Stronger Than You Think

Mel B on an old AGT video I watched on YouTube last week told contestant Grace Vanderwaal: “I want to give you a big boost of confidence… because you don’t actually know how good you are.” 

That’s what I want to do right now. I want to give every parent in the world a huge confidence boost, because truly, we don’t know how good we are. 

Every human being on this planet has a cruel inner dialogue continually berating his or her imperfections. I didn’t get to the gym. I got behind on a project. I forgot my keys. I cried at work. This voice picks on us, picks at us and picks away parts of us until we’re no longer functioning at our true level of potential. 

One of my favorite interviews ever, Sarah Centrella on Ed Mylett’s Max Out podcast, explains two strategies to combat negative self-talk. One is a power motto, which means repeating an uplifting phrase about yourself over and over. The other is mental tennis, in which you train yourself to answer the negative thoughts that pop up in your brain with automatic responses that disprove them. These sound simple enough but can be difficult to execute in the moment. I think it’s crucial to ponder and practice your positive self-talk before the moment comes that you need to use it. 

It dawned on me the other day, after my third month home with two small children, that the sheer physical, mental and emotional abilities of moms on a regular day-to-day basis should be enough to make us feel incredibly confident. Ironically, however, it’s moms who often battle the most with low confidence, with feeling they’ve lost themselves or are coming up short in life. 

The next time that you get down on yourself for being weak, the next time you don’t get your to-do list accomplished, the next time you mentally shame yourself for this or that shortcoming… Here are all the reasons you should actually feel unbelievably proud of your abilities. You are a physical, mental and emotional POWERHOUSE. 

Physical

• You carry around a little person much of the day. Eight-pound newborn, approximately 100 laps around the house daily. Or thirty-pound toddler, holding, cuddling, wrestling, rocking, moving, removing. Whatever the size of your kiddos, you lift them longer and more often than any gym weights. You have STAMINA.
• You are constantly on the move. Playing with the kids, bathing, chasing, jumping, dressing, changing. Chances are you cook, clean, do laundry, work in the yard. Whether you get in a workout or not, you are not sitting around. You are ACTIVE. 
• You pull off incredible physical multitasking. Ever cooked with a baby on your back? Fed a toddler while breastfeeding a newborn to sleep? Changed a diaper while transforming robot Star Scream into a jet? Carried your toddler, a diaper bag, a purse, a blanket and a water bottle all at the same time? You are COORDINATED.
• You freaking birthed a child! You are TOUGH.

Mental

• You are constantly keeping track of the multiple compartments of life. Work compartment, possibly. Household. Kids. Spouse. Business or side hustle, for some of us. Projects. Hobbies. Vacation planning. Finances. The list goes on. You can and must go back and forth among compartments at any given time. For as disorganized as you might feel your life is, there is a ton of organization that goes into keeping a family afloat. You are SHARP. 
• Whether you work outside the home or work as a full-time mom, there are never enough hours in the day to get even the most critical of your tasks done. You have learned to prioritize, cut corners smartly, focus and hustle. You don’t do things perfectly, but without the proper amount of time needed, you still do them exceptionally well. You are PRODUCTIVE. 
• Your overtired brain gets pulled in dozens of directions every day. You are constantly working out the details of tonight’s dinner, next week’s birthday party and next month’s project. It can be frustrating to forget keys, make silly typos or season your rice pudding with cumin instead of cinnamon, but these things happen because our brains are working in too many directions and on too little sleep. What’s amazing is that we only make these mistakes some of the time compared to the vast majority of instances that we bust it out and pull it off. You are LASER-FOCUSED. 

Emotional

• Remember when you were single and could cry for an entire day if you felt like it? You don’t exactly have that luxury when the well-being of small children is in your hands. Now, you control your emotions so you won’t fall apart in front of your kids. You let a few tears fall and save the rest for bedtime, or bury them altogether. You are SOLID.
• You were up all night (or several nights) birthing a child. Then without a moment to recover, you started caring for that child. You spent the first year terrified that something could happen to your fragile baby, your sleepless brain thinking up elaborate and tragic disasters. On top of it all, you were a tornado of hormones. But you had to keep it together. Even if you think you didn’t manage to keep it together, you absolutely did. You are RESILIENT.
• If you have a significant other, your relationship with them may have changed completely when your child was born. Being parents brought out new sides of each of you. Nothing in your relationship had mattered as much to either of you as this child does. You now have something incredibly important to disagree on, as well as 1000 new unimportant things to argue about. You are navigating a changing and growing relationship, while raising children. You are STRONG.

It’s easy to lose perspective on the bigger picture among the blur of taking care of kids all day, or working all day and then taking care of kids all evening. Motherhood is challenging. So is running a half-marathon (ahem… I mean, a mile); so is starting a business; so is any other worthwhile endeavor we’ve ever accomplished. All of the less than desirable tasks we do as moms – breastfeeding 10 hours of the day, carrying two children at once, scrubbing a bucket full of crap-saturated infant clothes (okay, my husband does that last one) – these are all the things that somehow or another make us tough, give us stamina and make us better. 

Sometimes as moms we feel the opposite. Reading Fox in Socks 25 nights in a row? Not exactly intellectually stimulating. Dealing with three spit-up incidents and one poop blowout in five minutes’ time? I know that’s not what you got your Master’s degree in. Yet our ability to handle the realities of motherhood – the grind, the multitasking, the curve balls, the emotional roller coaster, the absurdities – this is what makes us, as a group, pretty dang impressive. The seemingly unextraordinary tasks in your daily grind require exceptional physical, mental and emotional capacity. That’s something to be proud of. It’s something to remind yourself of when you’re feeling low. It should give you a huge burst of confidence every time you think about it.