CwL Ep103: An undeniable Motherhood truth

Hey, it’s Lisa Corduff. Welcome to the podcast where you can expect inspiring, raw, energising, and transformative conversations with people on the path of personal evolution. I’m here to really live my life. And if you are too, these conversations are just for you. I’m really glad you’re here. Enjoy.

Hey, so it’s a mother’s theme today on the podcast, because it is Mother’s Day on Sunday here in Australia. And I just thought I might take this opportunity to share something that I get really, really passionate about. If you are new around here or this might be your first time listening to the podcast, I am the very happy mother to three kids, they’re seven, nine and 11. My eldest is a boy and I’ve got two girls. And I parent them on my own. Their dad passed away in 2019. And before that, we’d been separated for, before, maybe eight months before he passed away. Since the very start of 2019, I’ve been parenting on my own. And I feel that journey has been an extraordinary one for me and for my parenting, because I can go through stages where I feel, can everyone just go away?

I need some time and space for me. It can feel heavy, sometimes, making decisions for my children on my own when that was certainly never the way that I thought it was going to go. But I think as soon as I found myself at home with them full-time without my husband, it was like there was no one else to kind of blame for why I might feel tired or to take the fall if I got myself into a total tears and completely overwhelmed. It was just me. And while that was super confronting and continues to be confronting sometimes, even though I have built an amazing support in my life, it’s still just me as their parent. No matter how supportive my immediate family is, their grandparents and aunties and uncles and my boyfriend, it’s still me as the parent. I had to start taking some pretty radical responsibility for myself, because if I go down, this ship won’t sail, and it’s really, really important to me.

Well, it became very obvious to me that taking care of myself, prioritising myself and what I needed, was a factor in all of this. I think I ran myself into the ground, totally and completely, in the early years of motherhood in ways that I look back now and I think what? How was I doing that? And I think maybe when there’s someone else there to kind of share the load, it goes a bit undetected, but when you’re on your own, there is nowhere to hide. I thought I might just share with you today an absolutely undeniable truth about motherhood and why we find it so hard.

And this is not just a Lisa truth, I have worked with thousands of women over almost a decade. And I can tell you that this is a thing that so many mothers struggle with. And there’s really… I’ve literally spent so much of my time trying to figure out why. And in my programme, Ready for Change, we really unpack this in a big way. And in the most recent, the stories of change that I’ve been sharing, you hear how women, many of them mothers, have completely reframed how parenting feels for them, what their home life looks and feels like, because they really to put a question mark over some of the truths that they’ve been telling themselves. I believe a truth story that I choose is that everything, everything in our lives works better when we’re thriving.

It’s so obvious. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to you. When we’re rested, well slept, which I know is an elusive thing for many parents, and I am with you or power to you. It is a tough season, but it’s almost why we have to double down on taking care of ourselves. Lack of sleep is a bitch, really. And self-care is a huge, huge, huge priority for women who are struggling in those early years of parenting, but even just, it feels better when we have energy, when we’re nourishing ourselves, when we’re not just eating the crusts off the toddlers sandwiches as our lunch, but actually paying attention to the food that we’re putting in our body. Simple, and were drinking enough water.

I mean, I don’t get how parents can wake up with hangovers after big nights, because I just think, well, for me personally, what a waste of a day, but also it just throws everything out. I can’t parent well, I’m recovering for days if I have a big night. And so, I choose my times wisely, but also just experiencing pleasure, working from an overflowing cup instead of even just a full cup, because that still means that you are getting depleted. The aim is an overflowing cup, giving to ourselves, filling up all the time. And we find this so hard, we find it hard to prioritise our pleasure, joy. I mean, we do things, we might go for a walk or a run or lift some weights or do our yoga classes and stuff like that.

And we kind of justify the essential things in life, movement, food, friends, as how we’re filling our cup, but can we just get a little bit juicier about this? And to be honest, majority of the women that I work with don’t even have those fundamentals down pat, because their life is moving so fast. There’s no room, there’s no capacity. Bloody hell. I mean, it can just feel tough sometimes to just remember to pay our car insurance on time or little things like that. It’s a lot, we’re dealing with a lot, for sure. But if everything feels better when we are thriving, why aren’t we focused on that? If we know it’s kind of the secret to life, feeling good, and that as a human being put on the planet, we actually get to enjoy our time here, why is that not a focus?

Why is all the focus somewhere else? Well, what I’ve found is that a lot of the time, we don’t even know that there can be another way. We haven’t stopped to question it. We accept a status quo, a status quo that we’ve kind of inherited. A status quo that we assume from all of the stuff we see online or expectations of what we can handle, that we think other people are handling and they’re not really. It’s too much for you, it’s too much for other people as well. Can we just get real about that? I think the thing is that we’ve bought into truths about motherhood that aren’t in fact true. And they’re making us really depleted, keeping us in our overwhelm, stopping us from really exploring what a juiced up, pleasure filled life might actually look like. And those supposed truths, which I believe are stories, stories that we’ve just told ourselves so often, stories that we saw our mothers live by, they became truths.

And these stories run deep, deep in sitting in our subconscious, ruling us, because we’re not consciously thinking about them all the time. Things like motherhood means sacrifice. Now, for sure. I’m not talking about the obligations that we have as a mom. Yeah, I might sacrifice my Saturday mornings reading the paper, having coffee and pastries to get my son to his soccer. But I do that one willingly. I’m talking about how the expectation is that you go years, sometimes decades of your life, thinking that it’s normal for you to sacrifice yourself for the needs of others 100% of the time. That’s not normal. I don’t think that’s normal. I don’t think it should be the case.

And yet, we kind of like, oh yes, you become a mom. And from that moment on, everybody else comes first. Well, what? Now, as I said, I parent solo. My kids only have me as a parent. And I still prioritise myself, because the truth I live by, the story I live by, is that when I’m thriving, everything else feels better. And that includes my ability to parent and be present for them, also includes taking time away from them. It includes grumpy kids who don’t want to walk to school, walking to school, because it’s important for me to get some movement at the start of my day. And at this stage, I can’t really leave the house early on my own while they’re still sleeping.

My youngest one would… Just not there yet, but we’ll get there. I think another truth that we have inherited, this story that moms just don’t stop. And for sure, struggled with this, because my amazing mom, she sort of seems to have an ability, or she did, it looked like to me, to have this nonstop ability to just keep going. I never saw her sit down, really. We were watching TV, she was ironing. She used to vacuum our house every single day because of my brother’s dust allergy. What? She had three kids. She worked. And I can remember just sort of thinking to myself, oh, I’m doing so badly at this. Mom didn’t have to rest. Why was mom able to do it? Why aren’t I able to just keep going? And then learning about ourselves and our particular design. Oh, human design is a fascinating thing. And I don’t have the ability to just keep going and going and going and going, it’s just not who I am. I need moments to rest.

And accepting that and embracing it and creating a life around it so that I can thrive, so that I can be a better mother, has been revolutionary. And yet we find it so, so hard. And it’s because these truths, these stories, they exist at a subconscious level and it is really, really hard to spot them sometimes, to just even spot… We’re running a programme that’s old school. It is old school, it is the old ways. And even if we have awareness around it, unless we actually have a map to spot and shift those stories at a subconscious level, we’re just going to keep repeating the patterns. And that is the power of my Ready for Change programme. That is exactly what it does and it’s exactly why it changes women’s lives for the better, because we don’t have to accept these truths. Self-sacrifice, everyone nails comes first. What might your life look like if you were the top of the priority pile? How might everyone in your family’s life feel better if you were coming from this juiced up, cup overflowing, loving life place?

That has an impact, that has a huge, huge ripple effect, and yet, we find it so hard, because it goes against what we believe a good mom is. I really do think it’s time to change that. And I’d love to invite you along on Thursday night to sit with me, bring a cup of tea, bring whatever you like, and let’s talk about this. Let’s pull out a bird’s eye view of you and motherhood right now. It has been a really tough time for so many moms. Much going on. Let’s just gently pull out, have a little look at things and reimagine motherhood for you. The link to join us is in the show notes, I would love to see you there live. I would love to nurture you, I would love to gift you this hour, this is my Mother’s Day present for you. And let’s just start to create a little bit it of a shift. Okay?

Happy Mother’s Day. I hope that you ask for exactly what you want, and don’t just sit back, expecting that everyone knows exactly what you want and need. Use your beautiful voice, claim what you want from the people who love you and recognise you’re doing a bloody amazing job. Well, I think you are. I know it. Big love. Hey, if you want to learn exactly how to start moving through the stories that are keeping you stuck, and you want to delve into these self defeating thinking patterns that so many of us have, then I’ve got a free workshop that you can go and watch right now. In it, I highlight some of the main stories that I see women telling themselves that often lead women into a spiral of self-sabotage. You also learn how to let yourself off the hook a little bit more, because when you understand how your brain is actually working to create this, then you feel a lot breezier about your life. Trust me. In this workshop, you’ll also start moving towards the things that you want by the end.

I absolutely promise you’ll have a new perspective on your next step forward, and that can be in any area of your life where you feel stuck. I can’t wait for you to go and check it out, it’s totally free, the link is in the show notes, enjoy. Hey, if you are enjoying the conversation, then it would mean the world to me if you head over to iTunes and give us a rating and review. It really makes a difference and it’s my intention to get as many of us involved in real conversations that really change the game as possible. Thanks so much for your help, and I’ll see you in the next episode.