Why Doing All The Things As A Stay-At-Home Mom Will Never get You Where You Want To Be

When you think back to the first conversation you had with your partner about becoming a stay-at-home mom, can you remember exactly how you felt as you pictured your future? 

I remember how excited I was before our first daughter was born, anticipating the joy and ease I’d feel being home with my baby full-time.

But in reality, I found myself totally overwhelmed as I struggled with everything I felt I should be doing whilst my pilot husband was gone several days a week.

I fully believed that the path out of the overwhelm was to keep doing - to work under constant pressure to get everything on my to-do list done by the end of each day. And that only when it was all complete could I experience the joy of being with my daughter and attempt to relax into the ease I so desperately wanted to feel.

It took another seven years and two more babies for me to realize that ploughing through my to-do list was never going to give me the feeling I was longing for - if it could, I would most certainly have been feeling it already!

So why do we keep trying to do all the things?

The reason why we do anything is because of how we think it will make us feel. So we push on relentlessly, often taking no time at all to rest (except maybe at the very end of the day, late at night when sleep is the kind of rest we actually need), striving to get to where we think we need to be to feel the feeling we want to feel.

But what is that feeling? More often than not it’s ‘safe’, ‘secure’, ‘in control’, or some version of that. And what changed everything for me was finally realizing that there was no amount of action I needed to take in order to have permission to believe a thought about myself and feel the way I wanted to feel.

Of course that feeling of safety was never was going to come from taking action - it’s always, always our thoughts that produce our feelings. 

So if you’re thinking that you simply can’t get control of your day or see a way out of struggling to get everything done, then that’s exactly what you’ll continue to get because your feeling about that thought then fuels your actions, and your actions then create your results.

Similarly, if you think your partner isn’t pulling his weight and that the responsibility for both your kids’ needs and your home lies squarely on your shoulders, then that’s all you’re ever going to create for yourself.

In fact, you’ll never be free from this cycle until you drop the underlying belief that the only way you can begin to feel better about your situation is if your partner behaves in a certain way - dictated entirely by you - and sticks to the manual that you’ve created for him (whether you’ve informed him about it or not!). Because when he inevitably does not do what you expect of him, you only end up feeling more resentful and disconnected from him than you did in the first place. 

Ultimately, choosing to believe the best, rather than the worst, of your partner is one of the best things you can do to move towards getting back to a feeling of connection, alongside deciding how you want to feel in the relationship (irrespective of what he does or does not do). 

How to get to where you want to be

Just like constantly grasping at the illusion of control (over a situation, or other people) can only lead to sabotaging what we really want, looking to the past to dictate what we’re able to do in the present can also find us self-sabotaging our goals to make big (or small!) changes in our lives.

For example, if you decide you want to reduce the number of hours spent cooking by creating a meal-planning system, basing your belief in your ability to do this on how your attempts have played out in the past will only lead to you thinking you can’t reach that goal. Maybe you then procrastinate every time you sit down to start planning, or perhaps you never even sit down to get started in the first place! 

This can then lead us to think we’re not capable of doing anything different, and that we’ll never figure out how to make the changes we want to see in our lives. 

But imagine how it would feel if you stopped focusing on the shame of past failures, and all the areas of your life where you’re currently doing things “wrong”? After all, this only ever prevents you from giving yourself permission to do what it is you want to do! And imagine what it would feel like to go through an entire day without feeling that shame, or perhaps just to notice when it comes up rather than using it against yourself?

What if you practiced seeing everything that you are, everything that you’re doing brilliantly, and took the time to really think about what it is you do want, rather than focusing on everything you don’t? How do you want to live your life day-to-day? How you want to feel. What is your relationship with your kids like? With your partner? How do you look? What about your house? What is your money situation? What are your dreams for this year? And the next?

When you do this, you’re beginning to change your story, and when you dare to really dream big and create seemingly impossible goals for yourself, you set yourself on the path to making those dreams your reality.

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