Dear First name / Friend,
Mother's Day is around the corner and this one is for anyone who is, has been or played a mother figure to any living being.
It's for the woman who has given everything she has — and still lies awake at night wondering if it was enough. For the mother who has loved her children, animals or family so fiercely it sometimes takes her breath away — and still questions whether she did it right.
As a mother of four daughters, I still feel a complicated mix of pride, love, exhaustion, humor — and if I'm being completely honest — at times, a fair amount of retrospective cringing at moments I wish I could do over.
And for years, my inner critic used every one of those moments as evidence that I had failed them.
Sound familiar?
Here's what I want you to know: those thoughts are not your truth. They are your nervous system talking.
Science tells us that 80% of the information processed by our brain travels from our body to our brain — not the other way around. Which means your inner critic isn't a character flaw. It is a messenger reporting the state of your nervous system. A dysregulated nervous system generates dysregulated thoughts. And so many of us have been carrying the weight of impossible cultural expectations about motherhood for so long that our nervous systems have been living in a low state of dysregulation for years.
A good mother is endlessly patient. Endlessly giving. Always available. Never resentful. Selfless but not a martyr.
This reminds me of the scene from the Barbie movie where America Ferrera is telling Margo Robbie about how impossible it is to be a woman.
