299: Does Your Partner Acknowledge All That You Do As A Mom?

[00:00:00] Randi Rubenstein: My name is Randi Rubenstein, and welcome to the Mastermind Parenting Podcast. At Mastermind Parenting, we’re on a mission to support strong-willed kids and the families that love them. 

Hi everyone. Uh, I have a fun episode this week. I’m actually going to let y’all be flies on the wall of a conversation in one of my groups. And it’s a dad’s voice. It’s fun. It’s fun to hear from a dad. Um, yeah, just really talking about what is happening inside their home. 

Um, and my response to, um, I of course weave in a lot of topics, including attachment. I’ve been going down this rabbit hole learning all about attachment and, um, yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been reading an interesting book. I really want to have her on the podcast. So yeah, the book’s called The Strange Situation and I think it’s an interesting way to understand attachment. 

Um, and side note, this has nothing to do with constantly being attached to your baby or wearing your baby. Even though I was a big fan of wearing the babies, that’s not what we’re talking about here. 

Um, I think it’s pretty critical that all of us understand more about our own attachments. Um, yeah, I know I do everything out of order. This is like such an obvious thing and I’m just starting to really go in and learn about it and I’m like, well, this is pretty important. It actually is teaching me a lot about myself. 

So I talk about attachment. I also, there’s been another conversation in my groups, in several of my groups where, probably since I’ve been starting to talk about attachment, you know, a lot of the moms who, a lot of y’all who listened to this podcast or work with me, you know, you’re the kind of parents that are learning things. And there’s a shadow side. 

When we start to learn things and then we, we move into the messy middle. Like at the beginning, when you first start to learn something and you try something out, maybe you’ve started listening to my podcast and you learned about, you know, I don’t know, there was something. two positive choices or, you know, knowing that, that that kids act on the outside the way they feel on the inside. And so a kid that is having a meltdown and you know, you know, hurling violent words at you, telling you the worst mom ever, I hate you. I can’t stand this family. 

Like understanding, okay, this is my child who is just feeling so outta control. It’s like in their body, they feel like they’ve been kidnapped by the mafia. So if I take any of their words right now to heart, then I’m just in my emotional brain, right? Like that’s not my fully evolved grownup thinking brain. That’s me. That’s like my, like, that’s a wounded part that just got, feels like it got stabbed, but that’s not my adult self. Right? 

And so we start to learn some of these things and we, and we start to make shifts in our household. And then there comes this messy middle part when we realize either we start, we realize, gosh, I did it wrong. Or what if I damaged my kids? Or what if before I knew better, like, what if, what if that is irreparable? What if I, what if I screwed them up? What if no matter what I do now, their early years are going to be what boomerangs them back to the patterns that I didn’t want for them. Right? 

Like, so a lot of the parents that work with me, I think come to that. And I remember, and I still sometimes will go there. When I’m learning about this attachment stuff, I’m like, well, how could I have ever been a good mom? I think I’m avoidant attachment. Right, like I know I was super um affectionate with my babies but what if I was? Like, I know, I know there’s, there’s lots of stuff that I’m looking at that I didn’t perfectly that I can see differently now. And I’ll find myself going down into that shame spiral too. 

So what happens to a lot of us is as we start to learn more, It’s easy to go into that shame spiral, which feels terrible and will stall us out. So several of the moms on, in my groups have been talking about the early years, right? Like I just beat myself up because my kid, you know, I was finishing up my PhD and um, my kid went straight to daycare. Or I had this major health event, and I couldn’t be with my baby for the first three months of his life. And those first three months are so critical. Like, like I have so much guilt about that. And, and this dad that I’m responding to in the coaching clip, his wife has had a lot of guilt and shame about the early stages with her son.

And so I, I also talk about that and poke holes in this narrative that makes us all feel so guilty that the way, yes, the early stages of a child’s is, uh, they’re very important. and also we can undo, we can reverse, you know, the order of things. We can’t, it’s like, it’s not irreparable, right? And um, and so I speak to that as well.

So enjoy this week’s episode. And if you guys are getting anything out of this, please make sure that you share the podcast with people that you think that it can help. And if you, you know, are feeling really generous and industrious, um, do the whole subscribe and review and do all that. Cause I do think it helps the podcast to, to get in front of more people. And that’s the point of it is I just want to help people. So have a great week.

[00:06:39] Masterminder Brandon: Good morning. I just wanted to jump on here and celebrate a little bit and express some gratitude for this program. Monique is just masterminding the hell out of our house right now. She is firing on all cylinders and as a result, so is Billy. I mean, things are just clicking and working and the program, it’s, it’s all just making sense and coming together and wow, I’m so happy. I don’t know what else to say.

We went to a barbecue over the weekend. It was late and Billy had been playing out in the sun all day and he ate a cookie and there was a lot of noise and kids there. I mean, the stage was set for a total meltdown. And when we were approaching that potential meltdown, Billy came over to his mom. He said he was getting mad. He needed help. He wanted the kids that were at the party to stop playing soccer because it was too much for him. And instead of, you know, attacking somebody or throwing a fit or having a meltdown or acting out, he just came and asked his mom for help. And Monique just had all the right things to say. 

He’s getting so aware and in touch with his emotions and his feelings and learning how to handle them appropriately. And I just, I, I just had to come on here and say thank you, Randi. And. and everybody in our group and for everybody’s support and help. I know these things tend to ebb and flow and, you know, we solve one problem, and then another one pops up later, and as life moves on and changes, there’s going to be new challenges, but man, we are in a good space right now, and it’s so awesome.

One more thing too, Billy is going to bed every night without a fight, without a problem. Sleep and bedtime routine, which really feels like, you know, the foundation or one of the pillars of this whole program, is so dialed in right now and I, and it’s no wonder that everything else is kind of falling in line as well.

He’s going to bed every night, no fighting, no problem. Stays in his room until his alarm goes off the next day. Even if he wakes up 20 minutes before the alarm goes off, he just stays in his room and plays. This morning, I went down 5 minutes before the alarm went off. He was awake and he was just sitting on the ground reading a book. It just, it’s amazing. 

If you’d have told me any of this was possible when we first started, I would have thought, well, probably not for our situation. I’m sure this program will improve our lives, but it’s, my son’s never going to go to bed at 7:30 at night and stay in his room until 7 o’clock the next morning and till an alarm goes off. It’s just it’s amazing. Again, thank you so much. So much gratitude over here.

[00:09:21] Randi Rubenstein: Brandon, You just show up as you taking the time and I loved what you said. Like, I know it’s going to ebb and flow, but right now, things are great. Does it mean that, you know, life is always going to be great? No.

This human experience, as I say, it’s freaking messy. We’re going to go through changes and transitions and new seasons and things we have to get used to. And we crave familiar and certainty, and it makes us feel safe in our bodies. And so when something’s new, it throws us off kilter and there’s a transition time. And you’re right. That’s this is the human experience. There’s we ebb and flow, ebb and flow. 

Are, you know, the growth mindset is, when we’re in the ebbs, we’re learning how to lean into the suckage. And understanding, it’s like, whenever Lindsey’s going through one of these ebbs, which she just went through big time this summer. You know, moving multiple times a hurricane, um, throwing this destination bar mitzvah, her kid getting sick right before. There was just all kinds of ebbs. 

You know, she’s a person that really, you know, she loves her space. She loves to hunker down at home. And this has been a big transitional summer for her. And every time she’s in one of these seasons, she, she’s like, the law of fucking polarity is fucking on right now. And the law of polarity, you know, I mean, it’s like, this is growth mindset is when we remember when we’re in the ebbs, it sucks. And, we can lean into the suckage and know, sometimes you got to go out into the freezing cold to appreciate the warm fire.

Like, when she moves back into her house after this summer, is she going to have even a bigger appreciation for her remodeled house after. being in Lots of less than ideal other houses? You know, she’s going to be Loving that she not only is past this planning of this bar mitzvah and this big ritual and all this, you know, this whole big event and her kid is prepared. 

Like, she’s going to be in a season going into next year where it’s like, we can just flow for a while and man, it feels good to flow. Because I went through the summer of hard, and now I appreciate the flow even more and we remind ourselves when we’re in the ebbs. Yeah, this sucks right now. And when I’m on the other side, it’s probably going to be that much sweeter. And also this sucks right now. Right? This human experience, half the time we feel shitty, half the time we feel great. That’s just the bottom line. 

Where do we get really hung up is when we are arguing with the 50 percent that’s shitty. And it’s like, no, 50 percent of it, That’s the law of polarity. 50 percent of the time it’s gonna suck and it sucks a lot less when we stop arguing with ourselves that it shouldn’t suck. It’s just the human experience. 

You know, as I send Cory off to college, and we go into this next season of life and Avery’s a recent graduate, like, I knew in my personal life it was going to be a new season. And I’m going through a big internal shift right now. And it’s been, It’s been hard, you know, it has it’s been hard. 

I have a lot of like, anxiety I notice in my belly. And being a person that turned off the sensations of my body. I think probably this started during my first year of life. I’ve got a lot of years of dismissing and bypassing my own body, so just the fact that I can feel the anxiety, It’s very uncomfortable and it’s a very new sensation for me. And it really just started in the last couple of years. So I’m still, you know, going through these things. So, yes, there’s ebbs and there’s flows. 

The other piece that I wanted to say is, you know, I know Monique. Yeah, I’ve been going, because of my own personal stuff that’s going on, I’ve been, I go down, you know, I’ve been going down rabbit holes, As I do, learning things. And ever since I made a proclamation that I’m no longer putting any bandwidth towards marketing. And so my bandwidth is going in all the other areas, like, no more do I have to, like, listen to business things in my spare time and try to learn one more business thing. I’m, I’m just not, I just learn what I feel like learning. 

And so lately, I’ve been going down this rabbit hole of attachment, learning all about early attachment and I’m reading a very interesting book right now. It’s called The Strange Situation, and it talks about this, the famous study that was done, many years ago where they created this, this strange situation. That’s what that’s what the study was called the strange situation, and the book’s called The Strange Situation. and it really studied, um, mothers and infants and how our attachment styles, develop. 

 And I know,, Monique, you’ve had a lot of guilt and shame about the early, you know, years with Billy. And I think something that’s very interesting that Brandon just noticed is how he came over to you. Right? Like, he came over to you. He’s three, almost four. So he came over to you and said, I’m feeling angry about this. Instead of just acting on the outside the way he feels on the inside, he came over to his mom and basically said. I need your help. Right? And if that isn’t secure attachment, I don’t know what is. 

So there’s your evidence. Whatever you were going through during Billy’s early years, where you are and what you have worked so hard. Like this version that you’ve worked so hard to become and are still becoming, Billy showed you in that moment, That he is attached to you. He feels safe with you. He trusts you. It’s just so beautiful.

 Thanks for listening today, guys. I hope you picked up some tips, tools, maybe some baby steps for creating more balance and boundaries in your life. And I just wanted to let you know, if you want to continue moving the needle forward in creating this for yourself, having a happier household, I want you to go to my website and check out mastermindparenting.com. We have three beginning programs, and if you need some accountability and more support then please look for the one that would be a good fit for you.

And, as always, we’re on all the social channels under Mastermind Parenting, on Instagram it’s mastermind_parenting. And, you know, periodically I do pop up on different Instagram lives, Facebook lives where I give you teaching and coaching and I love engaging with you live to help you help your strong-willed kids so that they can feel better, because when they feel better they do better, and I love, love, love getting to know you guys. 

So thanks for listening. If you like this podcast, please don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review. Super, super appreciative.