When my daughter was about six years old, she fell off a wall and broke her elbow. It was one of those little walls, maybe two or three feet high, that kids love to walk along. Nothing particularly dangerous. She was old enough to be doing it, and I was about 15 feet away, watching her while I was on a work call.
And then she fell.
She ended up with a compound fracture in her elbow, which meant she needed surgery. I remember feeling terrible, but not only because my daughter was hurt, I felt terrible that it had happened on my watch. I was her mother. I was right there. And somehow, I hadn’t prevented it.
I felt so guilty. But what I remember most about that experience isn’t the accident itself. It’s the night we spent in the hospital waiting for her surgery.
She couldn’t have surgery until the following morning. We had to wait for an operating room to become available, and she couldn’t eat because she needed an empty stomach for the procedure. She was six years old, in terrible pain, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to make it better. I couldn’t fix her elbow. I couldn’t make the surgery happen sooner. I couldn’t take away her pain.
So I climbed into that little hospital bed with her, wrapped my arms around her, and held her. All night. She was uncomfortable, she was hurting, and I just stayed there with her. I couldn’t make any of it go away.
And here’s the strange thing. That night is one of my proudest memories of being her mother.
She’s 17 now, and the whole experience has become one of those family stories we still talk about. It’s a core memory for all of us. But for me, what stands out isn’t that we got through something scary. It’s that I remember feeling like I was exactly the mother I wanted to be.
Even though I couldn’t do a damn thing to change what was happening.
What makes you feel like a good mom?
I’ve spent more than 20 years working with mothers, and there’s something I’ve come to understand about what so many of us want.
We want to feel like good moms. We want to know we’re doing right by our kids. We want to trust that we’re giving them what they need and that we’re raising people who will grow up feeling loved, secure, and capable of living good lives. And we want to feel good about the job we’re doing.
I don’t think we talk about that last part enough. Underneath so much of the worrying, planning, researching, and second-guessing that happens in motherhood is a woman who really, really wants to feel like she’s getting it right. The problem is that we’ve developed some pretty unreliable ways of deciding whether we are.
Think about what makes you feel like you’ve had a good day as a mom. Your toddler gets dressed without a fight. Your baby takes a great nap. Your kids play together without arguing. Everyone eats dinner. Bedtime goes smoothly. You get to the end of the day without losing your patience.
You might look around and think, Wow. Today was a good day. I actually feel like I’ve got this.
But what about tomorrow? Tomorrow, your toddler refuses to put on shoes. The baby won’t nap. Your kids are fighting. Nobody wants what you’ve made for dinner, and by bedtime, you’ve lost your patience three times.
Now how do you feel about yourself? Are you still a good mom?
Of course you are. But you might not feel like one. And that’s what I want us to pay attention to.
If your confidence as a mother depends on how your children behave, your confidence will always be at the mercy of your children.
And that’s an exhausting way to live.
We’ve confused things going well with being good at motherhood.
Most mothers I know want their children to be happy and healthy. Ask almost any mother what she wants most for her kids, and there’s a good chance she’ll say something along those lines.
But I think we need to get curious about what we imagine when we say that. Because often, the picture we have in our heads is of a child who is doing well. A child who has friends, who enjoys school, who is confident, who isn’t struggling with anxiety, and who feels good about themselves. And when our children’s lives don’t look like that picture, we start to worry.
Our child is having trouble making friends, and we wonder what we should be doing differently. Our toddler is having constant meltdowns, and we start questioning our parenting.nOur child is anxious, and we wonder whether we’ve somehow caused it. We begin to see their struggles as evidence that something isn’t going right. And sometimes, without even realizing it, we start treating those struggles as evidence that we’re not doing something right.
So we get to work. We research. We problem-solve. We come up with new strategies. We try to figure out how to make things better. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that because, sometimes, our kids really do need our help solving a problem. But sometimes, in our effort to help them, we’re also trying to get rid of the uncomfortable feeling that comes up inside us when they’re struggling.
Because when they’re okay, we get to feel okay. And when they’re not, suddenly we’re not so sure of ourselves.
What if we’re measuring the wrong thing?
I want you to think about a moment in your life when you felt genuinely proud of yourself. Not just pleased that something went well. Proud. My guess is that it probably wasn’t a moment when everything was easy. It may have been a difficult conversation you finally had or something you were terrified to do but did anyway. Maybe it was a time when life threw something at you that you didn’t think you could handle, and you discovered that you could.
There’s something about navigating difficult experiences that changes how we see ourselves. We begin to trust ourselves. We learn that even when we don’t know exactly what to do, we can figure things out. We can make mistakes. We can experience discomfort. We can get through hard things.
I think motherhood works the same way.
When everything goes according to plan, we might feel successful. But when things don’t go according to plan, and we discover that we can still show up in ways we’re proud of, we begin to feel capable.
Success feels good in the moment. Capability is something we get to carry with us.
That’s what I experienced that night in the hospital. I wasn’t proud because I had figured out how to make my daughter feel better. I hadn’t. I was proud because I was able to be the mother I wanted to be, even when I couldn’t make anything better. And that experience gave me something I could carry into other hard moments.
The knowledge that I didn’t have to fix everything to be a good mother.
Your kids don’t have to be okay for you to be a good mom.
I think this is one of the hardest things for mothers to really believe because of course we want our kids to be okay. We love them. Their happiness is important to us. Their suffering is painful to witness. But our children are going to experience disappointment. They’re going to feel left out. They’re going to struggle with things that come easily to other kids. They’re going to get angry with us. They’re going to make lots of mistakes. And sometimes, despite our very best efforts, they’re going to get hurt. We cannot prevent all of that. And even if we could, I’m not sure we’d be doing them any favors.
Our children need opportunities to discover that they can experience difficult things and come out the other side. They need to learn that disappointment doesn’t mean something has gone terribly wrong. That frustration is something they can tolerate. That they can feel sad, angry, scared, or uncertain and still be okay. And one of the ways they learn that is through their relationship with us.
When we can stay connected to them while they’re struggling, without immediately needing to make the struggle disappear, we’re giving them something incredibly valuable. We’re showing them that difficult experiences are part of life, and that they don’t have to face those experiences alone.
But there’s something else happening in those moments, too. We’re building our own confidence. We’re learning that we can tolerate our children’s discomfort without making it mean something terrible about ourselves. And that changes the experience of motherhood.
Imagine how different motherhood could feel.
Imagine not needing your child to cooperate in order to feel like you’re doing a good job. Imagine being able to watch your child struggle without immediately questioning whether you’ve done something wrong. Imagine getting to the end of a really hard day and still feeling proud of the mother you were.
In this scenario, you probably didn’t handle every moment perfectly. But you were able to recognize what was happening, make choices you felt good about, and repair when you needed to.
Imagine how much energy you might have if you weren’t constantly trying to prove to yourself that you’re a good mother. How much less you’d need to control. How much less you’d need to fix. How much more room there might be to enjoy your children for who they actually are, rather than who you think they need to be.
This is a big part of what I help mothers develop through Relational Intelligence. This is the ability to stay connected to yourself and your children when things are difficult, uncertain, or uncomfortable. To recognize when something actually needs solving and when what your child needs most is your presence. To trust yourself to navigate the experiences you cannot predict or control. To stop using every difficult moment as another opportunity to question whether you’re doing motherhood right.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after all these years of working with mothers: The mothers who feel most confident aren’t necessarily the ones whose children struggle the least. They’re the ones who have learned to trust themselves when their children struggle.
And that kind of confidence changes everything.
You don’t have to wait for things to get easier to feel like a good mom.
I still think about that night in the hospital. My little girl curled up next to me, hurting, waiting for a surgery neither of us wanted her to have. There was nothing peaceful or joyful about what was happening, and I would have given anything to take away her pain. But I couldn’t. What I could do was hold her. And looking back, I wouldn’t trade the experience of being able to show up for her that way.
It taught me something about motherhood that I wish more women understood. You don’t have to make everything better to be a good mother. Sometimes the moments that make us feel most proud of ourselves aren’t the ones when everything goes right.
They’re the ones when everything goes wrong, and we discover that we’re capable of being exactly the mother we want to be anyway.
And when you begin to trust that about yourself, you can finally stop working so hard to prove it.
