Embracing parenting hardship

Koren (00:00:00) – Hey there. Ready to not just live and grind it out, but thrive in both your professional and personal life? Let’s co-create that journey together. Here are three options. One: engage in thought provoking conversations at our exclusive dinner party. Two: join Dare to Lead, my upcoming group coaching program kicking off this fall. Three: opt for personalized private coaching for a deep transformational journey. Don’t just work, thrive with meaningful work and personal fulfillment woven together. We’ll create a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Ready to take the leap? Check the show notes for more. Can’t wait to work with you.

Music (00:00:56) – She’s dreaming, she’s drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:01:12) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It. The place where inspiration and possibility meet.

Koren (00:01:30) – Depending on where you live in the world, because we have listeners from all over the world. And if you’re in the Northern hemisphere, it’s summer. And if you’re in the southern hemisphere, you’re in winter. Those of you who are in winter. Imagine you’re in summer in what your dreams are for yourself and for your family and for those of us that are in the middle of summer. Think about what your dreams are for your summer. What is it that you want from it? What is it you want for yourself? What does it want for your family and what may be you seeing in your social media scrolling as well. One of the things that over the last 30 years is I’ve had the privilege of being a trusted confidant. Oftentimes rather accidentally, because when you’re somebody’s coach and this is when I was a youth coach and only coaching swimming, you start to get to know families really well. And the personas that they put out in the world start to get rattled a bit. When you do hard things like be on a swim team, you start to get to know families really, really well and trust gets built over time and people are more willing to be vulnerable and share what’s really going on versus the image that we’re putting out there to be accepted and to fit in and to feel safe.

Koren (00:02:49) – And then, you know, the last, I don’t know, 15 years or so that I’ve been a coach, a leadership coach, a life coach and executive coach, and I’m a confidant to my clients in terms of what’s really going on in their lives. And there’s, again, this external facing of what they’re doing in the world. And then there’s also the internal of what’s going on at home inside of their safe places. And then even deeper is how do they talk to themselves, What do they believe about themselves, how crushing it is of what they’re going through. So for 30 years, I’ve had this privilege of seeing people in experiences versus the perceptions of what we want to be. And it’s so different because I know growing up, you know, I grew up in a biracial home and we were really low on the socioeconomics status, aka for me, our family was poor, right? We had limited finances and I thought we were the only ones. I thought, oh, it’s just us.

Koren (00:03:54) – And that’s why hence my loser from Loser Street, right? We were different. And I had a mom who was an immigrant. And even though I couldn’t identify with what was going on, I could sense that something wasn’t okay. In what I now know. Is that whether you have education, finances, a better neighborhood. It doesn’t make family life easier. Now it can make it easier in the sense that we’re not surviving. Right? We know that the food is coming. We know that our electric bill can be paid. All of that stuff. Right. Our basic needs are met. But one of the things was, is that, yes, it was hard for my mom. And in some ways there were things that were really, really challenging. And I thought it would be so much easier for me to be a parent. And it’s still hard and maybe sometimes in different ways, but it’s still hard. And so what I want to talk about is that parenting is the hardest thing that most of us do day in and day out.

Koren (00:04:53) – And I think it’s often portrayed to us as, oh, it’s beautiful, it’s amazing. And it is and it sucks and it’s horrible and it’s horrendous. And oftentimes it is one of the most grueling things most of us do. And with all the parents that I work with, this is true, again, whether it’s my clients who are leaders, professionals and entrepreneurs, and they’re doing work they love and are really good at. And then there’s this parenting arena. Parenting is hard. And I think from the more that we can understand that and accept that, then we can figure out how do we move through it. Because when we don’t think it’s supposed to be hard and it is hard, we tend to beat ourselves up. So one of the things I know and I know this like from the Aqua Monster parents where at a swim meet last weekend and the exasperation from the parents on the deck about the triumphs and the tribulations of getting to the meet and how difficult it was and the tones that our kids used with us.

Koren (00:05:52) – Right. And we think we’re the only one that’s going through this in which parenting is hard. I often say that to parents that they’re exasperated and they’re trying to figure it out and they’re like, why isn’t it easier? What’s wrong with me? And I can see these questions popping up on their face. And I look at them and I say, Parenting is the hardest thing that I do day in and day out. And they’re a little surprised, right? Because they watch me do a whole lot of stuff. But parenting is the hardest thing. Give me, you know, a thousand kids at a summit, volunteers, issues of the pool. And I can move through that. Right. I’m really good at moving through things. Have me parent kids. It is really hard right there. Still sleepless nights. There’s things that I’m trying to figure out how to move through it. It’s hard, you know, the vulnerability of being a parent, especially as they get older and you are fired as being their manager and maybe are their consultant.

Koren (00:06:49) – Right? And you don’t want to be their fixer. It’s hard. And I think that’s the thing that if we can grasp that and understand and give ourselves the acceptance that parenting is hard, instead of thinking what goes on in our day to day lives should match somebody else’s social media pictures, right? We often forget there’s a highlight reel and then there’s the real life shit show. And we’re so hard on ourselves, like day in, day out. My meet up with parents who are constantly hard on themselves about not doing enough, not being there enough missing out on a sports event, not seeing their kids race. One of the things I used to tell parents all the time was it’s okay if your child you don’t see your child race. It is okay. There’s a lot of races in their career or in their summer. The measurement of being a good parent doesn’t mean that we have to make every race watch every game, be it every event. Right? We hold ourselves to that high standard. And it may just be impossible, especially when we look at the whole all the constraints in our lives.

Koren (00:07:59) – Maybe you’re also taking care of an aging parent. Maybe you’re the breadwinner in the family and you need to financially do that to support your family. But then you’re also putting the pressure on you that you need to also be the parent that your mom was when maybe she was a stay at home mom. Her work was really in the workplace taking care of all of you. But you’re trying to be her as well as be the breadwinner. We create these impossible standards for ourselves, and then we think it’s supposed to be easy. And then we get into these shame storms, right? We beat ourselves up. We take ourselves down. We’re not good enough. We’re exhausted. Instead of realizing parenting is hard it’s ever evolving. I remember when my daughter was two and I was like, okay, I’ve got this nap thing down. You know, we have the whole diaper thing. And maybe she wasn’t quite two yet. And then she went to potty train and we also had a newborn that became a total shit show, right? Like it was just very difficult.

Koren (00:09:00) – And the sleep got all messed up and I was like, But we had it all figured out because I just thought it was going to be like these building blocks, like you build and you build and it only keeps getting better. And easier. And better and easier. How many of you all can relate to that? Right? Some things that get better at and some things that get harder at like I’m astounded as an empty nester. You know, parenting for kids for a really long time, for 30 years and how hard it is. I’m not trying to story fondle how hard it is. I want us to realize that it is hard so that we can have that acceptance because yes, we can do hard things. I’m all about doing hard things. I’m all about having resilience and overcoming and falling down and getting back up. But the first thing we must do is acknowledge it as hard. It is hard like raising kids is hard. And there’s things that are beautiful and it’s hard. I guess the reason I wanted to talk with you about this is that I just see so much pain in parents eyes when they’re talking to me, and especially at first, because I’m assuming they have shame, right? Like, why is my kid doing this? What’s going on? Am I a really mean parent? What’s going on? And I often ask them, you know, if it’s being on the swim team, why do you do this swim team? And sometimes they say, Well, I want my kid to have diverse athletic skills.

Koren (00:10:22) – That’s great. Or I want my kid to be proficient in swimming. Fantastic, right? That’s an important reason why, right? If they’re saying, well, I want my kid to get a college scholarship, we need to have some perspective on that, because what I’ll often tell parents is it’s better just to not do sports and save that money and put it in a 529 account towards, you know, college and trying to get a college scholarship because it’s not for everybody that’s out there. Not saying it’s an impossible goal, but at 8 or 9 years old, we don’t know if your kids will be swimming and like swimming or like sports by the time they’re 18 or 19. You just don’t know. Right. And to have to be constrained to that, to have like the handcuffs, that this is what we have to do. The other side people don’t see is the cost of what it takes to get college scholarships, especially nowadays in athletics. So I often come across parents who are in a lot of pain.

Koren (00:11:16) – And whether they recognize it or not, they’re probably in the shame of like, Oh, maybe I’m a bad mom. We’re doing this. We’re making them do this. And your kids are more than happy to tell you that you’re a bad parent for making them do this. Often my advice to parents is you never evaluate on the drop-off you evaluate on the pickup. How are they when you pick them up? They may not come to you and say, oh, I love it, thank you so much. You’re such a fantastic parent. That’s often that’s magical thinking, but maybe they’re kind of not so grumpy. Maybe their tone is better. That, my friend, is a win. That is a win, right? So pay attention to that. They may tell you you’re the worst parent in the world going, you know, And that’s where your own discernment of Is that really true? Why are we doing this? You know, what was the reason? What are our family values? Because when they tell us that we’re the worst parent, it’s easy, especially if we’re in shame to go down in the shame spiral, think it is, and then give in and allow them to get us to do what they want, which may be out of alignment with you, your values and your family values.

Koren (00:12:28) – So knowing it’s so important to know that parenting is one of the hardest things that we do, it’s evolving. Our kids evolve, we evolve, and then depending on the community, there’s going to be outside peer pressures, right? We think we just need our kids not to succumb to peer pressure, whether they’re a teenager or an elementary school or tweener or in college. Right? As parents, there’s a lot of peer pressure because there’s all this comparison. Your kids will say, well, so-and-so’s parents let them do this right? And we had that often, especially being a blended family. And what we came down to was different families have different rules. And I have found myself in probably the last year forgetting that own rule of ours, thinking like, oh, maybe we should be doing it this way instead of like, wait a second, what are our family rules? What are our values? And understanding that different families have different rules? And that’s an example of taking courage, like being courageous and living courageously along with your values and your priorities.

Koren (00:13:32) – But again, it first goes back to accepting that parenting is really hard. I feel so fortunate because I have clients of all different ages and so I have clients that are much older than I, who have kids who are in their 40s, and I’ve coached them and watched them. Being an adult parent of an adult, right, who wants independence. And I also have clients who have young kids and then I have AquaMonster families going through this whole parenting journey. I’m not a parenting expert like that is not at all. You know, I’m not a parenting expert. I make a lot of mistakes. I’ve done a lot of wrong. I fail. Often I fall down. Often I continue to learn. And I’m in it, right? Like I’m committed to it and it’s the hardest thing that I do. So I discussed that with you because when I was first pregnant, even though I’d been raising my bonus kids for a number of years by then and probably like six years or so and I was first pregnant, I was so naive because I thought, oh, I’m going to be able to work while my baby sleeps.

Koren (00:14:39) – I didn’t even consider that. Oh, like I’d need to heal from nine months of growing a baby inside of my body and what that would do to my own body or the grueling task of going through labor. Like I only thought about labor and what that was going to do, like just in terms of exhaustion. But I didn’t think about the long term stress of my body and then nursing a baby, like I thought, oh, I’m just going to be able to jump right back into work, right? There’s also learning how to take care of a baby. I knew how to take care of young kids, but taking care of a baby, that was a new skill set. And then when I had my second baby, even though I’d been nursing and changing diapers, going back to a newborn was like, Oh my gosh, how do we do this again? Right? There’s constant learning that happens as a parent and this continues throughout. Like and I remember thinking like, oh, once we get to school or once we get to kindergarten or once we get to first grade, and I kept having this belief that like, then we’ll be in the Promised Land.

Koren (00:15:37) – Well, then there would be other obstacles, right? The beauty of being an empty nester is that basically when I leave my house and I come back, most often it looks the same way. The countertops can be clean. I can wake up to a clean kitchen, right? But then having adult children out in the world, they may call at inopportune times and there may be a crisis that I need to help support them through. Right. And they have my heart in them. Like I love them dearly, but they have their 20 something year old brains making choices that maybe I wouldn’t be making. Right? And there’s that vulnerability. So parenting is just one of those really challenging things that is constantly evolving. They have their names, we have our names, we have identities. But then the rules shift, right? And that’s why I always loved that author who’s been on my show when he talked about the consultant and the manager, your child’s manager, until they become a tween and then they fire you and you’re fortunate to come back as their consultant.

Koren (00:16:38) – Notice he didn’t say fixer. And oftentimes I would come back in as a fixer and I resigned myself from my kid’s fixer. I’m willing to walk with them and do with them. I’m not willing to do for them. Right. We work on that. So one of the things going back to parenting being really hard is that I really fell for that myth of once I get this done, it will be so much easier. Once I get this done, it’ll be so much easier. And the reality is, each chapter in parenting has its own struggles, its own joys, and there’s its own sucky-ness, like each chapter in its never ending. And the big reason I started this show back in 2006 is I had a blended family of four, right? I had four kids, a demanding job, along with a husband who had a demanding job. We both did a fair amount of traveling. He did much more right. And I was trying to be Carroll Brady from The Brady Bunch and have a clean home, a blended family and a happy family.

Koren (00:17:39) – I didn’t consider that She had Alice, her housekeeper, who lived in with them and cooked and went to the grocery store. She had a husband who was often at home, even though he worked. And was a partner in so many aspects. Like you didn’t see disagreements about them about what was okay and not okay. And there weren’t any ex-spouses. And then Carol also didn’t work outside the home. Right. She worked in the family home. But I was trying to be her. But that wasn’t what my constraints were. And so we had these, like stealth expectations, these magical thinking of what we’re supposed to be doing, but they’re not true, and we may not even be aware of them. And that’s why they’re stealth. We have these expectations in there in our brain and unconscious, and then we’re beating ourselves up that we’re not matching them. So as we can create an awareness of what are we thinking it’s supposed to look like, and then what does it really look like? And what are our constraints, right? What are our realities that we have? My mom had different realities than than I do, right? She was an immigrant.

Koren (00:18:44) – She looked different than other people. I’m white facing. Most people don’t know I’m half Asian, right? I’m educated in a highly educated town. My mom didn’t have that. You know those American things here because she had those from Korea. So knowing we had different socioeconomic differences. Right. And she had her difficulties. And I have mine. Mine don’t become less than we both had them. And then how do we go about overcoming them? How do we go about doing what we need to do for ourselves and our families? The big thing, though, is before we can overcome, we have to make sure that we don’t beat ourselves along the way. How do we talk to ourselves? Do we judge ourselves thinking, Oh, I’m not doing this right? Or so-and-so does this Because I can tell you this. There is not a parent that I met who doesn’t have a pain point in parenting that may not be shared on Facebook. It may not even be shared in book club or you may not know it as a parent or as a good friend.

Koren (00:19:46) – You may not know the troubling that goes on inside. And here’s something else to consider. I was reading recently in a book about how women of upper middle class experience quite a bit more loneliness than women from other socioeconomics. And oftentimes it’s this armor that we put up of like, oh, look at my family by not really being vulnerable and not maybe not feeling safe enough, but not being vulnerable to share what really goes on in the shows. So one of the reasons I talk about all this stuff here is, is that, you know, I say I live an amazing life and there are shit shows. There are things that I’m astounded by in my life today, especially when I think about that little 11 year old girl in what she wanted and desired. And there are hard things that I go through and I’m resilient and I can overcome. And one of the important things for me is to remind myself day in and day out that, yes, parenting is hard and yes, I can do hard things. And sometimes before I do the hard things, what is it I need to fill me up so that I can do those hard things? Right? Because one of the things that I found, especially in this generation of parenting, is that it continues, right? The parenting continues.

Koren (00:21:03) – Like I have clients who have children that are 30 in their late 20s and they’re still parenting. That goes on. It looks different than the day in, day out when everybody lived in the same home. It’s about how do we come together? How do we hold that space for our adult children as well as our needs? How do we expect to be treated? How do we want to be treated? How do we ask to be treated versus obligating as a sense of falseness? Right? How do we authentically come together? So there’s a lot of rumbling that goes on. There’s a lot more communication that goes on and there’s a lot of recognizing of the differences, right. So that we can have the connection we desire. The key is that we must be compassionate with ourselves, and this means setting realistic expectations instead of magical thinking. Yes, we can do hard things. And yes, parenting is hard. It’s often glossed over how hard it is. And instead, no, it’s hard.

Koren (00:22:03) – Instead of beating yourself up that it’s hard because you’re doing it wrong. And then along the way, take exquisite care for yourself. Sometimes it may be sitting in your backyard and appreciating the trees or the sunrise or the sunset, or it’s giving yourself five minutes of not doing anything and sitting there and taking it in whatever it is that you need. And how can you find ways to incorporate that into your life. Talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend. Own the things that you do not do well. Figure out what capacity you have to maybe learn and grow or maybe decide not to do those things and who else can do them right? Like for me, cooking is something that I’m more than willing to own. That is not my great skill set. And for a number of years I didn’t cook. Then I learned how to cook since I haven’t really been cooking. And so there’s a shifting of responsibilities over time. But the big thing is to be kind to you so that you can sustain the long term of parenting because we’re going to be parenting from the way it looks through the rest of our life.

Koren (00:23:26) – I’m smiling big for you. Hey there. You know, coaching is a term you’re hearing a lot these days, but let’s be real good coaching. The kind that truly changes lives is more than a buzzword. Imagine your favorite sports team without their coach. Hard to picture, right? A coach is someone who sees their blind spots, pushes them forward to perform better and help them achieve their goals, and above all, is always there to support them. And that’s what I aim to be for you in your journey. But here’s the thing. It’s not just about advancing your career. It’s about living in integration, where the work you do is not only rewarding, but deeply meaningful. It’s about fostering, loving, connected relationships not only with others, but also with yourselves as you do your meaningful work in your life. It’s not about splitting your time perfectly between work and life, because life in all it’s wonderful. And predictability doesn’t work that way. It’s about weaving your professional personal life together in a way that each one enriches the other, allowing you to thrive in all the areas of your life.

Koren (00:24:44) – Here’s how we can kick start this transformative journey. One: dinner parties. Imagine an evening filled with fantastic food, thought provoking conversation, and people who are on the same journey as you will share stories, learn from each other and of course have a lot of fun and connection. Interested? Let us know where you’d like us to host one. You can fill out the form linked in the show notes. Two: if you prefer a group environment, join one of my group coaching programs. My upcoming one is Dare to Lead starting this fall. It’s an amazing way to grow. Surrounded by folks who share similar challenges and aspirations as you while they’re pursuing to unlock their leadership potential. Three: for a more tailored experience, we can dive deep with private one on one coaching. This is a chance for you to focus purely on your journey, your goals, your struggles and your growth. So three opportunities. One goal. Thriving in a life where meaningful work and personal fulfillment are interwoven seamlessly into your life, ready to take the next step.

Koren (00:26:01) – All the details are in the show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates. Remember, growth isn’t just about work. It’s about creating a life that feels good on the inside, not one that just looks good on the outside. So let’s do this. Can’t wait to work with you.

Music (00:26:24) – She’s dreaming, she’s drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.