Feeling Like You’re Just A Mom

Hi there. Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life podcast. My name is Natalie Bacon, and I’m an advanced certified mindfulness life coach as well as a wife and mom. If you’re here to do the inner work and grow, I can help. Let’s get started.

What’s happening my friend? Welcome to the podcast. I am so happy to be here with you today. I just want to say thank you so much for sharing this podcast with your friends, with your family. I see you, and I hear you. So many of you have been reaching out to me through Instagram in my DMs sending me messages, loving the daily stories that I am providing over there.

If you haven’t followed on Instagram yet, it’s @nataliebaconcoaching. This is a newer account that I started a few months ago where it’s specifically for mindfulness tools. Every single day I get on stories, and I share a new tool. What I’ve heard from you is you love that, and you love the podcast, right? The podcasts, we go deeper once a week. The podcast I’ve had around for years, and this Instagram way of sharing is more bite size. But I think that if you can have both in your ear will really help you be more intentional, have a better mindset, feel your feelings, and do all of this inner work.

So thank you for sharing. Thank you for your messages. I just really appreciate you being in this community. I’m so excited for what’s to come in the next few years. I have big plans. It’s all going to be focused on how to over deliver and how to serve you and how to make everything so much easier for you to consume. Just really make sure that you are getting help solving the challenges that you are having. That is my mission.

With that, let’s dive into today’s episode, which is all about solving the problem of what to do when you feel like you are just a mom. I’ve been coaching a lot of clients in Grow You on this lately. I wanted to do a podcast on it specifically because I think that it can be this subtle, negative identity. It’s almost as if we say oh I’m just a mom, or I feel like I’m just a mom as if it’s a fact and not as if it’s a mindset.

So it is a mindset. This can either be a mindset that you change in a way that’s more empowering and serves you, or it can be a mindset that you want to keep but expand so that you can actually get into other roles that you want to put your energy towards. So the phrase just a mom is used typically to describe the feeling of over attaching or focusing on your role as mom.

So you have many roles in your life. You have the role of partner, spouse, wife, friend, sister, daughter, employee, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, and many more. Maybe you have hobbies. Maybe you are an entrepreneur. In each of those areas, you have specific roles.

When you spend most or all of your time, resources, energy, money in one specific role, it can feel like you are internally out of balance. This is what’s happening when we hear someone say I feel like I’m just a mom, or I’m losing myself in motherhood.

The solution isn’t to automatically kind of diversify your roles, which I will talk about that. That is one of the solutions. But before you do that, it’s important for you to ask yourself how much time, energy, resources, effort, money do you want to put into this role? There is no right answer.

I remember watching the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary, I think it was on Netflix, when she passed away. She had such a profound, amazing life on the Supreme Court and the role that she had for women, and just her life is so interesting to me.

Anyways, she really dedicated most of her time and effort and resources to being a justice on the Supreme Court. That was her primary role. Yes, she was a wife. Yes, she was a mom, but that was her passion. Her husband joked in the documentary that he would have to remind her to take breaks to eat. She had no shame about it and no judgement about it.

I want to point that out here because it’s not just over attaching to your role in your career, but here we’re talking about over attaching to your role as mom. I want you to see that you can do that in any role. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is only a bad thing if you think oh yeah, this is a bad thing. I want to spend more time, energy, effort, money in other roles, but the choice is yours. There are other lawyers, judges, justices who do not have that passion and over attach to a role in that way.

Similarly, the same is true for moms. You see this all around. We see moms who are stay at home moms who like to just be home and mom almost all of the time. There are other stay at home moms who do community service and serve on boards and participate in lots of different things as well as have friendships and all sorts of different ways that they make sure that other roles are fulfilled. Maybe they are into yoga. Whatever it is.

Then there are moms who work outside the home who have a role where they are an employee or a business owner. They also have the mom role. There are really an infinite number of combinations where you can focus your resources on specific roles.

So I want to encourage you to take a step back and not look to other people, whether it’s your spouse or your mom or your mother-in-law or a book you read or the TV, whatever it is. Decide for yourself do you like the amount of resources, time, effort, energy that you are putting into your role as mom?

If you feel like you are just a mom, is that a phrase that you just picked up on because you’re feeling tired, overwhelmed, kind of maybe depleted. That you’ve just spent kind of loosely describing yourself as just a mom without thinking more about it? In that case, do you just want to reframe your mindset to be more empowered?

Or is it, now knowing what I’ve said so far, that yeah, you actually do you want to have some of your resources go to other roles. So decide that for yourself. Give yourself permission to know that there is no one right way to mom. There is no one right way to be in any role.

We see this a lot with dads, and I am generalizing here for sure. But so often we see stay at home moms describe themselves as just a mom. And a dad be really into his career and spend a lot of time energy and resources into his career, and not feel bad about it, not beat himself up about it, not say oh, I’m just a lawyer.

When I was practicing as an attorney, I remember some of the partners in the group that I was a part of would joke about a big case that just came in and say oh my gosh, I guess we’ll be seeing my wife and kids after the holiday, which was three months away. They said it with pride because they loved their work. It’s not that they didn’t love their family, but they really liked spending most of their time, energy, money, effort, resources in the role of attorney.

So give yourself permission to decide on purpose. Instead of just identifying as just a mom, how do you want to allocate your resources towards this role? It might not be that you can change it immediately. But really allow yourself to imagine if anything was possible, how much of your identity would you have as a mom? This is so individual. It’s really important that you go inward and decide for yourself because there is no right answer.

So I want to speak to two solutions here based on whether you want to spend more time, energy, and effort in other roles or whether you want to continue with the same amount of resources but want to change your mindset.

So solution one is you want to spend more time in other roles. If you feel like you’re just a mom and you think yes, I am overweighted in my resources towards my role as a mom, the solution is to put some of your time, energy, resources into your other roles. For example, you might want to put more energy and time into your friendships. So you might reach out to girlfriends and have a regular girl’s night or join a local book club. You do something that gets you into the space of a different role.

This can be really powerful. If you take a step back and say yes, I don’t want to be 100% all of the time in this role as mom. I want to be in other roles. This is something that can work really well if you don’t have mom guilt about it. So make sure that you don’t beat yourself up and think that you should only be in your role is mom. Don’t should on yourself. Just allow yourself to make that decision and know that it’s the best thing for you, which means it’s the best thing for your family.

The second solution is if you decide okay, I’ve taken a step back and thought about do I want to put more time into other roles, and the answer is actually no then the solution for you is to change how you think about your role. Instead of saying oh I’m just a mom, which 100% of the time when I’ve coached someone on this, it has not felt good.

So try on the thought I’m just a mom. Does that feel good to you? Most likely not. It’s not usually said in a very empowering way. So then the work becomes changing your story, changing your language, changing how you think about yourself, which will change how you feel about yourself, which will change how you show up.

So instead of I’m losing myself in motherhood. I’m just a mom. I don’t contribute to my family enough. I don’t know who I am anymore. Notice these are thoughts and notice that they feel terrible. Notice that there might be an unmet need. Like you’re really exhausted. You feel like you are depleted, and you’re feeling overwhelmed.

If you notice what your needs are and you bring attention to them, you might find that you don’t want time in other roles. You simply want 20 minutes every morning or every night to yourself to journal or something like that. Something that resets and reenergizes you. The mindset part of it will be so incredible for you.

So here are some thoughts that you can try on and see if they feel better for you. Motherhood is helping me find myself. This opportunity is so unique and special. I am chosen by my kids to be their mom. I am the exact mom for them. Half mess and half amazing, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. I am of service to my family even when it goes unnoticed. This is my passion. This is where I want to be. It is my job to feel good if I want to feel good. I’m finding the most true and authentic version of myself as a mom.

This one is so powerful because so often we think oh I’ve lost myself in motherhood as if that’s even a thing. That’s just a sort of sloppy thought. There’s no such thing as losing yourself. There is becoming. So why not decide that you are becoming your most true and authentic self?

Another thought that might serve you. Motherhood is bigger than me in the best way. I am honored to serve my family as mom. I get to be selfless when it comes to my home and family, and that is rewarding and fulfilling. These empowering thoughts will serve you because they are supportive and validating. No one else is going to give them to you. You have to give them to yourself.

This is why if you’re in Grow You, take the mindful journaling course in there in the bonus vault and practice this. I do this myself. I journal every morning and I write down who I want to be and how I want to think about my day, and that fuels me. So when a challenge arises or something doesn’t go right, I know that I’m showing up as my best self. I know that I’m accepting myself, and I’m accepting all of the circumstances that come my way. It’s not perfect, but I show up in a way that I’m proud of.

So let’s recap here because I have a few more things to add when it comes to your identity, but I want to make sure that you kind of see the options when you’re feeling like you’re just a mom. So I’m just a mom is a thought. It’s typically a thought that doesn’t feel good. Where it’s coming from is this idea that you’re over attached in your role as a mom. That may or may not be true depending on your desires for the life that you want to live.

Do you want to have many different roles? The answer may be not right now before my kids are in preschool. The answer may be yes, I do want to focus on more roles. Or the answer may be no I don’t until my kids are all out of the home. You get to decide for you how much time, energy, effort you want to spend in your role as mom, and there is no right or wrong answer. We can look to other people doing it in different ways to show us positive examples of how this is possible.

So again, Ruth Bader Ginsburg obsessing about the law and having to be reminded to take breaks to eat is such a good example that’s relatable, I think, to many women who feel like they can relate to that in motherhood. Or if you look to stereotypically men in their careers, again not all men and not all moms feel like this, but just using this as an example where some men over attach to their careers, and they love it.

The worst part for the I’m just a mom or losing myself in motherhood is not that it’s a fact that’s happening. It’s the judgment. Which we typically don’t see when someone over attaches to their career. Those lawyers who I used to work with weren’t beating themselves up because they would spend 12 hour days in the office. They were joking about how they would see their family in a few months, and they loved their families. This is just how they wanted to allocate their resources.

Again, there’s no right or wrong. So make sure that you are not judging yourself. Make sure that you’re not thinking that you’re doing it wrong, and that there is some right way to balance all of your roles as if balance is outside of you. The only thing that you want to make sure of is that you are internally balanced. That you have decided intentionally and purposefully this is the amount of time that I want to spend in this role. Again, there is no right or wrong answer.

For me, personally, I can say that I love spending so much of my time in this role. I have always wanted to be a mom. I feel really good about my identity in this role. I still have other roles. I still have my business. I still am a coach, and I love those other roles as well. But knowing that I get to decide how much time, energy, and resources I spend in each of the roles, and that decision is up to me has been so incredibly freeing because I’m not trying to meet some external standard of what the right way to be a mom is or the right way to balance your roles is.

The last piece of this that I want to talk with you about is your identity. What was your identity going into motherhood? Where did you get that identity? Did you choose it? Or did you have family members, peers, education systems, society choose it for you? I think becoming a mom is such a perfect opportunity for you to get to reinvent yourself into the identity that you want to have. You get to decide it.

So your identity isn’t out there. You don’t ever find yourself. You have to put time and energy into deciding who you want to be. This doesn’t have to be a decision that is forever. You might try one way of being you in your role as a mom, and you might decide now I want to have more roles and diversify my relationships. That might be in five years. You can always redecide.

But you do have to do it intentionally or else it will happen to you, and you’ll, again, wake up and realize oh my gosh, I feel like just a mom. You’ll say something like that, and it’s coming from not focusing on how you want to think about your roles more deliberately. So this is why doing the inner work and working on your mindset is so important because it affects everything in your life.

So when you decide on purpose who you want to be then you can become her, but you have to decide first. So, if you feel right now like you are drowning, overwhelmed, stressed, anxious. If you feel like it’s a really challenging season, it’s not because of your circumstances. It’s because of how you are relating to those circumstances.

Even if it is a season that you want to continue to think about as challenging, which is 100% legitimate, you can do so in a much more empowered way. You can go from feeling like your life is happening to you to really feeling like you are so strong and handling some things that are very challenging, but you got this. You are 100% made for this.

So remind yourself that you’re not finding yourself. You are creating yourself. You are redesigning yourself. Don’t say that you lost yourself and motherhood. Say that motherhood gave you the opportunity to redefine yourself intentionally on purpose.

My hope is that this episode prompted you to think about your role as mom in some different ways. I know that for each of you it will lead to different results. That is because this work is so individualized. For me, personally, doing the identity work with respect to being a mom has been so powerful. I’ve been able to sort of silence the inner critic and the comparison trap where I think I should be the mom who goes out with friends more. Or I should be the mom who wants to have all of these other roles.

Instead, I’m deciding for me. I know that right now I love my role as wife and mom. Those are my primary roles. I love my business. I love coaching. That’s another roll that is so important to me. Outside of that it takes very little for me to put resources into. Maybe once a month girl’s night or play date or something like that, that does it for me. I don’t have the urge to travel a ton. Again, this isn’t the right way to do it. This is just me tuning into what’s important to me.

It’s probably because growing up I had a different childhood than I wanted. So navigating that created so much resilience and also purpose. I always wanted to just have a safe, calm, fun, playful family life. I have that now. I’m 100% loving it. So for you, how do you want to spend your time as mom?

From there, from that decision, decide how you want to think about it. Tell your story in the most positive, validating way. Not that it’s right and that everyone else should do that too, but that it is right for you. That will lead you to the most amazing experience of life. That is my hope for you my friend. Take care. I will talk with you next week. Bye, bye.

If you loved this podcast I invite you to check out Grow You my mindfulness community for moms where we do the inner work together. Head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more.