Today’s topic is pretty close to my heart, I wear several hats during the day, and during these extraordinary circumstances – these several hats are being worn, all at the same time. I am on work calls all through the day, in the middle of these, I am cooking, putting things around the house in order, taking the trash out, folding the laundry, homeschooling and trying so hard to be a “good” mother. Mom guilt creeps into our lives, without us realizing it…
Being a mummy is hard, crisis or no crisis.
It’s important to understand it, it’s important to address it and our guest blogger Alexandra tells you how.
Easy ways to understand and ease your mom guilt during this pandemic
Under normal circumstances, mom-guilt can feel like it comes with the territory of being a mom. Even more so during this pandemic, it’s showing itself to be an invisible epidemic that needs our attention. It starts a cycle that keeps us off our game in the “momming” department. Healing your own mom guilt during this time (whether it’s intensified or suddenly dissipated) will have you feeling more aligned, energized and successful as a mom.
What’s really happening?
Mom guilt is very much a matter of perception of our performance. The mind (including thoughts and feelings) is the best place to start unraveling and healing it before setting your intentions and taking action. Mom-guilt can act as a tool to help you rather than hinder you as a mother. Consider your mom-guilt as an internal alert signal that there is a misalignment between your energy, your expectations and your actions rather than seeing it as proof that you’re not doing well as a mom. Alignment between our energy, our expectations, and our actions is required in order to feel good about how we’re showing up for our children. Each of us needs to look at these areas and see where we personally need to bring our loving, caring and intentional attention.
Cycling through the spiral of mom guilt exhausts our energetic reserves as we hold ourselves to impossible expectations, which results in constantly falling short and finally judging ourselves harshly which leads to feelings of anger, regret, and sadness. This spiral makes it even harder to parent our children in ways that feel good to us.
The physical, mental and emotional toll it takes to sustain this pattern is the energy that we could be investing in breaking this cycle so to change our actual experience of motherhood.
Caring for Your Energy
This means looking at your self-care story (both currently and historically) and setting new intentions. The key pillars of self-care need to start with your nighttime nutrition (sleep) and your daytime nutrition (rest, food, movement, self-care). Having these in place will help you to restore your precious mental, emotional and physical energy each and every day and night.
How we show up in all areas of our life, and especially in motherhood, is so deeply affected by our energy. Protecting and preserving your energy will ensure that you are more patient, present, active and engaged with your children.
You can start by:
- Taking stock of your self-care including sleep, food, movement and mindset and setting small but inspiring intentions about where you need to invest the time, energy and mindset work to restore your energy (ie starting a deeply relaxing nighttime ritual, eating more veggies and fruit, practicing 5 minutes of mindful movement morning and night)
- Ensuring that you have 3 moments to yourself daily (even if it’s just five minutes each time) to start your day, to restore midday and to begin your night
- Consider segmenting your day into blocks where you are completely available to your kids and then solely focused on yourself and your work/business. Filling the kids’ cup first will help them understand when you need to fully concentrate on work
Personalize Your Expectations
Expectations for “momming” can be our worst enemy or our best friend. Mom-guilt runs deep into our family story and our how we value and love ourselves. However, if you’re feeling any level of mom guilt, it is often because of a misalignment between your expectations and your actions. Either our actions don’t align with our expectations (ie extremely high demands of ourselves) or when our actions don’t align with our core values (ie when we lose it in the heat of interaction with our kids).
These two patterns keep us in the spiral of perfectionism and being unforgiving to ourselves. Of course, it can feel awful when we act out of accordance with our expectations or our values. Learning how to forgive yourself and identifying how your energy and your expectations got you here, will actually make it happen less often and allow us to turn things around more quickly in the moment. The key is to embracing forgiveness for yourself and being forgiving with your expectations.
You can start by:
- Identifying your core values as a mom and the actions that help you embody those values every day
- Celebrating everything you are doing well! Acknowledgment, appreciation, and gratitude are so important for shifting your perspective from a negative bias to a positive one
- Noticing which expectations or actions need adjustment. The fewer expectations that you have of yourself, the easier it will be to clear them and feel good about how you’re showing up with your kids
- Observing when mom guilt comes, do you go into patterns of perfectionism or are you able to drop your agenda, forgive yourself and choose the next action that will create harmony for you and your children
Remember that you are doing an amazing job mama! Simply feeling any level of mom-guilt (and perceiving it as the alert signal to a misalignment) is proof that you are invested in stepping into your highest potential as a mom. Implementing these simple steps will help you finally spend your days celebrating yourself as a mom, enjoying your children more and having more energy to allocate intentionally in your life.
Alexandra is a holistic health and energy coach helping moms and moms in business glow with next-level energy to support their family and business with more to spare for their self-care. She loves using the powerful tools of sleep, food and play to allow her clients to transform their energy and show up in their highest potential. You can find out more about her private coaching program here, or find her on Instagram.
Stay tuned for more resources, we have some great content lined up with experts in various fields – marketing gurus, coaches, wellness experts, chefs, and teachers to get you through this tough time. Stay safe and healthy! Make the most of your quarantine with My Swiss Story.
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