Healing You While Raising Them: The Hard Thing About Doing the Hard Thing in Motherhood
Before sitting down to write this, I'm pretty sure I told all four of my mom clients to be gentle with themselves and that healing takes time and effort and sometimes you have to do the hard thing even when you don't want to.
The hard things are the types of sh*t that future you thanks you for.
And here I am at 9:47 PM, sitting here in the aftermath of another hard solo parenting day where I did none of those “good” healing things.
It's quiet now except for the dishwasher humming, and I've been trying to convince myself for almost 20 minutes to get up and do something.
Not something productive, but just something for me.
Something that makes me feel whole and not like a shell.
I've been yelling a lot lately.
Swearing too—it's supposed to be under my breath, but they're not really under my breath. Because I feel righteous. I feel like I deserve to feel this level of anger, this level of frustration. I think thoughts daily like: Why me? Why is it so hard? Why is it like this? Is it me? Is it my fault? Should I do this? Am I responsible for this?
I know what I need to do to wake up regulated tomorrow morning, and I find it so hard to do it because there's all this easy sh*t to make me feel what I think is better (aka, scrolling the evening away and not sitting with my thoughts). But I think it's just making me numb.
We watched Puffin Rock tonight at bedtime after the playing hotel sh*t show (story below). The episode was about doing things the Puffin way—like slow and steady and intentional. And it hit me like a brick. I’m not taking things slow, stead or intentional. I’m rushing through life, trying to avoid feeling at all costs (and it IS costing).
Here my kids are learning about taking things slow while I'm over here wanting my healing to be quick and easy, wanting to rush through breaking people pleasing, codependent, generational patterns like I can Amazon Prime my way to better parenting with same-day delivery.
What do these patterns actually look like?
It looks like me absorbing their feelings instead of letting them have their own experience.
Reacting instead of responding when they're upset.
Thinking something's wrong when I have no reason to think that - they're just being kids having kid emotions.
Sometimes I catch myself arguing with them when they're disappointed, trying to convince them they should feel different.
Or rescuing them from natural consequences because I can't handle seeing them struggle.
I know as a therapist that their happiness is NOT my job. But knowing that and feeling it are two different things. That pressure to make them happy makes parenting feel impossible.
Usually I notice these patterns when:
My husband points out how exhausted I am, and I realize how much I've been pouring into them without filling my own cup.
I find myself in yet another negotiation about something that should be simple. Like tonight.
Earlier tonight after supper, we had tried to play hotel.
My oldest had this whole vision—first he wanted to go for a bike ride and then "arrive" at our house like it was a real hotel. So I went all out: got hotel key cards ready, set up scanner things on the wall and "programmed" the iPad so the apps wouldn't open without codes from both their cards. I made it this whole elaborate game where they had to complete their bedtime routines for the codes to actually work.
But then my oldest came home in a mood and my youngest had a hard time getting in the shower, and all I could do was think: I’m trying to have fun here, the fun you asked for and now you’re making it too hard for me to BE fun.
I'm not good at being flexible sometimes, but damn it I was trying. And all I could think was f*ck, you guys aren't being flexible either.
This is where the book I'm reading about inner child healing would probably have something wise to say about what I should do in this exact moment.
All this stuff just reminds me of the ways that maybe I tried to express myself and it wasn't accepted in my own childhood. Like what is it about these hard moments in my own parenting that reminds me of my own childhood?
I think it's this: I was the "easy kid." The one who made things work. When things got hard, I learned to manage my emotions. I became responsible for keeping the peace, for being grateful, for not being too much.
So when I'm putting all this effort into creating magic for my kids and they're having big emotions about it, that old part of me panics. The part that learned emotions are inconvenient. The part that thinks if I just try harder, manage better, be more flexible, then everyone will be happy.
My kids don't need to be easy. They don't need to manage their emotions for my comfort. They're allowed to come home in a mood after a bike ride. They're allowed to struggle with the shower.
I'm the one who learned emotions were too much. They didn't.
And that's not a dig at my own mom. It's just the reality that no one (literally no one, not your kids either) gets out of childhood without some kind of hurt or mistranslated message.
Childhood hurts regardless of how intentional or how amazing your parents are. There's just sh!t they can't do. There's sh!t that they can't show up to because it's hard because life gets in the way. Because we are all humans having human emotions and experiences. Because we are all learning and what one person needs is different from another and everyone's temperaments are different.
So back to the hotel room play, at the height of everyones emotions, I was trying to breathe, and I was trying to do all the “good” things to regulate:
I moved my body.
I had a drink.
I closed my eyes.
I did the deep breathing.
I shook it out.
I told them I needed a minute.
I even walked away.
I tried to be silly again.
I tried to connect.
I just needed to reset and find my center.
And nothing was working! It just felt f*cking exhausting.
After I walked away and did all those regulation things, we actually recovered. The boys handled me needing a minute better than I expected. When I came back, we were able to find our way back to the magic. They still wanted to play hotel. The key cards still worked. The codes still unlocked the iPad apps.
We did end up doing the whole thing - the bike ride arrival, the check-in, the bedtime routines that unlocked their 'hotel room' access. The evening recovered because I took that space.
So why did it still feel so fucking exhausting? Why am I sitting here at 9:47 PM feeling like I failed when we actually pulled it off?
Because even when I do everything "right," even when I take space and regulate and come back and recover the magic, I'm still carrying this impossible standard. The standard that says good moms don't need breaks. Good moms don't feel overwhelmed by elaborate games they created. Good moms definitely don't yell under their breath.
The exhaustion isn't from the hotel game or even from my kids' emotions. It's from the constant internal battle with myself, the voice that says I should be better at this by now.
That's not their fault. I wish that they knew that it wasn't their fault. The anger, the overwhelm, the stuck-ness—that's all me. It's my stuff that I'm still working through, my patterns that I'm trying to break, my healing that I'm doing one messy day at a time.
And why does this even matter? It matters because I can see that my patterns are affecting them.
When they are really little you can brush it off because they just f*cking love you so much and now (my kids are six and ten) when they give you back what you have given them, it stings.
They are sponges, mirrors, and mini-mes.
This matters because they don't owe me anything—I owe them, and right now I'm doing a sh*t job.
One hard evening doesn't define my entire parenting, but it feels like it does in the moment. It feels like evidence that I'm failing them, that all my therapy training means nothing if I can't handle a hotel game gone sideways.
The spiral is always the same: one moment of struggling becomes proof that I'm not cut out for this, that I'm damaging them, that I should know better.
The gap between professional me and mom me feels like living in two different worlds. In my office, I sit across from moms and say things like 'You're not responsible for managing everyone else's emotions' and 'It's okay to take space when you're triggered.' I mean every word.
Then I come home and do exactly what I tell them not to do.
There's this voice that says I should know better.
That having my degree in this stuff should somehow make me immune to losing my shit over a hotel game.
That understanding attachment theory should mean I never get overwhelmed by my kids' big emotions.
But here's what I tell my clients that I'm terrible at applying to myself: knowledge doesn't erase your nervous system.
Understanding patterns doesn't automatically stop you from falling into them. Being a therapist doesn't make you a perfect parent - it just makes you more aware of all the ways you're imperfect.
If a client told me about tonight - the elaborate setup, the meltdown, the walking away, the recovery - I'd probably say something like 'You handled that beautifully. You recognized you needed space, you took it, and you came back.'
So why can't I give myself the same grace?
Like, right now, I'm stuck. I'm in bed at the end of the day and I'm stuck in my thoughts, my whirlwind, my waves. I know what might make me feel better, but I don't wanna do it.
It's too hard to sit in silence, to journal, to face and name my real emotion and get down to the real problem.
So hard to do the healing thing, good thing, the right thing. So I'm writing this instead, maybe it isn't so hard, and maybe it's working.
There's something different about forcing yourself to journal versus writing when you're ready. That messy middle I was in - contemplating doing the good healing thing, avoiding it, feeling guilty about avoiding it - that uncomfortable part IS the work. That's where you meet your feelings and sit with them, even when you're not sitting in perfect meditation pose doing it 'right.'
The magic happens in the contemplation, in the wrestling, in the 20 minutes of convincing yourself to get up and do something. Even when you don't actually get up. Even when you choose to write instead of journal. Even when you do the healing work sideways.
It also doesn't mean I need to 'heal' every single moment of 'bad' parenting or less than ideal parenting.
Some moments just are. Some moments are hard and messy and that's it. Not everything needs to be processed and perfected and turned into a lesson.
But honestly? What I actually wanted was just to go to bed and not beat myself up. I wanted to not feel like shit because I knew I was being too hard on myself. The evening had recovered just fine. We did the hotel game. The kids were happy.
I was feeling the pressure of impossible parenting where we must make every moment magical, where one meltdown means you're failing, where needing space makes you a bad mom. I wanted permission to have a hard moment without it meaning anything bigger about who I am as a mother.
I see this in my kids too. They don't wanna do the hard thing. And when they do the hard thing, it IS hard. I find it really hard to hold space for it as they're moving into the world and having more experiences that are painful, that are embarrassing.
Sometimes I find it hard to be there, to be present, to not just tell them to shake it off. Because I know that they'll be okay, but they don't know that. It is so very real for them in the moment.
Why can't moms just do everything all at once?
I want to be healed and a "good mom" and just ride the waves of motherhood. My clients are saying this too. They're like, "I want more patience. More presence, more peace." I need all of that, but fuck—the healing is hard. This parenting is different.
Maybe the Puffin way applies to breaking generational patterns too—slow, steady, and intentional, even when it's f*cking hard. Even when every part of me wants it to be easier, faster, more like the highlight reels I see everywhere else.
But doing it differently is hard. And maybe that's exactly the point. Maybe I'm still figuring it out. Maybe that's okay too.
Next week I want to write about starting these 'big little years' and how doing it differently is exactly what... well, that's what I'm still figuring out.
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Because sometimes knowing you're not the only one yelling under your breath makes all the difference.
And if you're in Leduc, Beaumont or Devon, Alberta and ready to do this work in person, I offer individual therapy sessions in my office at the Leduc Cowork and virtual therapy across Canada.
Sometimes we need more than a blog or newsletter - sometimes we need someone to sit across from us and hold space for the hard stuff.
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