Being Lost is Not Your Identity as a Stay-at-Home Mom

Do you feel that you don’t know who you are anymore - that you’re so consumed by motherhood that you no longer have any understanding of the little things you might enjoy, let alone the sort of life you might want to create for yourself at home?

Do you find that you can easily answer questions about your kids’ favorite food, or color, or activity, or song, but draw a complete blank when it comes to your own preferences on anything (in fact, you wonder if you even have any anymore)?

Did you assume you’d be more efficient at cleaning and cooking and laundry and bedtime by now, but instead find yourself lacking the drive and motivation to get things done as you constantly question your purpose?

And when you remember to fill your own cup, it never feels like something just for you - but rather just another task dutifully checked off your list so you can turn right around and get back to serving other people.

I was in this place for seven long years until I realized that I desperately needed to find my way home - and quickly - because I was missing out on the joy of being me and loving who I am today.

Where to start?

If you’re feeling lost right now, please know that you’ve already set yourself on your journey back to you, just by noticing that you feel this way. You’re now on a path to wholeheartedly believing that you being YOU is beautiful and compelling, not a problem for you and definitely not a problem for other people.

This journey is about first letting go of your commitment to being “happy, pretty, busy” to keep other people content and then giving your true essence permission to express itself.

I have many examples in my life of where I believed that being me as I truly am led only to rejection - and also many examples of where being “good”, and behaving the way I thought other people wanted me to behave, led to acceptance.

So I then made myself “wrong”, and let my inner critic take over completely - to the point where what I was hearing all day long was a whole myriad of ways I’m simply not good enough as a mom. And I came to believe that these thoughts were facts about me, rather than thoughts I was believing at the time.

And it’s THIS that makes you feel lost because you’re never in your power when you’re listening to your inner critic and shutting out the wisdom of your true essence. Only when you’re in your power can you feel the opposite of lost - and that is being in your joy and feeling profoundly right in who you are.

So rather than letting our days run us as we stand back and witness all the ways that we’re chaotic, or lost in our phones, or not understood by our partners, waiting for some change in circumstance to one day enable us to find ourselves again, we can start enjoying ourselves and our lives at home with our kids right now.

What to do

1. Decide for yourself right now that you are not lost! This is important because we can start to see being lost as our identity - we think it’s just who we are and we believe it to be a fact about us that we’re powerless to change. Remind yourself that being lost is not your identity, it is an ENERGY you’re in right now, it’s temporary, and you always have agency and choice in your life to change this any time you want. 

2. This brings awareness of it being a THOUGHT and not a fact that’s currently creating this stress in your life. And it also brings the realization that you’ll never be able to settle or feel at ease or be at peace with this thought because you’re firmly in the belief that there’s something wrong with you that you have to fix some day.

   And being aware of this belief also reveals the behavior that this unease is driving. The more unease you feel within yourself, the more you want to find relief with easy hits of dopamine, like scrolling your phone late into the night. Your inner critic then comes out shouting and beating you up for not doing the things you want to get done or for not getting the sleep you know you need, which in turn makes you feel even more unease - even more lost - and leaves you wanting to reach for your phone yet again.

3. So the key next steps are:

   a. Getting clear on what you WANT your days at home with your kids to look and feel like (and believing that you’re capable of creating this for yourself and being willing to take the steps to do that).

   b. Knowing ONE thing that feels good to you in your body that you love to do for YOU - something that truly lights you up. This will naturally tune out the inner critic in your head by bringing you into your body in the present moment. (If you don’t immediately know what that thing would be, think back to what you loved to do as a child and try that - for me it’s dancing). And these two things - the DESIRE you have to create the life you envision for yourself AND one thing that feels good to you in your body - work together beautifully to bring you back home to yourself.

4. Next, go through your day in your mind and see where exactly you’re spending your time and energy. And then take a look at whether this aligns with your current values (these will change many times over during our lifetime). If connection is one of your values, for example, are you spending time one-on-one with your partner or kids without distraction?

5. Pick one thing you’re going to get done today and be in the energy of having that thing done now. This will give you the motivation to decide on:

   a) what time you will do it

   b) how long you will allow it to take

   c) how you will reward yourself with a dopamine hit (through doing that thing you know will light you up in your body) when it’s done. 

   So for me, for example, I do 30 minutes of uninterrupted cleaning followed by 5 minutes of dancing to a song I love afterwards. 

And it’s always a good idea to start small - for example doing ten minutes of laundry followed by 5 minutes of singing - to just play and see what works for you, without fearing that it’s not worth it if the whole task isn’t getting done at one time. Because think of what you’re building here - it’s not about the tasks themselves, it’s about who you’re becoming through this process. The compound effect is always at play here: Just like doing two minutes of leg lifts each day is going to build muscle over time, this training for your brain establishes a pattern of you sticking to your word and successfully getting things done as you plan them.

Coming home to you

And then suddenly you’ll realize that you’re seeing yourself as fully capable because you know that you can get anything done in the time you plan for it, in complete alignment with your values, whilst giving yourself permission to experience one thing that feels profoundly right to you in your body, every single day.

And you then start to see that you do know who you are, you know what you love, and where your priorities lie, and how to listen to your body in terms of what feels good, and you’re giving yourself permission to feel pleasure, and to be truly anchored in who you are. And with that, you no longer feel lost but empowered.

If you’d like help with this, click on the link below to sign up for my 8-week, 1:1 coaching program.