Mojo Mom Chapter 4: Am I Just Being Selfish? Letting Go of Guilt, Worry, and Anxiety

In Chapter 4 of Mojo Mom we explore the emotional landscape of mothers. How did guilt get woven into the fabric of motherhood? I truly believe that we need a shift in consciousness about guilt, worry and anxiety. We can spin our wheels and constantly drain our emotional reserves if we get into the habit of feeling worried, anxious and guilty. When it comes to these destructive emotions, I say that it is important to examine the feeling and the situation and ask whether there is something that truly needs to change. If so, change it. If not, let it go.

The threat of being called a "selfish Mom" also controls us in unhealthy ways, and I turn that around to talk about self care, and developing a centered self. Self-preservation is an important lifelong skill for mothers that will prevent burnout and resentment, and guide us to develop a sustainable parenting style.

Am I Just Being Selfish? Letting Go of Guilt, Worry, and Anxiety takes a look at mindfulness, and learning the difference between true danger signals we should pay attention to, as opposed to the "mental static" of free-floating worry and guilt that distance us from our best selves and genuine concerns.


I loved pulling this bookshelf together (Momma Zen, I imagine that the baby Buddha in the photo is saying a cheeky hello to you). Some of my favorite books are included in this chapter's list of recommended resources:

When You’re Falling, Dive; There Is Nothing Wrong with You; and Time Out for Parents by Cheri Huber

Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood by Karen Maezen Miller

Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters More, and Raise Happier Kids
by Julie Bort, Aviva Pflock, and Devra Renner

12 Simple Secrets Real Moms Know: Getting Back to Basics and Raising Happy Kids by Michele Borba, Ed.D. I really appreciate Michele Borba's writing. You are in good hands when you read any of her books, but this one is my favorite.

Momfidence: An Oreo Never Killed Anybody and Other Secrets of Happier Parenting by Paula Spencer

Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers

What are the realistic concerns we should have about our children's safety, and just as importantly, what are the SKILLS we need to teach our kids in order for them to develop into independent young adults? Protecting the Gift and Kidpower training provide these vitally important answers.

Protecting the Gift by Gavin de Becker

Kidpower, website of the international organization.

I believe in Kidpower's safety skills training so strongly that I became a Kidpower instructor myself and started a local program, Kidpower North Carolina.

Mojo Moms don't have to be macho

People have been asking me why I haven't written more about Sarah Palin and part of the answer is that I'll never get my book done in time if I allow myself to become obsessed with her. But here I go....

I am proud of the blog post I wrote last week analyzing the content of her convention speech, and yes, her personal storyline is a little like Mojo Mom on steroids, in terms of a mother reaching the highest levels of leadership. But I don't think her life story is at all realistic, and I am worried about what would happen if we were all expected to be like her. I hate that she has to act so macho and invincible. I cringe at the stories of her hiding her pregnancy and returning to work days after giving birth. From the New York Times, "Fusing Politics and Motherhood in a New Way":

Before her son was born, Ms. Palin went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his arrival would not compromise her work. She hid the pregnancy. She traveled to Texas a month before her due date to give an important speech, delivering it even though her amniotic fluid was leaking. Three days after giving birth, she returned to work

Maybe she could get out of bed and go back to work competently three days later, but that seems incredibly unrealistic and actually inhumane to me. I would never encourage any woman to aspire follow that example. My current activism is focused on efforts to make sure that mothers get the family leave they need to care for themselves and their families during important life transitions and health care crises.

Journalists Katty Kay (mother of four) and Claire Shipman take on these issues in today's Wall Street Journal, "Let's Talk About Palin's Family Challenges." These successful professional Moms argue that the future trend is toward life sanity, not insanity like Palin's:

Fed up with 50- and 60-hour weeks and a career ladder we didn't build and don't want to climb, women are looking for jobs that demand fewer and freer hours. We want to work but we also want quantity time, as well as quality time, with our children. Most of us no longer buy the onwards-and-upwards drive to the corner office (or in Mrs. Palin's case, the West Wing) at the cost of a fragmented family life. More and more, women are choosing a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success in reasonable terms -- even if we sacrifice some "prestige."

And by the way, in Gen X and Y, men are more willing to choose that path as well. If we play our cards right we could get a workplace revolution that benefits all of us.

Palin's Superwoman image is a Republican fantasy come true. She might as well get "Rugged American Individualism" tattooed on her forehead. She can shoot the moose and cook up the mooseburgers; she'll tell you that her teenage daughter's unplanned pregnancy is a blessing, not a burden, as is the arrival of her special-needs child; and by the way, she'll birth her baby and then be back to run the state after a weekend's worth of rest.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a country run by people who make public policies based on that unrealistic, unsustainable storyline.

Why I left teaching

As I write the new edition of Mojo Mom, it has been rewarding to find that I am having new insights into old issues.

This morning I was thinking about why I left my teaching job after I became a Mom. I had originally thought I'd go back after a semester or a year, but then I didn't. It was an Opt-Out/Pushed-Out situation where there was not necessarily a ton of flexibility. Our family's life was complicated by the fact that we moved to North Carolina when our daughter was one year old. But even that could have been temporary. We were originally planning to move back to California after six months, but we liked it here so much that we decided to stay.

Here is the additional kernel of truth that I was thinking about today: the problem with teaching high school was that I never did make that job truly sustainable, even before I had a child. It was the kind of job that demanded 110%, which we all know is impossible to keep up over the long run. My first year I was up at 5:30 am every morning and frequently stayed up past midnight. After that first crazy year it got better, since I was more prepared, but there were always going to be papers to grade and classroom plans to be fine tuned.

And teaching at an independent school is the kind of job that extends tentacles, grabbing your time in many ways that are not listed on the job description or discussed during salary negotiations. In addition to teaching five classes, three sections of Brain and Behavior and two sections of Chemistry, additional expectations were: running an advising group, being on many committees, co-authoring the school's accreditation report, attending some student groups, chaperoning dances on the weekend, attending student performances, leading an "intersession" activity during several days before Spring Break, and making personal financial donations to the school to get 100% staff participation.

I remember one fall an eager new teacher came in to ask me to enroll in the blood drive and I thought NOW YOU WANT MY BLOOD, TOO?

There were two important things going on: first, the school would demand all it could of us (sort of like a family, hmmmmm?) and second, I willingly dove in headfirst. Both my husband and I were really job-focused at that time, and it all seemed to work at the time.

However, without really realizing it, I was laying the groundwork for a tough choice after we became parents. Had I shaped my job down into something manageable, maybe I could have continued teaching. I could have set up more realistic expectations for myself, and the others around me. I had a great time during my three years of teaching but did veer into burnout my final year, I can now see looking back. There was no handle I could grab on to envision a way to jump back into the fray at that school (which was also a 38-mile commute from my house, another complicating factor would have worked against any sustainable childcare arrangement). In the long run, it may work really well for some parents to create a job that can be done while parenting. If you can do that, and get some seniority so that you have some leverage in your work situation, your job may be sustainable, and your bosses may also be willing to accommodate you to keep you.

I didn't see any way to make that particular teaching situation work, so I looked for a teaching job elsewhere and almost took a position teaching at Stanford after we returned from North Carolina. But then we moved, I fell in love with the Triangle, and I got the new textbook to review during our "temporary" stay. I took one look at the Behavioral Neurobiology text and realized that my heart just wasn't in it. It was a reminder that I had left neuroscience for a reason, because I had learned that I was a Generalist who was becoming trapped in a Specialist's world, and once I got to that Specialist level, I really didn't care about the questions we were asking. There was nothing wrong with me or the field, but it just wasn't the right match over the long run. If I was going to go back into teaching, and work for someone else rather than myself, I wanted to be something I would enjoy and be good at.

So, in North Carolina I settled into motherhood, still needing to learn lessons about sustainability and burnout (ie sleep deprivation over two years is NOT a good thing). I thought about what was next for me, and reconnected with my passion for writing. I had started a young adult novel years before, as procrastination when I was supposed to be writing my Ph. D. thesis! That project had fallen during the wayside when I taught, even though I could have worked on my novel during the summers. So now, reinventing myself in North Carolina, I decided that I would commit to taking my writing seriously. I managed to finish High Water, wrote a screenplay, and then had the inspiration for Mojo Mom.

So you can see why I believe that life is not a ladder to climb, but rather a path to explore. My own career journey has had loops, side tracks, pauses, and days stuck in the wilderness. But when it comes down to it, I love where I am now, and I think that opportunity is open to many of us, if we give ourselves permission to explore and not beat ourselves up because we're not doing it the way we're "supposed to."

Mojo Mom Podcast: Positive Discipline

I can't be the only Mom burned out at the end of the summer, can I? I've had a looming manuscript deadline and very little child care for the past three weeks. It feels like a 24-day weekend, and as great as weekends are, that's a little long!

We are back to school on Monday and I am back to work, hooray!

I did manage to get a Mojo Mom Podcast episode recorded this week.

Listen to the podcast now:


We're reaching the end of summer and co-host Sheryl Grant is already back to school, so Amy's friend Aparna Desai Brown is filling in. Aparna shares her family's story of recently relocating from Silicon Valley in favor of a saner and more sustainable lifestyle in Pittsburgh.

Then Mojo Mom switches gears to talk about Positive Discipline with Amy McCready, founder of Positive Parenting Solutions in Raleigh, North Carolina. We have more democratic families these days, but how can parents maintain their leadership role? Positive Discipline operates on a foundation of respect and responsibility for all family members to help parents bring up capable, competent kids.

I highly recommend the Positive Discipline training that Amy McCready's firm offers. They teach throughout the Raleigh area, and will start offering online classes soon. Amy helps fill a niche of training offered to address normal, everyday parenting challenges--as opposed to remedial parenting or family therapy. Her course has been very helpful to me personally and resonates with much of what I say in Mojo Mom, especially when it comes to sharing power between both parents.

Beyond "balance": "CEO of Me" book review

About a year ago I wrote one of my all-time favorite Mojo Mom blog posts, Work-life balance: Our ladder is up the wrong tree. My thesis was that work-life balance is the wrong goal, and that instead, sharing life work and developing extensive support systems should be our guiding principle.

So when I read the new book CEO of Me: Creating a Life that Works in the Flexible Job Age, I felt a deep resonance with these authors, among the only others I've seen that both challenge our reliance on the work-life balance metaphor, and also embrace the concept of sustainability.

CEO of Me is most definitely a business book, written by two professors, Dr. Ellen Ernst Kossek and Dr. Brenda Lautsch, who consulted the latest research to come up with their own plan for flexible work strategies. What I like about CEO of Me is that it challenges us to look beyond our own impressions of the ideal work environment. Maybe we're just stuck in a rut and can learn from others. For me, I found that I have become too enamored with the idea that "flexibility is good" and that I would be more effective if I mixed flexibility and structure to make sure I get everything done.

After reading the book I am motivated to re-examine my Franklin Covey planning strategies, even though this is not specifically mentioned in CEO of Me.

The book suffers a bit from business-speak jargon (ex., I still don't really understand what "interpersonal capitalization" is), but it's worth sticking with the authors as they explore flexstyles. They emphasize the need to think consciously about one's strategies, and also acknowledge the destructive cycle that can be associated with any work style if it's not what someone wants: loss of control, leads to frustration, burnout, resentment.

CEO of Me includes tips for making any work style work better. I love the fact that it's presented in a broad, gender-neutral way. It's not just for women, or Moms, or even just people with families. The benefits of flexible work (and the tradeoffs, which are honestly examined) can potentially be extended to a wide variety of workers.