If there’s one thing I wish every mom knew, it’s this: you are not just allowed to feel everything you feel, you are supposed to feel it AND to love and encourage yourself through it! If you know how to embrace the emotions and learn from them instead of running from them, you will not only be a better mom – you will be a much happier one, and teach your kids how to manage their own emotions with grace at the same time!
Motherhood is beautiful, but it’s also stretching in ways that tug on every part of your identity, your patience, and your relationships. It exposes the places we’ve avoided, magnifies the false stories we’ve been carrying, and invites us—daily—into the kind of growth most people might never pursue on purpose.
But, there are ways to grow gracefully and peacefully, and ways that might look and feel very chaotic and overwhelming. I’m on a mission to help moms experience peaceful, joy filled growth, so that we can enjoy the once in a lifetime moments that motherhood offers us!
Here’s the wild truth few people will tell you: our overwhelm is not about our kids, or about the demands of motherhood. It’s about US! It’s about our emotional state and the patience, love and level of genuine connection we have with ourselves and all our emotions!
Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to perceive, understand and manage your own emotions and influence the emotions of others (aka your kids). This is what I wish most overwhelmed moms knew! If your emotions were perceived, understood and managed, it unlocks your ability to actually show up as the mom you want to be!
Now, I am not talking about faking or forcing emotions like gratitude or peace, that is the opposite of perceiving and understanding your true emotions. Instead, I want to help you feel comfortable accepting and appreciating the emotions you are genuinely feeling and understanding what they are motivating you to do or think differently! When we think or do things differently, and in a healthier way, we will naturally get the emotional feedback of peace without even trying!
Here is a practical example: if the house is a mess and I do not take time to perceive and understand that I am feeling inadequate, overwhelmed, ashamed, embarrassed, or like a bad mom because of the mess, I will naturally start to get angry or stress clean. From my child’s perspective, I am bringing the emotions of stress, anger or frustration into their world and they don’t know why (even if it’s not directed at them).
They don’t know I am telling myself the story that I am no good or that I emotionally can’t handle seeing the mess. They are not telling themself that story about you. They might react to our stress or anger by acting out, or being fussy, shutting down, being mad at us for bringing that energy, or not cooperating. I might then snap at them because I am so full of my own chaos internally and trying to clean the house at the same time and I just CAN’T HANDLE ANOTHER THING!
So how does a peaceful mom approach this differently? First by focusing on their own emotions and becoming very comfortable loving and accepting every emotion. If I can practice perceiving and understanding I feel like a bad mom because of the stories others have told me, or what I tell myself about what the mess means about me, or that the mess means I have to feel overwhelmed and I am powerless, then help myself correct those lies…my emotions, experience and outcome is wildly different. At the core, emotions like stress, fear or anger are often just trying to get our attention to help us see that we are believing a lie-that’s all.
But what does it look like practically? It could start with us intentionally changing our thoughts. For example, “I understand why I would feel upset about the house being a mess, I believed a lie that a clean house means xyz about me, and I am feeling shame. I am trying to get rid of that shame by focusing on the house and stressfully trying to fix the house. Instead, I am choosing to believe that the mess does not mean those things about me. It does not mean I have to feel shame. It may also mean I can feel pride that I let my children grow, explore and be themselves in the home we share, and now I can also teach them how to create order in their environment. I choose to love myself for feeling stressed and not wanting to feel shame, and also reassure myself it will be okay and we can create more order from a place of love and care for myself if that is what I truly need.”
In the second scenario, my child gets a version of me who has been mothered! They get a peaceful version of me who finds a way to make cleaning up fun or like a game that is connecting for us and them! (Let’s see if we can clean this room in 5 minutes, let’s clean up all the blue things first, I am excited to see how beautiful this room can look, etc).
Becoming a peaceful mom (for your own sanity first) is about becoming aware of what’s happening inside you so you can show up with intention instead of reaction. Motherhood forces this work in the most sacred, often inconvenient ways, but at the end of the day, we and our family benefit from the work.
Giving your kids the gift of a happy, peaceful, loving, emotionally available mom is one of the best things you can do for them, for their internal world (thoughts and emotions)! It also happens to be one of the best things you can do for yourself, your self-esteem and happiness!