Flour Fiasco: I Am Not a Calm Mom

…And that is okay. How the “calm mom” ideal is not serving us.

One slow summer day, I decided to make a flour sensory bin for the kids. This involved putting flour into a bin with a few scoops and popsicle sticks. Not a particularly fancy Pinterest or Instagram-worthy sensory bin, but my kids had asked to “play” with flour for a while after a recent baking adventure, so it seemed like a good time for it.  Maybe if it had more pizazz to it, it wouldn’t have gone upside down so fast, but let’s be real here—I was headed for chaos no matter what. I was prepared in some ways: we did it outside and there was an extra-large trash bag underneath the bin. This was going to be messy but that is the point, right? All four kids wanted to participate, the older kids feeling especially restless with all their unstructured time. This may have been a clue that there was to be some excitement-seeking, but hindsight is 20/20.  Initially, it was off to a great start. Everyone was enjoying getting to play with the flour.  It was “snow” at first, then they moved on to some pretend baking. It’s hard to know who tossed the first handful of flour, but what started as a playful exchange quickly turned into a flour bomb. It was everywhere. All over the deck, bodies, hair, shoes and so on. My kids were covered from head to toe in flour. In reflection, the yield of the flour was amazing. The surface area that fluffy white material could cover was impressive. My kids felt it was hilarious, shrieking with laughter. The most enjoyment was had at the expense of the toddler. Now she looked like an old lady with snow white hair. Like most sibling activities, the shared laughter turned into eventual squabbling, and pleas for others to stop weren’t heeded. The total time elapsed for this activity was probably ten minutes. A ratio of ten minutes of “fun” for them to an hour of clean up for me.

How I used to think my experience should go…

This is how I would play it out in my head: the flour sensory bin has gone awry. The flour starts flying and suddenly a toddler looks like a little old lady, her hair completely white. I take a deep breath or two. This is just flour, and I notice that they are having fun. I laugh. It’s not how I thought it would go but that’s okay. They will remember this with joy and that is what matters. It’s the little moments that make the most beautiful memories. We only have so many summers together. It’s just a little mess, we can clean it up.

And here is my actual experience…

I try to take a breath, okay it’s already a mess, it’s fine…IT’S FINE! Tension in body, telling myself it’s already a mess just lean in…. but I am mad. I am really mad.  Why do things like this always end this way? They have only done this for a few minutes and it is already chaos. I am mad at them and I am mad at me, why don’t I know better by now? We just can’t do these things. I know they won’t help me clean this up. Jeez, they are such a mess I will have to give them all showers and I can’t let them in or there will be flour footprints everywhere. Then I am short with them all, bouncing back and forth between lecturing and heavy frustrated sighs. I am not patient. I am not calm. I do not lean in and see the joy. I get through all the clean up and I am still mad as hell through all of it.

The “Calm Mom”

See, I am a not a “calm mom.” I am not a laid-back and I struggle to be patient. For a long time, I tried so hard to foster the “calm mom”. Oh, I wanted to be her so badly. It was what I had imagined myself to be before I became a mother and then it was hammered into me with a cultural sledgehammer that that was what I was “supposed” to be. There are definitely a couple of ways that this idea got so deeply wedged into my psyche.

There was an occupational component here. I was actually a very calm therapist, but a calm therapist does not a calm mom make. They are not the same thing. The raw reality of the 24/7 job of parenthood in no way compares to the role one plays in a clinical space. This reality can create an added layer of shame for parents in the helping professions. There is a very big SHOULD that sits on your shoulders about how you SHOULD be good at this. You have all that extra experience and training after all. Parents who work in mental health, healthcare and education, I see you.

Then there was the messaging around how important it is that a parent
(and let’s be honest, this overwhelmingly falls on mothers) to be calm most of the time and especially at times of stress. We hear this message through many channels—from experts, social media, family, neighbors and so on. This idea comes with well intentions but sets us up for failure. And the more those feelings of failure pile up, you only move further away from the “calm mom”.

So here I am. I have this big, hulking expectation that I am going to be a “calm mom” and I should be calm all of the time. Heck, I NEED to be a calm mom, because according to all the research, my kids’ positive character traits, mental health, accomplishments, SAT scores, and future well-being for their WHOLE LIVES depend on it! Also, they should have no sugar or screen time, but that is a story for another day. I so badly wanted to be a calm presence. And when that didn’t happen, that second arrow came in fast. The second arrow is a Buddhist concept: the first arrow being the suffering, the “thing” that happened (the chaos or the subsequent me losing my cool) and the second arrow is the suffering you inflict on yourself, the shame or the verbal beating you give yourself. The perfectionist in me did what you do when you feel you are not good enough: I studied, learned and collected so many “tools”. If I just kept working on it, I would be the “calm mom”, it would come. Even though I do know a thing or two about feelings and how little control we have over them, that sneaky perfectionist voice would tell me that I was going to be the calm mom I could override this and be a Zen master mama. The meditation, mindfulness practices, self-care and so on, they were all to get me to the place of being the “calm mom”, “the laid-back mom”, “the patient mom”. If I kept doing all the things, I would get frustrated less and in turn calmness would reign at home.  My “calm mom”-ness would have this powerful effect on the chaos and the unicorns would appear. But that is not me, and that is not my household.

See the problem with trying to be the “calm mom” is that calm is a feeling.  We can’t control our feelings. Calm is defined as not showing or feeling nervousness, anger or other strong emotions, which seems like a tall order when raising small humans or even just being a human. I worry that calm has become the new happy in the face of pushback against toxic positivity. We are inundated with the idea that calm is the goal, the expectation and the norm. We want kids to be calm in school, adults to be calm at work and as parents…well you got it. Calm is the A+. And much like what we have learned with toxic positivity, trying to force a “good” type of feeling and ignore negative feelings doesn’t get us very far. In fact, it can put us further down the hole and in the opposite direction of where you are hoping to go. Could we be entering a period of “toxic calm”? I know this may feel like I am being awfully hard on calm. It’s such a sweet word, and it evokes an image of a soft, fluffy blanket or a peaceful, solid mountain. I just want to stretch into it and be there. There is actually nothing wrong with calm itself. Calm is great and I have times when I am calm. When calmness enters, say “welcome”, sit with it and enjoy its presence, but do not make it a goal or an identity. It’s not fair to you and it’s not fair to calm. We are putting a lot of weight on this one feeling. The same pressures we have put on happiness for years. No one feeling is going to solve all the problems of the world. You need them all.

So, then what? Ok, calm is out but we still should try to do something and not go off the rails, right? Try self-regulation on for size. Often, I hear “being calm” and self-regulation used interchangeably but I think it is important to separate them. Self-regulation is a process, not a feeling, not a static state or goal. There are resources, past learning and skills needed for this process. Sometimes the process will change depending on the constraints in the moment. These constraints can be internal or external and are often outside of one’s control. Sometimes the process is not accessible. Self-regulation is not an endpoint to reach—you will never end the day and say “I was so self-regulated today, 10/10, met my goal, pat on the back, gold star for self-regulation.” Self-regulation is the pause between a feeling and reaction, which might look like calm but doesn’t have to be. You can be angry and use self-regulation. You can be nervous and use self-regulation. You don’t have to be calm to be self-regulated. You can support self-regulation and be the whatever in the world mom you are.

So, what I really focus on is caring for myself in way that allows me to support the process of self-regulation as much as I can, given the constraints of any moment. I still do the things: I meditate, I practice mindfulness and engage in self-care in the service of me, not in the service of an emotion or some parent ideal I have no control over. I do things in service of acceptance of me as I am here and now. When things (sometimes often) go astray—as they inevitably will—I restore, heal, get back to equilibrium, repair, rinse and repeat.

What type of mom am I?

So, if I am not the “calm mom” or the “patient mom”, what kind of a mom am I? I know I can’t always be self-regulated either so I am not a “self-regulated” mom. I am learning I am not a type. I bring many things to this role and they don’t fit nicely into one category. Digging deep into this question I have many strengths that were there before I became a mother. I have parts of me that have been brought forward by motherhood, strengths I didn’t know were there. I also have growing edges and the patchy spots, the things that aren’t where I excel. I have it all. I am a human mom and I am okay with that. After all I am raising human children, so that seems like a good fit.

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Bonus Video: What to Do When You Mess Up with Your Kids?