The Job I've Been Training For
On adding "mom" to my resume
I am grateful for ________ (3 things)
I felt strong and/or proud when ___________.
______ was really hard today, but I got through it.
These are the first three of several exercises listed in a Google Keep on my phone. It’s pinned at the top of my screen, always the first note I see when I open the app. It’s retained it’s spot at the top since I created it at 3:00 one morning, with an aching head and bleary eyes from tears of frustration and sleep deprivation. I have been filling the questions in every night (well, when I can remember), starting a couple of weeks after we brought our baby girl home.
The list has several quick journaling prompts designed to have me slow down and reflect on what matters while getting back in touch with my own feelings. It feels like a tough feat after having spent the entire day focused on keeping my new tiny human fed, warm, dry and tear-free (ha, I wish!). But every time I start, I remember it only takes a few minutes. My excuses quickly give way to bodily signs of relaxing as I jot down my responses; my shoulders drop, my breaths deepen, I close my eyes to pause.
It’s not that I couldn’t find an existing prompt out there on the internet, or in my wise mom friend groups. In fact, there was quite a lot of information out there. Perhaps too much. As someone who institutes polling (“Should I? Shouldn’t I? Is this normal?”) as a coping skill to avoid looking inward, I didn’t want to inundate myself with the stress of finding “the best” form of self-reflection. It only took me those first couple of weeks to understand there is no such thing as “best” when it comes to parenting. We pour our heart and our soul into it, and for each individual that means something different.
The same goes for self-care. Checking in with myself is like breathing; it’s absolutely crucial for my survival, but sometimes I forget to do it when I’m panicked or stressed. The first few weeks with a newborn quickly became a lonely echo chamber of my own self-doubt and worries. D.J. Anxiety would play a nice healthy mix of “You’ll Never Sleep Again” and “Count Every Breath, or They Will Surely Stop”. I know - they don’t exactly sound like club bangers, although they did keep me up late at night.
Thankfully, even though my work as a full-time therapist was paused for maternity leave, my therapeutic tendencies kept trying to fight back against my stress. For once, I was grateful I couldn’t turn my brain off - the same organ that got me into this mental mess was going to get me out of it! It was time to fire D.J. Anxiety and replace him with a meditation guru.
With my comforter pulled up to my knees and the soft rustles of my daughter adjusting to her swaddle in the background, I let out the exhale I’d been holding for the last several days and found myself wondering: “What would I want to be asked right now?”
The answer was this list of reflection questions that felt deeply authentic to me, but also bite-sized enough to complete in 5 minutes or less each night.
Here it is:
I feel _____ (1-3 emotions)
I need ______ for/from myself
I need _______ from others
I am grateful for ________ (3 things)
Today baby did this: __________
I felt strong and/or proud when ___________.
______ was really hard today, but I got through it.
I would like to take more __________ into tomorrow.
I am releasing _________ (a feeling, experience, tough moment, etc)
I can’t say this list sleep-trained my daughter, revived my thinning postpartum hair or even made me a “better” mom (whatever that means). I do think it makes me a more positive, grounded and compassionate human, though. And as a mom, wife, therapist and friend, I am most importantly a human first. There are many things I wish for my daughter, but self-assuredness and compassion are definitely in the top five. What better way to start modeling than to practice what I preach?
I suppose all those years of asking question after question to clients had been ricocheting back, landing in the part of my brain that would eventually prepare me to become a mom. Sometimes, we won’t find the answers we need on the outside because we haven’t asked the right questions on the inside.