asking for help, who asked you to do it all in the first place? Did you just take it on, on your own?

Did you not know how to say no? Or did you just start taking stuff on because you felt like that was what was expected?

Who actually asked you to do all these things by yourself in the first place?

Who asked you to power through like that?

And when we don't feel worthy…

Who told you that you aren't allowed to have happiness? Who told you that you weren't allowed to have that strawberry?

Was it actually somebody else? Or was it you?

(Yeah, I’m raising my hand over here too).

But if you start to challenge where these things are coming from, then we can kind of start to understand how they're showing up in our lives and how we can start to move past that.

If you start to ask even these basic questions, you start to challenge the status quo. Who said that that is how you had to live?

We can reclaim our power, even if we're the ones at fault that started doing some of these things. And not all of it is your fault because some of it's also how we're brought up and how we absorb different ideas from our culture.

Change always starts with us. It starts with you.

Your change in your life is starting with you. You're the one that holds the power to shift these thoughts and shift these behaviors. Because if we stop refusing to admit that stuff's wrong, if we stop refusing to ask for help, and we stop refusing ourselves little bits of happiness…how much better do you think life would be?

Do you feel like you would be more fulfilled?

At the root of it all might be bit of self worth work that you have to do.

Journaling it out, praying over it, meditating over it, whatever your best way to process things and to look deeper would be.

But for today, just start with those questions. When some of these things come up and you're starting to feel that overwhelm or resentment or bitterness, I invite you to go back to these basic questions of: Who actually told me that I have to do this? And who told me I have to do this this way?

See what answers you come up with, then take those answers and see what you can do to try to make a change and a shift.

I'm willing to bet that you're going to feel a little happier, a little more content and a little more fulfilled. Even if you're still wearing the “it's fine” t-shirt.