This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 054 / Parenting (How to Not Raise a Serial Killer) with Liz Bayardelle

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

This episode is for the sleep deprived, yet highly motivated Mamas, who are attempting to get more done in their 24 hour days then is probably advisable. Liz Bayardelle, author of “Clean Your Plate!”, mom of 3, PhD (Dr. Mommy according to her toddler) and executive, shares the importance of using tools like intrinsic motivation to teach our kids to be productive and confident grownups, as opposed to just well behaved kids. We are showing our children (both our daughters and our sons) what it means to be a woman. We are their first example. I see this as an opportunity to show our children how we live imperfectly… how to love, fail, forgive, live through pain and challenges, set boundaries, let things get messy, trust your instincts, and feel loved, worthy and valuable during and even because of our imperfections. This is Woman’s Work. To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com

If you're still wondering what to get for your mom for Mother's Day, or perhaps what to ask for as a gift, how about the opportunity to build your confidence together? Through May 9th, you can buy one This Is Confidence course and get the second for free, whether you choose the self-paced or facilitated option. Not only will you take your confidence to the next level, but you can do it with your mom or your daughter or a best friend, aunt, niece, or even a fellow dog mom. Because building confidence is life-defining work, but everything is always more fun when you do it with someone you love. Register at NicoleKalil.com under online courses by the end of the day, May 9th, to get your two-for-one deal. For this Mother's Day, let's build confidence together.

I respect very much the choice to not have children. I don't see it as selfish or as a decision you may regret one day. It is just as viable and commendable of a choice than the one to have children. So if you've made that choice, I celebrate you. And I want to throw you all the showers too. But I want to also be upfront that this episode is not for you. This episode is for the sleep deprived yet highly motivated mamas who are attempting to get more done in their 24 hour days than is probably advisable. This is for what my guest Liz Bayardell calls the overworked, underslept, marker stained,ained, life-giving, feature-molding, soul-hungry moms

of the world. On today's episode of This Is Woman's Work, Liz, or Dr. Mommy as her toddler started calling her after learning what a PhD was, is going to give us some tips about how to manage the multiple jobs we have, like amateur psychologist, nurse, teacher, bouncer, cuddler, discipliner, not to mention our actual professions. Liz has her PhD in business psychology, is the author of Clean Your Plate, 13 Things Good Parents Say That Ruin Kids' Lives, and Parenting in a Pandemic. She's also the executive and principal for four companies, three of which she co-founded with her very patient her hip or on the ground in various. So if you hear a little bit of kid noise in the background, that's what's going on. And we welcome both of you.

Thank you, Liz, so much for joining us. Thank you for having me or us, I guess. My assistant is present to keep meeting minutes as he often is now that we are all in the house 24 seven. Hey, at least he has a job, right? Meeting minutes are very important. All right. So I wanted to start by talking a little bit about your book, the 13 things that good parents, and I love the fact that you said good parents, because sometimes when we do things, we think that makes us a bad parent. That's not always the case, right? So 13 things good parents say that ruin their kids' lives. Can you share with us a couple of those things?

Yeah, I almost call it things all parents say that ruin the kids lives because these are really just like parenting staples like get straight A's or don't talk back or go give your aunt a hug finish your homework don't hit they're like it's not things that sound particularly life-ruining but they're things that just come out of your mouth but they do have some like unintended consequences. And especially as I was like writing my dissertation, which was on failure because I want a business card that says I have a Ph.D. in failing. But a lot of this had to do with like intrinsic motivation and teaching kids to just like be kind of teaching kids for grown upping as opposed to teaching kids for being a good kid and they're just things that when we say these things that are automatically coming to all parents no parent is ever going to be like oh I told my kid to sit still I guess I'm going to

parenting hell like that's not the way it works but sometimes the words that come out of our mouth aren't the words that kids hear. So we can accidentally convey a message that's totally different than what we actually meant to teach them. So that's kind of why I started writing this, because I kept I learned about these things with my PhD and I thought of all this. And I kept saying them anyway. I kept hearing it come out of my mouth and I'd be like no and you can see like the cartoon me trying to catch the speech bubble on its way out of my head but it just it didn't work out so I wrote the book for fellow good parents that say these things out of their kids best interests but really it just like there's some messages like what I have at the beginning of each chapter is kind of a doctor's warning. You know how in all the pharmaceutical commercials, it's like, oh, intended to treat headaches.

But then it's like side effects may include death, spontaneous vomiting, combustion. You grow a leathery tail. And it's like our parenting statements should have doctor's warnings like that. It's like, we have one thing that we say that's our intended use. And then there are all these side effects. So that's kind of why I wrote it. And the general purpose, because we say one thing, but we're also teaching other messages. So I was nodding along with you. So many of that, those things resonate with me and you're right. There are so many things we just say, I don't know, without thinking or out of habit, or maybe because they were said to us and we have an intention in mind, but we haven't thought through all the other possible things. So the clean your plate one is part of your title of your book

is one that really speaks to me. I heard that a lot, clean your plate. You know, there are starving children all over the world, you know, that type of thing. And, and, and by the way, I am not saying that that statement caused this, but I also, you know, in my twenties had a pretty significant eating disorder and really developed a very weird relationship with food. And, you know, I don't know if that's the direct correlation, but again, unintended consequences. Can you maybe walk us through one of those sort of warning labels that should come along with it? Yeah, I can do two. One is clean your plate is everyone has the exact same story. When I say this, I've talked to multiple people about they're all like, Oh my gosh, this was said to me. And I don't think it's my parents fault,

but like I've had so much trouble with food. And I still, when I'm sitting down at dinner as a grown adult woman, I hear clean your plate. And it's like, I'm not full. I'm completely full. I have no desire to eat more food, but it's there. So I have to eat because something in my brain is like, nope, clean your plate. And I have this too. And I actually noticed it.

This was the first, I don't think it's the most important chapter, but it was the first chapter I thought of when I was kind of tossing the idea of the book around in my head. And I had noticed that when I eat chicken nuggets, which I still do because I'm a grownup, I always eat the yuckiest ones first because I know I'm going to eat all of them. I have to finish my plate. So I saved the yummiest ones for last. And then it's like, okay, I'm not hungry anymore, but I saved the zimmy one. There's no chance in hell I'm not going to eat it because I saved it for last. And it's this philosophy that kind of, it's completely logical. I have a four-year-old. I say clean your plate every darn night of my life.

But it's been installed in a way that my operating system has wired differently as an adult. I have an issue with politeness that I am working on very hard. I have a team of professionals to help me be less polite. But in college, I accidentally got asked to three different social dinners in one night, and I couldn't say no, so I went. And I had three dinners in the space of maybe four hours, maybe. So I had three full dinners in one evening, and it was just like, nope, got to clean my plate, got to be polite, got to respond yes. And it's all these like social niceties we've been taught, but don't

actually translate well. As an adult, I use the example of the target tantrum a lot in the book in a couple different chapters. But the concept that teaching kids one set of skills as a kid, and teaching that it does not translate well to adulthood is bad. So kind of one of the philosophies that's a common thread throughout the entire book is trying to teach kids ways that make them a good kid, but also set them up for life as an adult. So in the target tantrum, your goal, the thing you want most is them to say, I want it. And you say, no. And they say, hark, the mother has spoken the Oracle and they shut up completely and obey your will without asking questions or talking back. That's winning as a kid, but pose that situation

to any parent. And instead of you being the authority figure, who's love and attention and approval, they crave, put your kid in high school on their first date and have the authority figure whose love and attention they crave being their scumbag date. You do not want their answer to a question to be like, park, the authority figure has spoken. I'll do whatever you want. That is the worst possible thing. So you want to teach kids in a way that they learn skills and they repeatedly practice skills that are going to be helpful for their adult and older patterns, as opposed to skills that are going to set them up to be like, why am I eating? I'm not hungry anymore, but it's still going into my mouth.

So that's kind of the common thread for all of these is like, you want to parent your kids in a way that's going to teach them skills that will still be useful when they're adults, as opposed to skills that are going to bite them in the butt when they're adults. Oh my God, that's so good. Okay. So what, what might we say as an alternative? So with the tantrums, you know, I, I do, I very much want my daughter to challenge and ask questions. And then in full disclosure, I have moments where I very much would just want her to listen to what I say. I have a bazillion things to do. Can we just move, you know, so what might be a better alternative, or, you know, like I want my kid to be respectful and appreciative of food and be mindful that

there are people who don't have enough of it. What are some alternatives that might work better? Well, I'll give you the premise in kind of a parable, and then I'll do a couple of specific applications. The premise is that we do not do what we are repeatedly taught. We do what we repeatedly practice. So my parable for this, that is just really more embarrassing for me than anyone else. When I was young and single and living in New York, I was getting my master's degree, which is in criminology. Um, and I was single, so I wanted something to cuddle with. So of course, I did

what everyone does get a puppy. Only I went to the shelter and I did what my misguided pattern is, which is get the most broken, most abused, most dysfunctional dog in the place, who is just absolutely horribly, horribly behaved. We still have him. My dad says that he has larceny in his soul. So I was dog training at this time and I got really good at the word no. It was practice for parenting a toddler. So he would be like jumping up and down. No. And you have to use the real guttural, like demon voice to get them to obey. So I was doing this 24-7.

But so later I trained the dog. I was walking down the street in New York and someone grabbed my shoulder. My master's degree is in criminology. I actually wrote my thesis on the approach behaviors of serial rapists. And at this time I was teaching 10 plus kickboxing classes a week. So when I tell you that there are a few people in life more prepared to be mugged than me, I am not messing around. So a hand grabs my shoulder. And what I've been repeatedly taught is like, you want to make as much noise as possible to draw witnesses. You want to like, here's how the physical moves you do. What do I do when someone

grabs my hand on the street? I turn around, just like I'm training a schnauzer. Now, embarrassing story. It turned out to be the IT guy from work. So that was a really awkward couple of weeks until I got over that little thing. But I didn't do what I had been repeatedly taught. I didn't do my kickboxing moves that I taught my students every week. I didn't do what I had researched for my master's thesis. I did what I was repeatedly practicing, which is scolding a dog. So in the terms of your kids, if you tell them, oh, you need to have balanced meals and eat bright colors and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's what they're repeatedly taught. You need to make them repeatedly practice things. So in the terms of clean your plate, how I would apply that is advice straight from our pediatrician, which is if they're not hungry, tell them that's absolutely fine.

Have them put it in a to-go box. And then when they're hungry, say, oh good, we have your dinner from before and teach them how to reheat things because that's what you'll want them to do as an adult. It's not like, oh, you have to finish this or no dessert because kids are sometimes not hungry and they will not starve themselves. The goal is to circumvent the behavior where they're not dinner hungry, but they're dessert hungry. So you say, oh, good. You're not hungry. Let's put it away. Let's put it in a to-go box. Wait. When they say, mommy, I'm hungry. Like, great. We have your dinner right here. Help them reheat it. Teach them to use the microwave. And then bam, you've taught them skills that translate to the adult world as opposed to creating a kid like me where they

get to college. They're like, wait, I don't have to eat dinner to get ready to dessert. I'm just going to eat this entire package of Oreos and not go to the dining hall. And it's way quicker, which is actually a story of me in college. Well, and I think only a parent would appreciate the difference between dinner hungry and dessert hungry. Such good information, Liz. Thank you. So on to your second book, which is Parent parenting in a pandemic versus parenting during all the other, you know, I guess parenting pre-pandemic. And then my second question to that is, how is it different for moms versus dads? The first thing that is different just for everybody revolves around, and I'm going to say the word mom guilt or the two words mom guilt, but I really do mean parent guilt because my husband has this just as badly as I do.

Before the pandemic, we had to be good parents. And that was our worry. We had to do right by our kids. We had to teach them all these protocols. I talk about the 13 things and clean your plate. And now that it's the pandemic, we have all this pressure that we have to be our kids entire world. We have to be a classroom full of toddlers because they're not allowed to go to school. We have to be a teenage friend network because they can't access their social system. We have to be tutors because they can't go to school. We have to be triage nurses because we never know when to take them to the doctor. So we have all these pressures that are first of all, not healthy at all, because expecting someone to overnight just because

a virus is spreading, get a personal trainer certification, a teacher's license, and all these different things is not possible. And also it's just not something we can really expect of ourselves so I think the biggest problem with parenting in a pandemic versus before is instead of just guilting ourselves to be good parents now we have to do everything for our kids lives and not only is it not feasible it's just creating a lot of stress for families like I've moms who are like, okay, I don't know how to do an entire eight hour school day by myself. And it's like, you have a two year old, you're both going to be miserable if you try to do eight hours of academia.

So if you are talking about a toddler, they should pay attention no more than four or five minutes at a time. And they should have maybe five of those sittings per day. So if you do one book in the morning, that's five minutes. If you go on a nature walk before lunch, then you do some kind of science experiment. You have Camp Crayola with coloring in the evening, and then you read another time before bed. That is an entire school day for an actual homeschooling toddler. You do not need to do the eight hour day. You have to do five, five to 10 minute sessions. And that's a lot more reasonable for parents to accomplish. So a lot of this one is just going through and like

decreasing that parent anxiety. That is, oh my gosh, I have to do all these things for my kid. Whereas you really still do need to be parent first, and then you can help supplement in those other areas, but you don't have to all of a sudden morph into all of these different jobs. Yeah. It's interesting. Early on, I was dealing with this like at a really, really high level. And I remember, you know, having this conversation with my daughter and she said something of like, I want a unicorn. And I remember thinking, I'm not going to feel guilty about that. That's impossible. And just having that moment of, okay, but I'm letting myself feel guilty about a whole host of other things that are completely impossible. So I need to figure out how to let that go as easily as I let go of the fact that I can't give her a unicorn,

regardless of whether or not she wants it. I can't be her teacher, her friend, her mom, a business owner, a spouse. Feeling guilty about something that's physically impossible. It seemed to like such a waste of energy. Now I'm not saying I have this figured out or that I don't experience mom guilt. I for sure do. But it was just kind of that realization, as you said, that it's not possible to do all of that. And I'm going to cut myself a little slack. Yeah. And I think the most important thing that I stress for moms, and this is especially moms, but really all parents is, it is not cutting yourself slack to not expect unreasonable things of you. Like there's so many

moms where it's like the default is I have to be the perfect Pinterest-y soccer mom, stay-at-home mom, orange slices sliced perfectly. But I also have to be the 24-7 career woman. And I have to have a perfectly functional job and bring in all this money for my family. And I have to do both at the same time. And anything less than that, I'm either a bad person or I'm cutting myself slack not to expect it. And that is absolutely ridiculous.

Yeah. You know what? If I can just spell that thing, that is my entire career right there. If I can just spell that one myth for people, like you are not being kind to yourself. You're not doing yourself a favor by not expecting an unrealistic outcome. Yeah. Thank you so much for saying that. That really

hits home with me because I still put it, I think in the category of giving grace, cutting slack as opposed to like, so how, what is it? Is it being realistic? Is it cutting ourselves slack? What are we doing? One thing that I teach, especially in my like productivity classes is you have to start kind of like a puzzle. You have to have your parameters before you can put the puzzle pieces in. Everyone, when they do puzzles, they start with kind of the end pieces. You have a 24 hour day. Every second you're doing one thing, you're not doing another thing. And that's an incredibly stressful thing to tell people because most of us have a push

real hard fallacy going on, which is, no, I can totally break the space time continuum. I just have to work harder. And that sounds really ambitious and happy, but it's actually setting ourselves up for a crazy amount of guilt. Because when we inevitably fail to break the space-time continuum by working harder, all we've done is work ourselves into a hole. And usually that makes us sleep deprived.

So we're less patient. It makes us worse parents because we're stressed. So we're not as like, forgiving or creative or happy, because you know, happy parents are better parents than miserable parents. And it also makes us not as good at our job. Because if you're sleep deprived and stressed and doing 19 million things in the same moment, you're not going to be as good of an employee or if it's a business owner. I think the first step is to actually decrease your bar for what stresses you out. Most people say, oh, I have a really high threshold for stress.

That's a bad thing. You want to notice stress as soon as it's occurring and handle it properly. You can actually handle it and create something that's not impossible. Right. I have a question that's not potentially not related to either of the books, but just one of the things that I experience and see so often is how judgmental parents can be of other parents. How much commentary there is behind people's backs on social media to their face about parenting choices, parenting styles. What are your thoughts on that? Is this productive and helpful in any way? Is this doing a ton of damage, something in between? Like, let me, let's start there. What are your thoughts on parenting judgment?

Well, it's definitely not helpful, but I think the twist, the surprise twist there is that it's most unhelpful to the person that doing the judging. And that is in twofold. One is for yourself and one is for your kids for your kids is kind of a quicker answer it's kids absorb things I swear and this is not science-based this is completely anecdotally derived evidence but I think parenting is about 10% what we intentionally teach our kids and it's 90% what our kids see us doing when we think they're not looking. Because there are a million times when I taught my daughter, here is exactly how you handle anger. Here's okay, let's role play.

Let's do this. Here's what you're supposed to do. And then I'll practice it with her a bunch of times. And eventually what she ends up doing when she gets mad is exactly what I do when I get mad. So as we judge each other as parents, our kids are subliminally absorbing that. And my daughter right now is in a phase that we're trying to work on where nothing can be good unless it's better than something else. So I definitely struggle with that myself. It's like, oh, I'm a better parent than that. Okay,

at least I can do this. I'm not screaming at my kid in the middle of a Rubio's. And somehow my daughter has absorbed my weird competitive vibes. And now we're having to work on it on that front. So there's no better mirror than seeing your kids do exactly what you do to help cure you of certain behaviors, shall we say. But for you, parents are a very weird little club that you join by a common hazing process. And whether you birthed, bought, adopted, abducted, like however you've got your kids, you're in it now. And we're all going through this like same common experience that no one else on the planet is going to understand. Like the other day, I was, my husband walked into our room at like 4am because he has back problems and wakes up ridiculously early to

work out. And I was sitting on the couch in like a tank top and shorts feeding our son. And he's like, aren't you cold? I'm like, yeah, of course I'm cold. It's freezing in here. He's like, why don't you get a blanket? And it literally never occurred to me to get a blanket because I am so used to being physically uncomfortable all the time that I didn't even think to fix the problem. And that is such a mom thing to do because it's like first, most people, you carry a child and you're uncomfortable for nine months as you turn Cheetos into a fetus. And then you have a baby and that's incredibly uncomfortable too. And then you're recovering from having a baby and that's uncomfortable too. And then you have this little creature that still eats and drives its nourishment from your body, which is also incredibly uncomfortable. So you just kind of get immune to discomfort at some point. No one who's not a parent is going to understand that you don't get a blanket when you're cold.

Parents will always cut up healthy food for their kids. We cut up fruit for them. But if the kids aren't there, I'm not cutting up strawberries for myself. Who are you kidding? I'm going to get waffle fries. Like we don't take care of ourselves the way we take care of our kids. And again, parents are the only ones that are going to understand that. So by doing this, like judgy, competitive, like, it will short term make you feel better. Because just like me feeling better than that mom who was screaming at her toddler in the middle of the Rubios. But you're also cutting off a huge network of people that can support you in a way that other people can't. So that's kind of my thing is like it is very very tempting to be competitive our family has

another child that is almost to the month the same age as my daughter they're cousins and it's so tempting to be like oh my god he can read so well he knows so many facts about bugs I need to teach my daughter facts about bugs or I'm going to fail parenting. But the second I very, very forcefully made myself take a step back from that and be like, that's awesome that my daughter is going to grow up next to someone that's super smart and knows all kinds of facts about things. Like he's incredible. he's into the Titanic right now and he can tell you like what degree the water was and the the structure of the ship and he's and he's four or five now it's ridiculous but as soon as I could actually appreciate that like okay we're a

community he's a smart kid our world needs more smart kids so as soon as I was kind of able to take a step back from like, my daughter has to be the best at everything and realize that that's great. I could see it in a better light and actually helped like, okay, what did you do to get that kid reading? How can I approach that here? And then I can see like, oh, wow, my daughter's really active and really coordinated and she can help him with that. And like, it just it sounds very kumbaya to say we have to appreciate the other people. But it's like you're really just cutting yourself off at the knees if you can't utilize people for the resources they are.

And there are certain Pinterest-y, passive aggressive, oh, my family's perfect posts that everyone is allowed to hate I'm not saying that like if someone is outrightly bragging like if you post a picture that's like oh it's 7 a.m time for quarantine story time hashtag blessed and a picture of like your three-year-old reading Tolstoy like I give all of your listeners permission to hate that person but like other parents that are just like sitting here knee deep in diapers doing the best they can, like we are community. No one else is going to understand what we're going to like, if you view people as part of your team, then most likely they are overwhelmed to like you're catching a snapshot of their existence compared to your best snapshot and

you're probably on par. You can compare your best snapshot and you're probably on par. You can compare your worst days and they're probably on par too. So just view everyone as a teammate. We're helping each other along. And then those like rare moms that are actually being braggy and obnoxious on social media, feel free. Talk smack all you want. Well, and it's interesting too, the thought ran through my head that it's a great opportunity to practice for ourselves and for our children. Because as you said, they're learning by watching us to acknowledge and appreciate different people's strengths without it having to take away from our own. So, you know, this mom may be great at this, or this kid may be ahead in this. And that's awesome. And we all have our own unique and individual strengths that may be different. And celebrating and recognizing another person's strength doesn't do anything to take away from our

own, right? Exactly. And if you compare it to a workplace, parenting is hard because you have to be a jack of all trades. You have to do all the things for your kid because you're the only parent they have. But in a workplace, you are not going to take, let's say you work in a marketing agency. You are not going to do the initial client pitch, develop your proposed solution, run it through digital, code the website, develop the ads, and then show it to the eventual client. You have an entire team to do that. So just because your specialty lies in one area, it's okay for someone else to have a specialty in another area. But with parenting, all of a sudden we put that aside and you have to do everything by yourself. This natural tendency

to appreciate differences has been deleted from our parenting repertoire because we have this like oh I have to do it all myself whereas if you start noticing oh that mom's really good at teaching reading be like yo specialist what are you doing differently like um my daughter's cousin it's like what were you were you doing? They're like, Oh yeah. Every time we turn on Netflix, we turn on subtitles. And he started mapping the words to the thing. So they're never allowed to watch TV without subtitles on. It's like, I would have never thought of that. But until I put my mom guilt ego aside and ask the question, I was missing out. Yeah. Great, great, great example. Liz, thank you so much for your time, your wisdom, your knowledge,

and thank you most especially for writing these books and giving us all some ideas and some of those, you know, like disclaimers, like you said, on the drug facts that we all need. You may be growing a leathery tail without your knowledge. Yeah, right. Which none of us want to do. Let's be real. All right. If you want to follow or learn more about Liz, you can visit her website, Liz by our Dell.com. So L I Z B A Y A R D E L L E.com. And she has links there to some of her other websites like the Stay Sane Mom or the Six Key Skills or donelikeamother.com. Liz, would you just quickly share a little bit about these different websites that you

have going? Sure. My career is basically a Venn diagram. It's parenting, business, and then the art of trying to do both of them at the same time. So each of those websites is one area of that Venn diagram. It's parenting, business, and then the art of trying to do both of them at the same time. So each of those websites is one area of that Venn diagram. Stay Sane Mom is exactly what it says. It's trying to give parents systems, tools, strategies, research, so they can do parenting in a way that it doesn't make them want to go crazy or feel like they already are. Then on the business side, six key skills is basically what I did my dissertation in, in just kind of developing yourself as human capital.

So I teach productivity, goal setting, like just how to structure yourself as an employee or a business owner. And then done like a mother is actually a collaborative project with two other working moms, we are the closest of friends, they would be the first ones to notice if I got murdered, but we've never actually met in real life. So we just met through business networking. And we started this together. And it's basically how to be a parent and do business stuff at the same time. I love it. So that's the three things is kind of each in a different area. So depending on what you need, all the links are on LizBierdel.com. Awesome.

And of course, go out and buy her books, either at your local bookstore or on Amazon. Again, it's Clean Your Plate or Parenting in a Pandemic. Liz, thank you so much for joining us today, especially multitasking like you did. I'm super impressed. I hope my assistant wasn't too loud. I love it. All right. On the good days and the bad ones, we still get to be our kid's mom. And there are some aspects of that that come with what may feel like a ton of pressure, making the best choices, keeping them healthy and safe, fitting everything into the schedule, and being a great example as examples. And some of it may feel easy and frankly makes up for all the rest of it, like good cuddle time, or hearing them say mommy for the first time, or watching them make a great

choice for themselves, or seeing them do something with great confidence because they believe they can. Being a mom is not for the weak. It requires incredible strength. And I want to leave you with this final thought. We are showing our children, both our daughters and our sons, what it means to be a woman. We are their first example of what a woman is, what a mom is, and in a lot of cases, what a wife is. Did your anxiety go up when I said that? Did you hear that as pressure to perform at a certain standard or to be perfect? Because I meant the exact opposite. I see as an opportunity to show my child how to live imperfectly, how to love, fail, forgive, live through pain and challenges, set boundaries, let things get messy, trust your instincts and feel loved,

worthy and valuable during and even because of my imperfections. Modeling perfection sets everyone up for misery. Being a mom and being a martyr are two totally different things. And spoiler alert, you know what happens to martyrs, right? They get dead. Be a mom. Be the mom, the woman, the partner you'd wish for your child, but also give the grace, the love, the acceptance, and the forgiveness. This is woman's work.