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Do you ever wish you could be a stay-at-home mom? Or maybe you don’t wish to be home with your kids ALL the time, but you just wish you could work less hours and be home with them more? I call this stay-at-home mom envy. In today’s podcast, I share about my own experience of stay-at-home mom envy and share with you the truth about where it comes from and why it pops up.
Topics in this episode:
Why you might be dreaming about being a stay-at-home mom, even though you are highly ambitious.
What happens when you feel you don’t spend enough time with your kids and family
Stay-at-home mom envy is a defense mechanism to ensure you don’t fail as a mom or a worker
If you could solve your work-life-balance challenges, would you still want to be home with your kids?
I can help you overcome your stay-at-home mom envy and learn to feel like you are “enough” at both work and home. Click here to learn more and schedule a free breakthrough call: https://www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/aligning-motherhood-program
Learn to be a more present and connected mom! Click here to sign up for a free 19-day audio series that will teach you tools & strategies for being present and happy in your everyday life. Click here to sign up: https://www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/be-present-optin
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Transcript
Intro
Do you ever wish that you could be a stay at home mom? Or maybe you don't wish to be home with your kids all the time, but you wish you could quit and be more singularly focused?
I call this stay at home mom envy, and it can be very confusing for a highly successful, career driven woman to find themselves dreaming about being home with their kids or not making work the center of their focus. But stay at home envy, I have found, to not just be very common among high achieving women, but it doesn't actually mean that you want to be home with your kids or that you don't want to work.
In today's podcast, I want to talk about the experience of stay at home envy and share the truth about where it comes from. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Hello, working mom friends. Today I want to talk about a subject that comes up a lot with my clients. And to be honest, it comes up a lot on breakthrough calls as well with women that are trying to sort out if they want to keep working or not, or if they would rather just be a stay at home mom for a while, or even just work part time.
And whenever I see one of my clients or potential clients talking about being a stay at home mom, I call that stay at home mom envy.
And what's confusing about stay at home mom envy is that it feels so real for many women, this yearning, this desire to be home with their children. And look, there's certainly nothing wrong with being a stay at home mom or wanting to be home with your kids. But 90 plus percent of the time, for ambitious, very driven women that I tend to work with, it's not actually that they want to be home with their kids. It's just that it feels like the only solution.
One of the questions I ask my clients, or potential clients on these calls when they're contemplating potentially taking a break from work and being a stay at home mom or working part time or whatever it is. I ask them if they could learn how to have better balance in their life where it feels like something that they're in control of.
Like if they could really learn how to separate themselves from their job. In other words, if they really learned how to be successful at their job and still feel like they are present and connected to their kids and like they spent enough time with their kids, would they still think about being a stay at home mom?
Feeling successful at both work and home.
The majority pretty quickly tell me no. They would continue to work if they could figure out how to truly feel successful at both. In which case, it's not actually that they want to be a stay at home mom. And that's coming from a deep place of desire. Instead, it's coming from this place of, envy. Hence why I call it stay at home mom envy.
Now, stay at home mom envy often comes into play when work feels like it's getting the best of you, or where your family and the priorities of your family feel like they're just not simply being honored or not being put first.
And the reality of every working mom, at least those that work full time, is that you will spend more time working away from your children during your work week than you will spend with your kids. And our mama bear instincts tell us almost on this very deep innate level that this is wrong.
Even if you don't have any desire to be a stay at home mom, it's still likely true that you at times, or maybe even regularly, your brain likes to take you to this place, that you should be spending more time with your children, that you're actually doing them a disservice to not spend more time with them. And in fact, you might even be a bad mom because you don't spend more time with your children.
Feeling not good enough.
It's this feeling of not being enough as a mom that oftentimes brings up the stay at home mom envy, or just that thought of being part time or taking a break from work or doing something that essentially would allow you more time with your kids.
And it's not even that you think that being a stay at home mom would be easier, because we all know the amount of work that a stay at home mom puts in. And we all know that being a stay at home mom is a job, and it's a very hard one. There's a lot of effort and work that goes into intentionally raising our children and being with them full time.
So it's not that the job will be easier, though for sure it will be different. But what your brain likes to think, at least, is that if you were a stay at home mom, you can, at least on some level, end all of these swirly thoughts about not being a good enough mom.
At least your brain thinks that that will solve the problem. Instead of focusing on how you could be successful at two things your job and your life as a mom, your brain just wants to focus on the one. It thinks that that's the solution.
If I could just focus on making one successful, then that would be easier, that would be better. And look, you're not wrong. If you were able to quit your job and just be home with your kids, there would be more of a singular focus. You would have more mental space to focus on just being a mom and being the mom that you ultimately want to be and raising your children in the way you want to raise them.
Being a stay-at-home mom isn’t going to solve all your problems.
But the reality is it's not going to solve your not enough thoughts. You will still have not enough thoughts. They just won't be about the amount of time you'll be spending with your kids.
Instead, you will feel like you're not doing enough for your family because you're not making any money.
Instead, you're going to feel like you're not doing enough with your degree or your education or your knowledge. You'll feel like you're not making, enough of an impact in the world. You'll feel like you should be doing more with your time and your energy now that you're home.
Not enoughness - that's a mindset.
It's not a truth. “Something being enough”. - And if you could see me, you could see my air quotes here” something being enough or not enough” is completely subjective.
There isn't a specified amount of time that you could spend with your kids that would be deemable enough, where it would be a fact, it wouldn't be known. Everybody would know that it's true.
I have clients that work 60 hours a week and feel like the time that they spend with their kids is not enough. And I have clients that quit their jobs and they're home with them full time and they still feel like they don't have enough time to spend with their kids. It's completely subjective.
Enoughness as a mom has no connection to time.
I also know that enoughness as a mom has no connection to time because that would mean that every stay at home mom would be better, would be enough than every working mom because a stay at home mom spends a lot more time with their kids. And we obviously know that that's not true.
What you deem as enough or not enough is completely subjective.
Now, we could also talk about what it means to be enough at work, at what point you have worked enough, at what point you have had enough success, at what point you have done enough for the day. You could talk to 100 different women and you're going to get 100 different answers.
Why? Because enoughness is not a fact.
You just get to decide when you have done enough, when you are doing enough, when you are being enough, when you have spent enough time with your children, when you have spent enough time working, when you have put in enough effort. You just get to decide.
So there's a connection between not feeling good enough and having stay at home mom envy. Or in other words, your brain kind of wandering to thinking that the solution would be to be a stay at home mom or work part time.
Now, I know I've just talked about how there's a correlation between feeling not enough as a mom and this connection to stay at home mom envy. But I also see stay at home mom envy pop up when you're not feeling good enough at work, when you're not feeling like you're living up to your potential at work, when you're not feeling enough at your job, if you feel like you aren't successful enough or not getting enough done. This is another time that I often see working moms sort of indulge in stay at home mom envy.
I have a client now, actually, that's struggling with this. When we started working together, she had a hunch that she wanted to be a stay at home mom for a while.
But after a few sessions together, it became clear that the heart of her reasoning for wanting to be a stay at home mom or sort of being drawn to be a stay at home mom was really this constant feeling of failure that she had at her job.
And to be honest, for her, it was easier to think that maybe the reason she wasn't as good as she wanted to be at her job was really just because she was a mom now and that she wanted to spend more time with her kids.
It was much harder for her to admit that she just wasn't living up to her own expectations as a worker and sort of owning up to that failure.
So instead of owning up to the failure, her brain went to this place of, oh, maybe really what I want is to be a stay at home mom anyway and to be with my kids instead and kind of indulging in this stay at home mom envy.
One of the ways we in coaching get to the bottom of if you really want to be a stay at home mom or if you're just envying stay at home moms is, we look for a pattern.
In my client's case, she had a pattern of really thinking about almost indulging in fantasizing about being a stay at home mom whenever work got really hard, whenever there was a project or a task that she didn't feel like she excelled in, her brain naturally, almost like it was a defense mechanism, would go to this place of wishing she was just a stay at home mom and she could just spend time with her kids.
Breaking patterns that are keeping us stuck.
And once she saw the pattern, once she realized that this was sort of a safety mechanism in her brain to think about quitting and being a stay at home mom rather than addressing the heart of the issue, which was that she was feeling inadequate at her job, the direction in our coaching shifted and we started focusing on the thoughts that she was having about herself and her confidence in herself at work.
And she realized how negatively she thought about herself and her job. Even though she's highly successful in what she's doing right now and has made remarkable progress and success over the last couple of years.
I had a conversation with a new client on her breakthrough call just the other day, where she told me about how envious she was of her husband, who was a stay at home dad, and how this resentment had been building up inside of her, and she felt like she was just missing out on her kids life and their milestones. And she hated that so much of her time and her energy went to her job.
When I asked her how much she worked, she told me roughly like 50 hours. And then when I asked her how much outside of that 50 hours did she think about work, she said probably another 15 to 20. So that's 65 or 70 hours in a work week that she spent thinking about work or actually doing work.
There are other solutions than only becoming a stay-at-home mom.
I asked her if we could solve for that 20 to 30 hours that she was working or thinking about work above and beyond a normal work week. Like if we could inevitably figure out how to get that time back so that she could spend it with her family or on herself, would she want to do that instead of be a stay at home mom? And the answer was very clearly yes.
Her brain was thinking that the only solution to getting back time with her family and prioritizing her family and being the mom that she wanted to be was quitting.
But I told her she didn't need to quit, that through coaching, she could actually find another way, a way to start saying no, to not have back to back meetings all day. So she could actually prioritize her own goals, her own tasks.
She could actually leave work each day feeling like she did a good job and feel satisfied in it, feel like it was enough that she didn't have to work more hours than she really wanted to. Her brain didn't see another way. And I'll be honest and tell you that it's not the easiest of ways.
Addressing your overworking habits and behaviors is hard work.
It requires vulnerability. It requires you to admit to yourself and to be honest with yourself about what it is you really want and why.
It requires honest conversations with your partner, maybe even your boss.
It requires you believing in your own value and what you have to offer in a way that you probably don't.
Now, that's hard work. In a lot of ways, it's harder than just quitting and being home with your kids.
Now, I don't want to discount the fact that some women do in fact, want to be home with their children. There is a small percentage of women that I work with that are highly ambitious and driven in their career before having kids. And then once they start having kids, quite literally everything changes and they no longer want to work.
Even if I could give them a magic pill and tomorrow, magically, they would feel balanced and successful at work, they would still choose to be home with their kids full time.
I've had clients that have made that determination with me in coaching, and I walk them through the process of either quitting or making some kind of an exit plan that works for them.
Because once we were able to weed through their not enough thoughts and begin to dream about the life that they really want for themselves and why they want to be a stay at home mom, they discover it's not really a reactionary desire. It's not coming from a place of deficit or a place of not enoughness as a mom. It's coming from a dream, a vision of the kind of motherhood experience that they want.
And I could think of a client that I've had that they told me they wanted to be a stay at home mom because she thought it was best for her kids that having a nanny or even a grandparent and certainly a daycare take care of her kids all day while she was at work. Quite literally felt like she was giving her child less than the best.
“I struggled a lot with stay at home envy just after my daughter was born.”
And I remember feeling that way for myself. I struggled a lot with stay at home envy just after my daughter was born. It felt downright wrong to send my sweet little baby angel to daycare so that I can work an hour away. And it felt like somebody else was raising my child. And I felt like a terrible mom.
So I could totally relate to what this client was saying. But when we really dug into it, she knew all of the benefits of having her child be watched by another human being. She could come up with countless arguments for why it actually would be a really good thing for her kids.
It’s simply a choice.
She could see it objectively that this was simply a choice, it wasn't a better choice. And that her thinking on this like, that she was the absolute cream of the crop, best person to raise her child, was actually sort of false.
And after a few sessions of really digging in, what it came down to was that she just really wanted to be home with her kids. Like, this was the dream. This was the vision. She wanted her primary responsibility to be raising her child. And it was okay to want that. It was okay to do something like quit your job, to be home with your kid just because you want to.
I want to say I find this to be very rare. It's rare for a very ambitious and career driven woman to actually want, deep down in her core, to be a stay at home mom and to give up working altogether.
Ambitious, career driven moms really want is to be fulfilled.
Instead, what I find is that ambitious, career driven moms, what they really want is to be fulfilled. They want to be successful in their job without working a ton of hours and feeling a ton of stress. They want to be successful at both work and home. They want to have the energy at the end of the work day to be with their kiddos, and they envy stay at home moms because it feels like the only way to truly prioritize your family and to not feel so split is to stop working altogether.
So if this is you, I want to ask you if there was another way, would you take it? If you truly believed that you could be successful at both work and home, that you didn't have to work the 60 plus hours a week to be successful, where you could have the energy and the time with your family just like you want? If that was possible, would you go after that?
Because that's what I offer in coaching over the course of our six months together in coaching.
You learn to identify the mindsets and behaviors that are causing you to over prioritize work, and you learn how to change them. You name your value as a worker, as a mom, as a human being. You stop second guessing yourself and feeling like an imposter. You feel clear about what it is you want and why you want it, and you decide if you really want to work or if you really do want to stay home and you love your reasons.
You will start to feel more in control and free.
Either way, you start to feel more in control and free, with your time, your energy. You will increase that feeling of success in all areas of life.
You don't have to quit.
You don't have to envy stay at home moms and feel like the only way is to work less in order to actually have the working mom life that you want.
You don't have to choose between work and family. It's a both and life.
If you are interested in connecting with me about coaching, I encourage you to schedule that Free Breakthrough call where we get to talk very specifically about your circumstances in life. We talk about your dreams and your aspirations and your wants, and I will show you exactly how we will achieve those together in coaching.
All you have to do is go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to schedule a time to connect with me. I can't wait to talk to you.
Together we are creating a movement of working moms that believe they can be successful at both work and home, that they don't have to sacrifice their family and they don't have to choose.
You can have both, and I can't wait to show you how. All right, working moms till next week. Let's get to it.
