Three Things To Delete from Your To-Do List as a Stay-at-Home Mom

What do you want to say when you look back on this time of your life at home with little ones? That you finally, finally crossed off that last item on your to-do list after 50,000 hours of resolutely keeping your head down and getting it done, or “I laughed and played and danced through all the craziness!”? Or will you tell the story that a happy life happens somewhere in between?

If you feel you’ve become a slave to your to-do list since deciding to stay home with your kids, know that you’re not alone. I used to run my life by my list with commitment and drive until I realized that it wasn’t benefitting me - or my three daughters - to live that way. 

My life at home - and my relationship with my husband - began to change for the better once I made the decision to lean in into the art of letting go of these three things (after clinging on tightly for seven long years!):

1. Thinking overwhelm will be solved by finally “getting organized”

When you’re feeling overwhelmed and your brain is offering you the thought that getting organized will pull you out of the quicksand, know that brains are very good at tricking us into staying stuck exactly where we are.

You will never get out of the overwhelm when you’re believing yourself to be overwhelmed, focusing on the overwhelm, struggling against the overwhelm, and trying to clamber out of the overwhelm. In fact, you’ll subconsciously be doing whatever you can to increase that feeling of overwhelm because your brain will actively be looking for every shred of evidence that you are, indeed, overwhelmed.

Remember that your primitive brain is focused on survival above all else. And it knows that with your current thoughts, you are surviving very well indeed. You may not be enjoying your life at home, but you are very much alive - and your kids are too. So it continues to focus on conserving energy and staying safe…and that means keeping you doing things the way you’ve always done them.

This allows for no space for questioning the basic fundamentals of your thought patterns - so you never even think to ask yourself what “getting organized” means in the first place! And it blocks you from noticing all the ways you’re already “organized” in your life - it’s simply not possible when your focus is wholly on scrambling to get “there”.

The most helpful thing to remember when you’re stuck in overwhelm is that the brain will always answer any question you ask of it (far beyond the usual fayre of, “Why can’t I do this like the other moms?” and “What’s wrong with me?”). So, first get crystal clear on where exactly you want to end up on your “getting-organized” journey, and then simply ask your brain, “What’s one thing I can do today to get me there?”. 

You’ll be amazed at the answers you come up with!

2. Letting “all-in” be an action rather than a mindset

As moms, it’s easy to fall into the habit of black-and-white thinking because we so often assume we’re always going to have to choose between one thing and another (and because we so rarely - if ever - choose ourselves!).

But we have to remember that it never has to be a choice (between, say, love your kids or love yourself; give your kids everything or give them nothing: be in your head checking and planning or be in your body doing breathwork and meditation; experience no pleasure at all or get so lost in it that you never clean the house again!) and that we get to question everything we’ve been told about how we “should” live our lives. 

So if you’ve decided that you’re “all-in” on stay-at-home motherhood, “all-in” does not need to be an action that consumes your day entirely - it can also be a mindset. You can decide that you’re fully committed to being a “good” mom to your kids by virtue of being you, exactly as you are! And that you don’t need to exhaust yourself by working non-stop with a blinkered conviction that this is the way to prove your devotion. 

Why not widen the lens through which you see yourself in all areas of your life? You can be anything you want to be, and this can change with the day, your mood, the activity, the people you’re with...For example, I had always seen myself as someone who simply cannot be on time or do anything without being rushed because I was so often late by a couple of minutes, but I now realize there are many things I choose to do unhurried and allow plenty of time for (like going for walks and “joyspotting” (Ingrid Fetell Lee) with my youngest). When you widen that lens, you quickly start to see that you don’t have to be one particular way in any area of your life - you can be any way you choose. 

And the same goes for your emotions too - you can choose right now to start widening your emotional repertoire - to open yourself up to feeling all the emotions that come up for you rather than push down or avoid the ones that you label as “bad”. When you resist certain emotions in this way, you also cut yourself off from feeling the emotions you might label as “good” to their fullest extent (like explosive joy or the greatest happiness).

So allow the emotions that come up for you - just stop a moment and breathe into what you’re feeling, rather than dismissing it and quickly moving on to the next thing you think you “have” to do. And if it feels like a lot to you, you can comfort yourself by cradling your cheek in your hand or holding your heart - and be curious about what message the emotion has for you today. 

3. Trying to get your partner to do things your way 

You might think your life would be much better if your partner would just do things the way you wanted him to but this is simply not true.

The way our brains are wired - which is to look for evidence of what we currently believe and to reject any evidence that goes against that - you would not actually feel any differently towards him if your current thoughts about him are not loving. 

This is because it's our thinking that causes our feelings, and never another person's behavior. And if you’re telling yourself “but it does make me happy when he does what I ask him to do”, what’s actually happening is that you’re deciding to think that he truly cares about you and what you want - and it’s this thought that makes you feel good. 

Know that the only reason you want your partner to behave the way you want him to behave is because of how you think it will make you feel. We all do this - we have a manual or rule book for the people in our lives (even the people we will only ever pass by on the street) that they should follow so that we can feel a certain way. We may not even be aware of just how clearly these instructions are laid out in our minds, but one thing’s for sure - our partners certainly have no idea! 

Now you may be thinking it’s only right to have reasonable expectations of others, but who’s to say what counts as reasonable? And what about all the pain and frustration that having these manuals causes for us? We can spend years trying to get our partners to change and thereby setting ourselves up to inevitably feel negative emotions in our relationship. This not only takes all of our power away - telling ourselves that we can only feel happy if another person changes - but also makes us controlling towards the people we love the most.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t ask our partners for anything at all - it just means that we ask without making our happiness dependent on whether they do the thing or not. We take responsibility for how we feel, accept that we can never control anyone else (because everyone - including us - behaves how they want to behave), and ultimately decide what we want for ourselves in our relationship.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed with everything you think you have to do right now, I can help you. Click on the link below to set up a free coaching consultation and we can chat on Zoom (your kids are welcome to the call too!).