#645 Mom Stress

So maybe you have this. And. And. And this. Maybe. Maybe even this. Or. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all of this. Today's episode 645 of Flow Dreaming is devoted to mom stress. Flow Dreaming, it's a show where we talk about the power of your mind to change your world around you, to literally affect the fabric of your reality. We talk about this feeling of hope and joy and relief. And that is what being aware of your flow does. It gives you a feeling of power again in your lives. Breathe. I'm Summer McStravik, and welcome to another episode of Flow Dreaming. Oh, my God. I'm so sorry to have tortured you with that. I know. I. I've listened back to it a half a dozen times and. Yeah. Moms, hello. Hi, moms. Just. Just so we're clear here, this episode is not just for moms. It is for parents. It is for dads. It is for any caretakers of families. But because I'm a mom, I'm coming at it from the mom perspective. So just know I embrace all of you who do the hard job of keeping families together. And mom stress has been an episode that's been a long time in the making. And we're gonna look at it from the perspective of yes and flow. Yes, Maybe even do a little flow dreaming, give ourselves some peace, some direction, some feelings of, I've got this, I can handle this. As well as I love my family. They're freaking awesome. Even though sometimes we have a lot on our plate. And my goodness, has it been a year for that. So let's get things rolling. I'm Summer McStravik, just like the intro said. Welcome to Flow Dreaming, where we talk about your mind and your ability to shape your life and your future. And we pull out all kinds of different ideas, things that are normal and day to day stuff in our lives. We turn them on their heads and say, how am I dealing with this? How am I actually approaching this? And am I using the right tools? And you will hear, you'll learn that flow dreaming, yes, is a tool I love and adore, but it's certainly not the only tool in my handy little toolbox. So let's dive right in and talk about the stress, stressors on our family lives, and particularly the stressors on us parents. I have two kids. They are now 14 and 18, and my goodness, I cannot believe I know. Every parent says this. It goes so fast. Well, let me tell you, it does go fast, but some days and years, it feels like it will never end. So you get both and that's the way time works. Isn't it funny? So the crying and the yelling and the crazy dinner time and the dog going off and all those things, you know. Yes, they're very typical, you know, sounds of family meltdown. But depending on your kids and their age, you know, my daughter is going into college this year and we've had an entire new set of stressors on us. And then she will be eventually graduated and my son will be going off and then the new set of stressors will come on as she hopefully finds someone that she loves and perhaps starts a family. And then we have to integrate the new family and on and on. You see, mom's jobs never end. We know that. We knew that when we signed up dads, parents. We know that. And how do we handle it? Especially how do we handle that feeling that we're not going to be perfect parents. In fact, maybe our kids tell us all the time how imperfect we actually are are in their mind. And it maybe squeezes and hurts our heart to no end. And we think, well, someday, someday they'll realize, someday they'll recognize that I am doing it for you, honey. I'm not doing it for me, I'm doing it for you. And they will see, and maybe that day is not yet here. And so we muddle along and we struggle along and we love and we feel guilt and anguish and we ask ourselves, could I done it better? Should I have done something differently? Oh, I regret that thing I did do. The stress comes on and it's not like it's only stuff that's already happened. We have daily, daily stuff, right? The missed practice because you just couldn't get off work to get your kid there, couldn't get it arranged on time. The child who is having, you know, emotional and you know, maybe psychological difficulties adjusting to the recent isolation and homeschooling and just adolescence in general. And you think I should know all things and everything. And then you realize I don't. I don't. Is this my fault? That, that, that, that is mom stress, parent stress. And the way we hold it emotionally, energetically in our flow is really, really important. Because over the years, and I think I've mentioned this in the past, let's back up a step. You know, the things that you don't like your parents for, maybe you love your parents, maybe you don't. But I'm pretty sure there's one or two things at least. You look at them and they say epic failure on that one, that one just no good. You were no. Good. If you were to ask your parent, what do you think your biggest failure was with your child, I would bet you dollars to donuts that they would give you a totally different answer. You would say you were emotionally closed and isolated. You always favored dad, and you never took care of me. Or you didn't pursue your own life and you thought that I could do it for you, or you always favored my brother. My s. You. You'd have something, and your mom or your dad would say, oh, really? Gosh. I always thought the problem was that I worked too much. I always felt guilty I wasn't home on time for you. Or I always felt that it was that I didn't give you enough exposure to, I don't know, higher things. Ballet lessons, time playing sports, learning an instrument. We just never had the money for it, honey. And you, too, would realize what I'm upset about and what they think that they did wrong are, we're football fields apart. But each of you carry the stress and the scars. And these scars inform us. They become part of us. Imagine yourself as if you were a beautiful glass vase. And this vase has cracks all through the glass. And that's what we are. Cracked vessels. But how cracked? And what do we allow ourselves to do with it? And can we still hold water? Can we still turn around and become great parents and feel in our hearts, I have not been a perfect parent, but I still love myself for having done it. And the things I did poorly, I forgive myself for. And that's what this boils down to. Bomb stress. A whole heck of a lot of forgiveness. So I call it being gentle with ourselves and recognizing. Yeah. And, you know, I realize I'm speaking to so many different minds and thoughts right now. You know, your bad thing could be really, really bad, actually, or it could be not bad at all, but you made it bad in your head because you need to be perfect. I don't know. There's a giant spectrum here. But across the spectrum, mom stress is what says you weren't good enough. You didn't catch it in time. You weren't there when you were too busy doing that. You were too caught up in that relationship with someone. You expose your. Whatever it may be, and that grinds and that holds. And whether it's past stuff or it's stuff that's happening now, you know what the common denominator is in it? I have a loss of power. Loss of power. So the mom stress you're feeling right now is in your power. Whatever situations are going on that Are leaving you feeling sucked dry, sad, tired, just belligerent, impatient. Oh, short tempered. Hello moms. That happens to be mine. Short tempered. Feeling like I don't have enough time ever. I'm never performing my best. I am never able to get to that point where I can perform my best. Those feelings right now are infinitely solvable right now. So the first thing I want you to do is take that lack thought around it. I can't change it. It won't change. It's just the way it is that you know that looping feeling of anger. Mad at yourself, mad at your kids, mad at your husband or your wife or your partner. Mad, mad, mad, mad, mad. That is a blinking, like blink, blink, blink. You know, New York Times light saying, fix me, fix me, fix me. And so many of us just get stuck. The deer in the headlights staring at the blinking lights and we don't die. Move to the next part. Fix me. You can fix this right now. Write it down. Filter through it in your head. If you don't have paper. What are the things that I feel the worst about as a parent right now? Not the past stuff, but the right now stuff. What is bothering me? What am I not doing right? What do I feel guilt about? What do I feel just confused about Sometimes as parents, you know, remember many times we haven't been through this before. It's our first time, you know. You expect yourself to go out there and make a home run your first trip to bat. No. But we do. As parents. All those foul balls. Oof. There's a lot of them as we figure our way through. And you don't know the little beings who are coming into your life. They're their own magical, incredibly powerful people. And you can't. You don't have 100% control to shape them, mold them, twist them and carve them into exactly what you want. That is. You can't. No, they are. They have as much control over their lives as you. You just get to set up the circumstances and pour their heads filled with things and thoughts you want them to hear from you until they reach the age when they stop listening. So look at these things right now. What's not working? Is it dinner time? Is it feeling guilty that you work too much? Is it feeling guilty that you don't have time for their homeschooling if this is still the pandemic? Is this feeling upset that you don't have enough money for them and for the opportunities that they want? Is this feeling like you don't have time? Is this Feeling like I've dragged them through so many bad experiences, they will never forgive me. Is this feeling like my kids don't talk to me anymore? They don't share with me, they don't trust me. What is it? Whatever energy is there, is there. It doesn't matter if you're looking at it or you're not looking at it. It's still there. And it is perfuming the room. It is scenting the room with its, with its energy. It is calling the shots of the interactions between you and between the whole family. So this is where the best thing, the thing you can do right now is clearing this air. What's going on? Why is it going on? How can we talk about this differently? How can I feel about this differently? Is there a way? And you know your old patterns. I'm not saying, you know, set up that confrontation, get into that yelling match, increase that stress. No, I'm talking about actually quite a few things all kind of mushed together in one. But a big part of our parental, Parental. Parental mom stress is that we hold this guilt inside of ourselves. I'm not good enough. I didn't see it on time. I didn't. I missed years, I missed opportunity. I wasn't there. I let something bad happen. I, I, I. And that's the first thing. If you're coming at your relationship with your children like I have so much to make up, then how can you ever be in the present doing the present things that are good? So what I'm trying to say is pull yourself back to now. What can you do in the present? Right now? Right now, Tonight, Today, this afternoon. That is good. Is it slipping a love note in your kid's school book? Is it interrupting them in the middle of their homeschooling day with a. And I'm saying homeschooling because this is during the pandemic and not very many kids are in classes anymore. They're home with us. But is it interrupting their day with a bowl of ice cream before lunch? Is it spending 10 minutes in their bedroom at night with your older child that you don't talk to as much anymore because they're always on video games and saying, tell me about something great that happened today. Tell me something wonderful. What did you learn and what did you love? In fact, someone gave that to me recently. The two things, what did you learn and what did you love? It's their dinnertime conversation and I'm trying to place who it was. Forgive me, I cannot remember your name, but I like that when you are trying to release your stress, a lot of it boils down to if you can change your behavior right now, if you can change your interaction, if you can change your emotion, if you can change your energy inside of your household, the whole place will calm. Because remember this, parents, the house tends to follow our energy. If we are a whirlwind, if we are angry, if we are having a steamy, difficult, angry night, fight night, a whatever the whole house erupts with typically follows us because we're the parents. Sometimes we have very loud, difficult, explosive kids though, and sometimes the whole house follows them around and you'll notice that the whole house is following them and you'll say, wait a minute, that's not right. You know, they're 12, yet we're all the whole house. The feel of the day, the way the evening progresses, our time just melts down around them. So you're noticing right now where the power is lying in your house. Where is it, who's got it, who's enforcing it, who's enacting it, and is it what you want? If it isn't, that is your very first thing. We're gonna grab that, we're gonna take that. It's that thing that popped up in your head and you say, this is the very first thing to solve. If I can straighten things right now in this moment, then as I look backward at all the other failures that lead to this kind of grinding mom stress. Because I guess what I'm getting at is there's maybe differentiations, right? There's present mom stress, the day to day, and then there's the long term, the stuff we carry feelings about ourself that we have. The long term stuff gets changed and altered as the present term stuff up levels. Can't do that past one before you really do the present one. In my experience, I could be wrong. You could forgive yourself. You could say, all right, it's all done, I forgive it, I feel good. And then tackle the present stuff. Yes, but often when you tackle the present and you bring that into alignment because it's so much in your power, then you can look back to the past stuff and say, I acknowledge you and I feel you, but you're no longer impacting me. You're no longer coloring my response. There's no knee jerk reaction coming from me out of, out of guilt or upset or remorse. So I'm going to encourage you as a technique today to take this wad of stress and discover it and own it and open it like a beautifully Wrapped present. Saying what? Take this wad of stress and open it like a beautifully wrapped present. What the heck does that mean? It means it is the gift for you. Because everything you want is inside that box. It's inside it, it's in it and through it. We tend to think that problems are things that are insurmountable, terrible things that block us or cement walls, and we stop behind them and we linger and look at them and yell at them and pound on them without solving. I'm encouraging you to look at your family right now and say everything is solvable. This problem is just telling me, it's begging me for a solution. Everything I want, I need that closeness, that love, that release, that relaxation, that more help around the house. That understanding between myself and my partner, that understanding between myself and my children. Everything is there and it is possible. And if it isn't possible because you have some way, way, way far out reason, but I really encourage you, do not make yourself the exception. I know it's tempting. I want to be the exception. I'm the unhelpable one. But you know what? That's just another way of letting your power go. So don't be the exception. Be the norm. I'm the norm. Oh, yay. I'm the norm. And we can release and we can change the stress. What needs to be done? What needs to be done? And you're gonna drop your list. You're gonna listen. I'm not a psychologist. I know I'm getting all psyche on you, but what do your kids need? What are they asking for from you? Even if you feel like you give enough or you can't give it, how can it be adjusted? Look again. Look again. You're clever. You're a parent, for God's sakes. You're very clever. You've found a thousand different ways to make things work for your kids. You'll figure this one out, too. Now, let's get back to you and that stress on your shoulders. Because I want you to know that the stress that you carry is just one more topping on the ice cream. Right? You carry the stress of perhaps making a living. You carry the stress of perhaps caring for other people, maybe your own parents or someone else in your family. You carry the stress of making it through day to day. Perhaps in a job that you dislike, you carry the stress of your own feelings about yourself. Perhaps a body that you're a little upset with, it's put on weight or it's unhealthy, or you feel guilt that you haven't taken care of. Right. We're laying on all of these stressors. All of these stressors. And being a parent is just, like I said, it's nuts on the ice cream. And I want you to see it and acknowledge it. Our expectations for ourselves are bonkers high. Like crazy bonkers high. I know there are people who do not have children. And it's funny, studies often show those are the people who are strangely happier. And we parents think, how is that, how is that possible? I can't imagine my life without my kids. But think of it in terms of there's a big stressor that they just don't deal with. They just, they don't have that one. No. No nuts on their ice cream. So we have a lot we hold, and of course, we all hold different amounts. Some people have relatively few stressors. Many of us were given multiple stressors to hold onto for long periods. And your mom's stress is just one of them. So how are you gonna handle that inside of you? What can you do? Well, we talked about the practical things. One, handle it right now, in this moment. Do not let it be a continuous power leak that grinds and becomes collected stress, that you just file away and become stress over the years. Let's stop that cycle. The second thing though is where is your heart? Where is your energy? Where is your flow each day? You know, I always come back to it, right? Because in my world, you do the physical stuff and you do the non physical stuff. If you only do one and not the other, you don't get where you wanna go or you don't get there as quick. So what's the non physical stuff that we moms do? To care for ourselves, to soothe ourselves? Who's nurturing us, right? Who's nurturing us? And some of us are lucky enough to say, my spouse nurtures me. And some of us are saying, nobody nurtures me, I'm it. I nurture me and I nurture everyone else. I want you to nurture yourself more. I want you to pop that up the ladder like 4, 5, 10, 15 notches. And what this means is rampant self care, right? Rampant self care. Real, real self care. Real self care. The kind of care that says, I love myself, I care for myself. I'm not talking bubble baths here. I mean, yeah, you can take bubble baths, sure, but what kind of care do I give my heart? Do I give my feelings? What kind of love? And this is where when you flow, dream that love, that inner love, that self love is huge. Yes. Our children Give us love. We may be lucky to have a partner who gives us love or other family or friends who give us love. But we are the primary sources of love. The primary, primary sources of love. You know, you know, our kids, sometimes they're too busy and self centered and too excited about their own new burgeoning lives to think about giving us love. We have to give ourselves love. So I'm going to encourage you to do this in all the different means and ways that it can be done. To that end, some of you know that I have opened up a whole new section of FlowDreaming.com devoted to courses and classes. And there is a fantastic new course class out called Pure Self Care. And it goes way beyond, like I said, bubble baths. It goes into the kind of self care that is deep, that reaches into your soul, that heals you, nurtures you, nourishes you in an ongoing way. Brings you up to that level, that place where you can say, I can take care of just about anything and anyone because my cup is full, my well is overflowing, and moms, that's what most of us need. We need to refill that well. So I encourage you to go look for it. Look at is also available through Flowon, which is my membership. In fact, if you're a member of Flowon, you get all of his classes free as part of your program, which if you were to buy them individually is about a 30% savings. So it's pretty significant. But if you're not part of Flow on, please go check it out. It's at the website. Look under Courses courses and master classes or courses and classes and look for Pure Self Love. Now you can also go to the website and look for some of my playlists around Self love. Just type in Self love or maybe I'll have a recommendation here for you soon. But as parents, here's the deal. When you're carrying around this ongoing stress and you're not in ever, what do they call it when you put a little, poke a little hole, you let the steam out like a, you know, like a, like a teapot on the stove. It needs to have a way let the steam out, right? You have to have a way to let that steam out. And that's by giving yourself love and generosity and care, saying you're doing as best you can, you're navigating these waters. You are not perfect. I don't expect you to be perfect, but you're doing good. And the biggest thing is you're always focused on doing better. Who could ask for more? And letting that stress see about right? Like a slow leaky balloon. Except we'll make yours a little faster. Letting it out. Letting go of the mom stress and the mom guilt. Not letting it continue to accumulate and become things that hang on you in the past. The action part is to pick something to solve. The other part of it, the pre action part, the flow part, the energy part, is arranging your emotional self, giving time to that self and saying, I love and appreciate myself. And I love and appreciate the fact that I'm a fantastic mom, I'm a great mom, I'm a good mom, and I feel it and I flow it. So if you guys don't know what flow Dreaming is, if this is your first time through one of my episodes. Flow Dreaming is a technique that we use to remake our energy system. To remake our flow, our life, our heart, our, our soul, our everything. It's based on this concept of manifesting and co creating that what we think is kind of what we mold ourselves into. Our thoughts generate our futures and our thoughts react to what we are. Excuse me. Our futures react to what we are now. Like two mirrors facing each other. So when you go into flow, what you're doing is you're remaking a part of yourself, part of yourself that you want to either elevate, make bigger, better, brighter, stronger, or maybe you need to heal. It's broken or cracked. So as we flow dream, we're doing this practice. It is not meditation, it is not self hypnosis. It's a very active form of, kind of emotional manifestation. You can find it by going to my website again. I have a free kit, teaches you all about it. But we're gonna use this technique as we're gonna close our eyes right now for just a moment. And we're gonna release some of this mom stress. See it, clear it and release it. Are you ready? Go ahead and close your eyes. Take a deep, long breath. Exhaling at your own leisure. Letting your body relax. Releasing. Letting go. Letting your mind drift. Letting your imagination flow. Released. Opening the gates of the corral and letting those wild horses of your feelings, your ideas, your hopes. Letting them run. Letting them run and dance in the fields, in the sunlight, in the moonlight. Noticing all the stressors of your life. Or back there, back in the old barn. A place you love. A place you're so familiar with. A place you built with your hands, your family, those you love, your children. But sometimes you can feel it. The need to run and shimmer and release and dance like a Crazy fairy on a fairy mound over the sweet green glass grass, over the sweet green grasses to let the stress of your days leak from you like rivulets of rain flowing from your hair, dripping to the ground. You feel your family, beautiful, radiant, filling you, filling your heart, a vessel filled with bright, bubbling light. And this is the feeling you hold them in always. No matter what they think, no matter how you feel, no matter who holds whom to blame for what they've completed or not completed, for what they did right or what they did wrong or what they gave or what they withheld. It's all a moot point. It doesn't matter. What matters is that beautiful flower pushing its way from the earth. A flower in the bright spring rain that's blooming. Flower of love. Flower that says, I have given myself to you, to raising you, to loving you, to steering you, to adoring you, to being with you. I've given myself, and I continue to give myself because I want to. I want to. I want to see you. I want to support you. I want to see everything that you can become. I want to see you unfurl and roll under my eyes as you grow into something, into someone. And you will be your own beings, your own beings, your own creatures, your own destinies, your own lives. But I can feel in my heart, when I stand back, I say I was there and I was important and I held up my end and I gave what I could give. And every day when the stress piled up, I said and I released it and I let it go, and I did my practices and I did the things that I know how to do to bring myself back into balance, back into brightness, back into brilliance. And I model that for you, my children, that you can learn to do this, too, someday. And that is how I release the stress and I release the guilt and I release the worry and I release the confusion. I release it all because I know what we are based in, what we spring from. All of us in this family. It's love. Love. Deep, unalterable, complete, real, unending, unyielding love. And as I hold those feelings for you, my children, my family, I feel them equally for myself. For me. I love me. I love my mothering. I love my fathering. I love my parenting. I love it. I love it. And my goal is to love it even more. To love myself in it, to love myself doing it, to stop being critical and criticizing of myself, to just love myself in it and know I'm doing the best I can. And knowing the best will Grow each and every day, each and every year, loving myself so that I can better love you. And with that I find myself now returning, coming back, back from Flow Eyes. Well, dear mothers and fathers and parents, how did that feel? Right? Just giving to yourself a little bit. Giving to yourself. This is going to wrap up our episode today. I hope you enjoyed that little taste of Flow Dreaming again. If you want to carry it forward, I do highly recommend Pure Self care available@flowdreaming.com I also recommend the playlist My Happy Family. It's made for you and your forgiveness of your own parents, for instance, and the people that you love. So with that, my friends, I close today's show and kisses to you all. Hugs to you and to your families and I'll see you again for another episode of Flow Dreaming. Hey friends, a couple things to tell you about that I think you'll really enjoy. Flow Dreaming is a universe actually. In other words, yes there is a technique, but it's also an entire community of those of us who Flow Dream and I have a lot to give you to get you started. That's 100% free. So if you go to flowdreaming.com the first thing you need to do is download my free kit that teaches you how to Flow Dream. It contains an audio of a Flow Dream that's been recorded called Positive Flow just to get you right into Flow state in under 15 minutes. It also includes a tutorial and a PDF guidebook. Now if you're on your mobile device right now, you can also get it by just going to the App Store and downloading the Flow Dreaming app and it will come preloaded with this wonderful kit for you to learn the process. The next thing I wanted to mention for you is that MI School is my active, gorgeous, beautiful community of Flow Dreamers and we learn together, we share and we grow into our manifestational, our co creational and mostly our own deep men's inner power. We do this together in a mentorship type, school type format. But believe me, no tests, no quizzes, it's the best place you've ever been to. It calls itself a school, but it's really the place where you will completely transform yourself from inside out. So check that out too. Last of all, I hope I see you guys on Facebook or Instagram. Just look up summer McStravic or flow dreaming and come say hi to me there. Until next time, my love to you all.