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If you’ve every felt the heavy weight of the word “should” echoing in your head as a mother, you’ll understand how the pressure to be the perfect parent, to always do the “right” thing for your children can be overwhelming.
In this episode, I chat to Miri Friedman about how we can navigate these all-too-common feelings of “not enoughness” in motherhood. You will hear Miri’s personal journey of learning to let go of external expectations and embracing her own worthiness as a mother.
We also talk about:
- The art of self-care and its crucial role in a balanced life.
- How learning to love ourselves and prioritizing our self-care can enhance our sense of being worthy of love.
- How compartmentalising self-care into smaller moments throughout our daily routine can help us prioritise our needs, all while being the wonderful mothers, wives, and individuals we are.
Miri is the founder of Women’s Happiness Project, a community of strong, smart, loving and kind women on a journey to up level themselves and the world. Creator of the Elemental Self-Care System™ for stressed-out women who want to feel better in their body and life. And your guide to a life that feels satisfying to YOU.
Find Miri online at: http://womenshappinessproject.com/
A gift to help you deal with all your “shoulds”: http://womenshappinessproject.com/free
Claire Yee: 0:35
Miri, welcome to our podcast. It's such a joy and delight to have you here to be having another beautiful conversation with you. I'm really excited to explore our topic today.
Miri Friedmand: 0:47
Thanks, claire. It's so good to be with you again here. Thanks for inviting me.
Claire Yee: 0:52
Such a pleasure. It's really awesome. So we're talking today about this feeling that we often get as mothers, that all this worry or this anxiety and it's often like this underlying anxiety of are we doing enough for our children, are we doing enough for ourselves This underlying kind of belief of not enoughness, which is so common And it's such a it can play out in so many areas. And so, if we're feeling, as mothers, like, are we doing enough for our kids? And obviously there's all the things on the internet, social media, about all these things that we should be doing to raise healthy, vibrant kids, from nutrition, from activities, from homework to just there's so many areas now there's so much information and it's like how do we diffuse that down into just having something that's workable and doable and to fit into like a 12 hour day, because they also need to have enough sleep? So, yeah, i'd love to hear about your journey with BASH or anything that you'd love to share with our audience.
Miri Friedmand: 2:14
Yeah, that is such a big topic, right, because I definitely had a lot of those feelings and emotions when I, even when I was pregnant with my first baby. It just became bigger when I when the baby was actually out and I was a mom. But even just being pregnant, am I eating enough of the right foods? Am I doing enough of the right type of yoga? Am I doing all the things that you should taking the vitamins Right, am I just, am I doing enough of the right things? And that grew bigger for me when I became a mom And then seeing all the other moms around me doing things that I wasn't doing, and feeling like, oh, i should take them there and I should be doing this with them, and feeling tired And, yeah, they also should get enough sleep, and then I couldn't get them to sleep and I should be able to get them to sleep and I should be able to feed them and all that. Yeah, i think we all struggle with that And, at the end of the day, what I've learned from my journey is that you have to teach yourself how to feel that you are doing enough for them and that you're doing enough for yourself and that you're doing enough around the house and that you are a good enough mom for your children, and because it's exactly like you said, there's all that information that is coming to us. We should do this and we should do that And that's the way to raise healthy children. And this is the way and have a good example from my personal experience. I'm coming from Israel and I grew up bilingual, speaking a couple of different languages, and I got a lot of shoulds, a lot of backlash from where I come from. Why aren't you teaching your kids? You know how important it is for their brain, you know you should raise them that way. And I'm sure everybody has their own shoulds. Everybody has their own feelings of, feelings of they will be better off if I could just do that thing for themselves, or why can't I do that for themselves? And I had to really stay back away from feeling like I should be doing that And because that took me away from feeling like I'm a good enough mom and that took me away from spending good quality time with my babies, because if you're not feeling good enough, that you're not willing to open your heart and accept that they love you just as you are, that was a big, big, big one for me to allow myself to put the shoes aside for a moment so that I could accept that they love me just as I am and that in their eyes and in my partner's eyes and in my parents' eyes and in my in-laws' eyes, i am a good mom and my friends see me as a good mom. So when I felt like I should be doing all that, all of those things, so that I can finally feel like I'm a good enough mom for them, if I could just put that to the side for a moment and I could accept from my close circle that they see me as a good mom, maybe I should take that compliment, maybe I should put that in my heart and start feeling that way about myself. And so I started training myself, teaching myself, being in the experience of feeling like I am doing enough of what I should be doing and just little moments of feeling that way. That then can grow into bigger moments in your day and then maybe like a whole hour of like, yes, i'm feeling like I'm nailing this motherhood thing.
Claire Yee: 6:49
So much wisdom in what you've just shared, and I think that should is the key word, isn't it? Anytime we're thinking something, and it includes the word I should be, it's a red flag of okay, well, whose advice is that? Is it something that I actually want to take on because we can so easily, especially when we're tired and we've got you know, we're already got a lot of demands being put in a lot of different areas, as what happens anyway, particularly with young children who might not be sleeping through the night yet, we can be more susceptible to those shoulds from so many places. and to have that awareness, with the thoughts that are going through our mind, of anytime we hear that, oh, i should be, because, if there's, you know and to look at why we're thinking that we should be doing something, is it that sort of pressure from somebody else and we'd only really just be doing it to feel like we have to prove ourselves as a good mother, or is it? can I actually see in my child that this is something that's out of balance? and then I'm exploring options, you know, and trying to work out the solution for whatever, whatever's coming up with our own individual children. So, yeah, i love that you are talking about that word should because it's just such a key word that we'll often say to ourselves and it's a heavy word.
Miri Friedmand: 8:33
Even making the decision of staying at home with my babies. And that also brought a lot of shoulds right. I should be working, I should be progressing in my career, which I love. That wasn't an external should, that was from my own self. I should be working in the career that I spent so many years to build and I love it, And I should be bringing money and helping the family. And then, you know, staying at home. I never seen an example of a stay at home. I mean Israel, it's not. It wasn't common in where I come from. My mom worked, all my friend moms worked really hard. My friends back home they have a baby, they stay home for a couple of months, six months tops, and they go back to work. So I had a lot of that expectation. And then what I saw around me is like, okay, if I stay at home, then I should really enjoy cleaning my house and making it a haven and making it beautiful and such a, you know, a comfortable place for me and my family and I should cook all the meals and I should make all the baby food and I should enjoy the laundry, Because I have friends who enjoy it. Right, It's all good. I struggle really, and I struggled with that big should for many, many years and I would find myself apologizing to Ben all the time He would come home from a full day work. He worked really hard and I would apologize to him that oh, I'm so sorry I didn't have time to clean the house today. And he didn't mind, He never said anything to me, He didn't care. But I put that on myself because that's what I saw around me. That's what I thought a stay at home mom should be like.
Claire Yee: 10:46
Yeah, that's such a myth of motherhood that should love being with our children 24 seven. we should be doing All of the everything keeping it and you know, things like all the highly curated photos on Instagram or social media. Don't help things because it's not actually. You know if you look behind the camera.
Miri Friedmand: 11:10
It's a complete shamble.
Claire Yee: 11:13
I mean I know that you know, some moms do actually have it all together but, i, certainly yeah, and it was like just spending that time with my children throughout the day was a huge thing And, yeah, sometimes the dishes were still sitting on the bench at the end of the day and it's like it's comes down to sometimes priorities as well, with what we can actually get through realistically ourselves, and also love earlier the way you shared that. All of these shoulds and all of these expectations that come externally, if we have got those sitting in our mind and stressing out our central nervous system, it's so important that we're able to and you know get into this. Allow ourselves some time throughout the day to calm ourselves down and to rebalance and center ourselves, because our children is the we're growing up. They borrow our central nervous system until theirs has fully developed themselves. So if we like strung out and stressed, then our kids are going to also be more, you know, aggravated and I don't mean that in like a really you know aggro mad thing, but they'll be more stressed as well. So it's just and I realize, as I'm saying, that could be another should, and it is sometimes, you know, i should be doing all of these self care things on top of all of this other stuff and it becomes just one big stress. So I think the biggest question here is how do we prioritize this important and what we do put our focus and attention on to really promote our own mental, physical and emotional wellness, and then, of course, our children are a part of that picture as well.
Miri Friedmand: 13:17
Yeah, first, i just want to say that I've never heard it articulated that way. I love how you said that they borrow our you know central nervous system. They borrow the way that we feel because we emanate it right. I love how you said that that's yeah, boom, totally correct. They're boring from us. No wonder we're so tired, right.
Claire Yee: 13:42
Yeah, and that's the thing. The more we're stressed out and then our kids are not sleeping well because they're they're feeling stress and you know they can't fully relax either, and then it's harder to do all these things.
Miri Friedmand: 13:58
Yeah, and then also, like with the should, come all the guilt right and self blame. So if I decided so, the first step for me was to prioritize, like you said, spending time. So I'm going to spend time with them rather than worrying about the dirty dishes. But then I would feel so guilty about not wanting to spend my entire day playing the same game and reading the same damn book again and again and again. So, okay, so I'm prioritizing living in a messy house because I think it's more important for me to spend time with my child. And here I am with my child, resenting him a little bit, because I just want to spend some time by myself, or I just want to do some. I just want to lie on the couch for a moment. So there's all these layers of like okay, you prioritize one thing, and then there's another should, and then there's a should, and then the self care. Okay, so I prioritized not leaving the house today because I don't want to spend time with my kid. And then I spend time with my kid, and then I'm prioritizing my self care for an hour while I'm putting him in front of a show that he likes, for example, and then I find myself in that hour, not doing my yoga and not sitting for meditation, because I just didn't feel like it, because I don't work like that. I don't work. Oh, on the clock, it's yoga time. It's really hard for me to do that. I'm more intuitive and I'm more my practice comes with flow and routines are harder for me. So that's another should that. Okay, i should do yoga now, because now he's asleep, now he's having enough. So that's another big should that I had to overcome. So the way that I found that works for myself and that's how I teach actually the women who I work with is to only gift yourself one moment at a time. It doesn't have to be a whole hour full practice, which includes yoga and meditation and journaling and sitting lovely with your crystals and smudging the house, all the things, all the things. It doesn't have to be all the things every single day. And that was a big realization for me that I could just break things down And I decided that for me, what was most important, what will give me the best benefit, would be to actually give myself that sense of feeling in my heart That I am doing enough, that I am being a good enough mother, i'm a good enough wife. I'm a good enough person, even if I don't do this and I don't do that. And so I have decided that the reason why I do all the self care practices was because that's what I want to feel like. I want to feel like I'm loved and I'm deserving of all this love that I'm receiving for my babies, for my partner, for my friends and my family. I wanted to feel like I deserve it, even though I felt like I wasn't doing enough. And so when I realized that that was that was the thing for me. That was the reason why I was practicing yoga, because it helped me feel like that. That was the reason why I said for meditation and did all my whatever self care practices. So then I decided to spend time on that. So then it didn't matter what I do. Was it the journaling? Was it just walking outside taking a fresh? just walking on the, you know, in my garden, barefoot? It doesn't matter what it was, it could just be having a shower in the middle of the day. You know, that was a big self care practice for me when having a baby. It was about no matter what I choose to do and no matter how long it takes. It could be one breath, it could be five minutes, it could be a whole hour. It was getting into that feeling.
Claire Yee: 18:33
That's so beautiful. So it's really switching into priority, prioritizing the feeling and how we're being over all the doing, and I love that, because then everything that we do ends up flowing from that space of self worth and self acceptance and enoughness.
Miri Friedmand: 19:00
Yeah, and because we know for certain right, this is like not some woo-woo stuff, this is proven modern psychology. We know for sure that when you feel good, when you feel whatever feeling on that spectrum of good that is for you better you know. When you feel better, happier, calmer, like you do deserve the love that you receive, then you will naturally for sure you will do better, you will treat those around you better, you will make better choices. When you feel crappy, you want to eat crappy food. It's just how it is. So when you know that you can stop blaming yourself for making those decisions and just knowing that if you can just help yourself feel better for one moment, everything else will fall into place, you will naturally make a better decision, a better choice, one tiny step at a time.
Claire Yee: 20:02
And it's so good because then it comes from a place of not that stress, precious based I should be doing all the things, Otherwise I'm not good enough. It comes from that space of I know I'm good enough, I'm a good enough mother as I am. Just by being here as a mother I am enough. And then from that space of our own worthiness and we can access more of our own intuition, because our nervous system isn't so shut down that we can't access it and our brain is more open to being able to hear our intuitive voice, Then our decisions and the things that we prioritize, the doing that we prioritize because it's not like we don't do anything, It's like the things that we do do come from. I want to do this. I'm going to try doing this. It's more that internal out rather than that external in. Should, should, should, should. Such a beautiful shift.
Miri Friedmand: 20:59
It totally shifted my family life and how I operate and how I had so much guilt, so much mom guilt, yoga guilt. I should know this by now. I was a health professional. I should be making better choices by now. I had a lot of guilt and it can be hard to find a place where, okay, i'm just going to decide that I feel like I'm a good enough mom. How do you do that? I love the practice of finding proof. Your brain literally works for you. You decide what you want to believe, you decide what you want to think about and just set your brain free. Let him bring you proof. I looked at my baby and I could see that he loves me. I could see that he just wants to be with me. There is no doubt there. I looked at my husband and I can hear how much he loves me. I can see from how he treats me how much he loves me. I can go to him and cry and say I feel like I haven't been a good enough mom today and I can let him tell me and really listen when he says you are a good mom, you're the best mom. Really, take that in, find proof, make a list, hang it on the fridge. I feel like I'm a good mom today because I got myself out of bed, i got dressed, i made a lunchbox, i got everything ready, i got in the car and we drive to the zoo and we had a fabulous day and then we got back. That is a good enough proof for me. You got to find for yourself what. What does that mean? If you feel like you're not being a good enough mum, then what does that? what does it actually look like? What does a good mum do? And then find the proof of all the things that you already do. You give them your baby loving cuddles, you give them a wonderful, warm family, and you know, i bet you, that their room is full of toys and yummy, nourishing food. And you already, just by being a mum, you're already doing so much. So it's just about deciding that that is good enough. That is good enough for today, and then tomorrow is another day and there's another chance.
Claire Yee: 23:35
And it just that's so beautiful finding that proof, because it's already there and it's just looking through that lens of where can I find proof about already being and doing enough? It's looking through that lens rather than subconsciously. if we're looking through, if we're thinking from that lens of I'm not doing enough there's all this shoulds I'm not measuring up all these things Then we find proof of that. So it's just switching and choosing and just finding it in the most simple things. Like you said, all those things that we're already doing. and you know, our children are such good feedback for us because we just need to look into their eyes and look at the way that they lovingly, especially when they're young, i get the rolling eyes. now I'm just like, oh my gosh, that's okay. But you know, looking at that, just you know, now I appreciate the fact that they are so independent and they have that strong sense of staff and that confidence and that is enough of that reinforcement that I'm doing a good enough job still. But you know, when they're little they just give such beautiful hugs and beautiful smiles and that joy that's in their eyes and you know all those things.
Miri Friedmand: 24:59
They stay all the time. Yes, so just take it in, because when you have that, it's like a wall, it's literally like you're covering yourself with like a black sheet and it doesn't actually come in. When they tell you I love you, you're the best mom ever. If you have all the guilt and you think to yourself, oh, isn't it cute, he thinks that. But you know, i didn't do this and I didn't do that and I didn't cook lunch. We had to eat a luncheon packet today, you know. So, yeah, exactly that shift the brain to find the proof of what is already good.
Claire Yee: 25:44
Yeah, and letting it in like allowing ourselves to just absorb the pureness of their love that they have for us. It's just, it's so beautiful. So, mary, where can people find you online? Tell us about your beautiful program that you've got, and what would you like to share with our audience with regards to how they can come into your world and keep absorbing?
Miri Friedmand: 26:08
Well, first of all, i actually I love this topic of shoulds and coulds and just putting it to the side for a moment so that you can accept the love that they have for you. So I wrote a guide about how to do that and offering it for free, and you can get it on my website, womenshappinessprojectcom slash free. And it's just guiding you through how to take that moment And, even though, yes, it's all true and all the shoulds and all the coulds are still true for you I'm not saying that they're not But how to put it to the side for a moment so that you can accept the love that is already there for you and you can choose to look to see it through that lens. Right, so you can get that on womenshappinessprojectcom slash free. And if you know, for all the stressed out moms out there, if you're feeling frustrated, if you're feeling like you're not doing enough, you really want to give to yourself a little bit more so that you can spend that quality time with your kids and feel like you're giving them what they need, then you're so welcome to join my community, women's Happiness Project On Facebook. And for those who are ready to really prioritize themselves, because that's what we're talking about. Right, you have to put a clear decision where this is what's important to me and prioritize the time for your own self-care, because, as moms, i mean, oh my gosh, your starting point is under the zero. We're starting being malnourished, right, We need to replenish our own center and our own nervous system, and so that's what my new program is all about. The elemental self-care system is how to take small moments, tiny moments in the day, to not overwhelm yourself with all the shoots, with everything that you should be eating or all the things that you should be doing, but how to? really, if you only had a moment, if you only could spare a moment when the baby is napping or at night before you go to bed, then I teach you exactly what you need for your body type, for your time, for your time of the month according to the season, and you know what you need to give to yourself so that you can feel better, uplifted, more peaceful, more calm. And if you want to join the elemental self-care system, then I invite you to book a free call with me And if it's the right fit, then I'll tell you how I can work with you So good.
Claire Yee: 29:20
All of those links where in the show notes, where people are watching this video or listening to the podcast, and I have dipped into Miri's program and it's just so beautiful and so nourishing And there's just just by turning on the videos and starting to do some of the practices, i could feel my central nervous system just drop into this beautiful sense of calm and balance. It's yeah, it's really a beautiful creation, miri. So thank you for sharing your gifts in the world with us in such a beautiful way. Thank you so much as well for being here today. I loved our conversation.
Miri Friedmand: 30:02
Thank you so much, Claire. It's always a joy. I love talking with you.
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