When parenting feels unequal

“So we have to have an awareness that there are these four entities that need caretaking the same way we do with our money, the same way we do with property or investment, the same way that we do with a garden bed.”

Julie Tenner @Nourishingthemother

Our guest today is a mother of four children, ages 5 to 17. She knows well how the demands of parenting can run you into the ground. She made the choice to step off the “struggle bus of overwhelm” — as she calls it — but it was a move that took time, and conscious effort.

The secret? Establishing clear boundaries. And choosing not to identify with the “mother as martyr” role. So many of us look for our partners to validate how hard we are working, before we give ourselves permission to delegate and take a break. Or hold onto resentment because we feel we are shouldering more than our fair share of the parenting burden. 

In this episode, Julie Tenner gives us permission to ask: What do I need to show up as the best version of myself in this family? She is an Australian-based relationship expert who shares her wisdom as co-host of the podcast Nourishing the Mother. You can also find her at julietenner.love.

Transcript:

Jessica: I’m really looking forward to this conversation and I just want to get started by asking what are some signs that we need to work on our own boundaries as parents? 

Julie: It’s when we start to get really resentful of our children or our partner, when we can realize that it’s gone from this place of open-hearted, loving, overflowing, “Yes, I want to be here. Yes, this feels fulfilling even though it might be hard, feels good on some level,” into, “Nope, I feel like I’m in a cage. I’m invisible, I’m unseen. No one sees how hard it is. I’m having to grit down and just like work harder to get through my day.” I’ve gone past a boundary. I’m washed over it and now I’m on the other side where I’m now like fighting for what I missed before my boundary, before that point of my boundary. So I kind of feel when we’re starting to move from that place of, “I’m choosing my life and this feels beautiful” into, “I’m now resenting the people that I love.”

How to avoid resenting your partner

Jessica: Yeah, that resonates.

And if you have a partner in parenting, how can we think about that scorekeeping? So for example, I like totally remember negotiating with my husband, “You went for an extra long run and my 20 minutes on the treadmill just doesn’t measure up to your long run. So now I’m feeling resentful.” How do you avoid this kind of tit for tat resentment and just trust that we’re each taking care of ourselves the way that we need to? 

Julie: I really love that question because I actually think it’s one of the most major questions in every modern day relationship that’s also involving parenting. And the way that I like to look at it is that we have these different caretaking roles. There’s, and in relationship, it’s not just you and me, in relationship, there’s the you, there’s the me, there’s the us, which is our relationship, and there’s family inc. So I perceive there’s four entities that create our life together and that like four garden beds, we need to make sure we are looking after those four gardens. Or if you are more into real estate, you have four investment properties, you need to look after those four investment properties. If you just neglect one of them and it just gets run into the ground, well now you’re having to do major repairs or knock it down or just sell it and quit and run.

So we have to have an awareness that there are these four entities that need caretaking the same way we do with our money, the same way we do with property or investment, the same way that we do with a garden bed. We have to tend to the you, to the me, to the us and to the family inc. And those four things need to have an open conversation around them. In my perception, this is what makes it much easier is if we look at that. So I like to say to couples, this is such a great opportunity because you get to really choose what you really want to be doing and what you need. What do you need to be a wholly thriving human in a week and what do you need, and what does our relationship need to match with what we want to be experiencing out of it? 

And then I would say the other part to that is being really conscious of your arrivals and your departures. So that first time where you say goodbye to each other in the mornings and you do separate things in your day, and that first time when you say hello to each other when you come back together at the end of your day, and the moment you say goodnight, whether you’re both going to bed or only one of you, I think those three arrivals or departures in your day are pinnacle moments where you can 10x your intimacy and connection. So how do I, how do you prioritize your partner beyond the kids, the house, the dishes, the list, the mental load? How do you spend 30 seconds just syncing into this human and saying, I choose you, I feel you, I’ve got a pulse point on you.

Setting boundaries in parenting

Jessica: I want to get back to this boundary setting, this conversation where you have with your partner or with your children or with yourself about what you need. I do find that I slip into these roles where all of a sudden now, I’m making dinner and I just found myself getting resentful. I was like, where did it happen that I’m making dinner [chuckle], like I’m working, come home or on the weekend, like I find myself in the kitchen kind of by myself a lot, making lunch, making dinner, cleaning up and obviously, I need to get my older kids more involved, for sure. And then I also kind of need to, I guess, talk to my husband, but it still becomes a sort of tit for tat conversation, I will say. So model this for me. Talk to me about a time that you’ve done this with your partner, where you found yourself taking on too much or feeling like you were not happy with the role that you had or the tasks that you were doing, whether it’s with your children or your husband or your partner, and you spoke up. What does that look like? 

Julie: Yeah, I love this question. For me, it’s an evolving conversation. So I don’t think this is a set it and forget it conversation. I think is you constantly change and the way that you’re living your life changes and the different ages that your children are, it brings up different capacities. And so what used to work for you when your child was a tiny, pre-one baby is going to be completely different when you have this hugely active toddler who’s between one and two and a half.

My base belief is we both get to live the life that we really want to live. And if one of us is feeling like we’re a servant to this beast, whatever it is, our family, our children, the current setup of life, then we need to have a conversation to renegotiate it because we actually both get to feel really good here. And what I would invite you to do is just do a look across my life, okay, what are the things that I do in a day, in a week? And list them all out and then use a color highlighter and go, okay, these are the things that are really inspiring to me.

I love doing this. Not even that, you’re not… It’s not like, oh my God, I feel so good all of the time when I do this, but there’s an intrinsic value for you that it’s meaningful. So for me as a naturopath, nutrition and food are actually really meaningful to me and I have the best skillset on that. So I manage and oversee what are my children eating in a day and a week? What are our menu plans looking like? What’s stocked in our cupboards, in terms of writing a list and having an overview of that. I take on the CEO role of nutrition, so I get to go, that’s really meaningful. But actually, I’ve had enough of being the only one who’s aware of my children’s medical appointments and needs, that’s feeling like a real… I have a third child who has a lot of additional needs.

So her medical needs are way, way bigger. And it had become this thing that I had just taken on like the camel. We just kind of add more on, and we rarely think to take things off. And this is the beast of the mental load. We’re mental load hoarders, we’ve gotta have a point at which we go, “Ah, it’s the straw that is breaking the camel’s back here.” And I don’t have to keep doing this. This is not my only option for life. I actually need to remember and see around me that it’s possible that I can choose something different. So I would say to you first go, here’s what I want to change. Here’s what I can’t do anymore. Here’s where I need help. And then bring it to your partner, not in a demanding way, like, resentful. You are just taking advantage of me way because you already know how that conversation’s going to go because you’re already in the energy of that rejection. Instead really syncing into being the energetic match for, we really are both on the same team. So when I have that viewpoint, I can go, “This isn’t working.” And I just like, “I can’t. We need to come up with another way.” That doesn’t mean I have to come up with another way, but it means, let’s open up creativity on how else this could look. Because it can’t keep going the way it is, how else could it look?

They want to problem-solve for you, so you just hand them the problem without the solution, like, “Here’s where I’m feeling I can’t. I need help. I don’t know how to do this,” like a vulnerable helplessness that just invites creative thought. And then you both get to workshop it. It’s like throwing spaghetti on the wall. Throw all the ideas on the wall, and then go, “Which is the one we really want to do? Let’s try it, let’s try it for the next three weeks, and let’s revisit this conversation and see if it’s working.” And that’s how my partner and I, and how I encourage other partners, other couples to do it. Every year, my husband and I have a renegotiation of our relationship agreements and our setups every year, ‘cause every year, it changes. Our kids change, our lives change, our needs change. What is inspiring to us changes. So we just kind of do this reconciliation whenever one of us is struggling and every January.

Addressing your baby’s needs with your partner

Jessica: I love this. It is such good advice. [chuckle] I wish my husband were here listening and we could just take this in together, so I can’t wait for this episode to be published. A lot of women in their early years of motherhood feel resentful of the constant wakings to feed the baby, so the fact that their bodies are required to keep this little one alive. Can you set boundaries around something at the core of your little one’s needs and how can you negotiate that with your partner? 

Julie: Yeah, gosh. I so feel this deeply because certainly, my experience with my four children has been in the natural parenting world, so it’s been in the co-sleeping, breastfeeding, all of that, and so it was a really long lesson for me to work this out. So with my first, I really struggled, really struggled. With my second, I had sort of started to work it out, so by the time she was… I think she was 11 months old, and I remember lying in bed with her in the middle of the night, and you know, they get to this stage where they start feeding every 45 minutes, and she was lying in the crook of my arm, you know, when you lie on the side, and she started scaling me like a ladder. And this was at like, [chuckle] I don’t know, 1:30 in the morning. And I remember sitting there going, “That’s it. I can’t do this anymore.” [laughter] And thinking, “How can I do this with love?”

So I spent the next couple of days just talking to her… She’s only 11 months old, but talking to her with the level of consciousness that says we’re connected. She understands, so saying, “Look, this is how it’s going to change, we’re going to have a floor bed. I’m going to lie with you, I’m going to feed you to sleep the way that we normally do, but then I’m not coming back in to feed you until…” Whatever it was for me. “But I’m here and I love you, and you’re safe. We’re just not doing this.’” And I’m going to let her have a cry and I’m going to listen to her feelings. And when you have that level of alignment, I think it’s congruence, when I was so certain on my boundary, “I can’t do this anymore because I’m going to stop being the loving mother that I am, I’m going to start resenting you, and that’s going to have an effect on our relationship. So what I need to love you so well is this.” And as mothers, just like in any relationship, we get to have needs, we get to go, “Yes, I want this for you. I connected, supported. I’m always here as your rock relationship, but to give you those things, I need these things.”

And I can tell you, with my four children, at no point… [chuckle] If I’m really sure of what my boundary is and I can love their experience of that, because they are not always going to love your boundary. You say no to this thing that they have an attachment to, there’s going to be a period where they have to tell you that they’re struggling with it, and that’s going to look like tears and crying. So if I am in a loving state, I can hear that without making it mean anything. I’ll be like, “Yeah, it’s really hard for you. I know you really want to have a feed, but I can’t give that to you right now, but I love you and I’m here.” If I can hold that space, nothing has ever taken me more than three nights, ever. If I’m out of alignment, it certainly takes longer. And I want to say we’ve taken on all of those journeys. So by the time I had my fourth, she got a gum infection and was bottle-feeding, and that was a freaking revelation to me. I was like, “Oh, this is amazing!” This thing that I’ve spent so much of my life going, “No, this… “ I’m sure the breast is best. I was like, “No, this is amazing.” So I kind of think we get leveled on all of our perceptions in parenthood.

How to delegate tasks in parenting

Jessica: We really do. We really do. You brought me back in time to my memories of trying to set boundaries around sleep. It’s so hard but you articulated that so well.

And I think it brings me to the concept of delegation. What about delegating? Why do so many of us have trouble delegating? 

Julie: Oh, I think this is a complex question, Jessica, only because I see it happen… Most of the women that I work with are high functioning, over-functioning women, who take on huge amounts of mental load and burden, super intelligent and proficient women in the world. And so it can be really hard for us to hand over the thing that we are super good at, super efficient at, like it done this particular way at this particular time. And when we delegate, we no longer have control over that. And we can often then slip back into being micromanagers rather than actually delegating, which is, “This is not important to me. I’m handing this over and letting go of it entirely,” right? I mean, you would know as…

A person who runs a business, there’s nothing worse than having a manager standing over you micromanaging what you’re doing versus them trusting that you can do this job. Might not be the way that they do it. You might do it in a way that’s two plus eight and you want it done two plus eight, but the way that they do it is five plus five. You both get to 10. And what is better for you? To spend your time micromanaging the two plus eight and running it and doing it and filling your time with that thing when you could be doing something that’s more meaningful to you, even relaxing? Or is it worth going, “Alright, I need to learn how to lean back. I need to learn how to receive, I need to learn to trust this other human that they can meet me, that I’m going to be safe in having this completion?”

So there’s a lot of micro steps, I think, that happen to being able to delegate. One of them is just recognizing, “Is this deeply meaningful to me?” If not, then it’s probably time to hand it on. And you don’t have to hand it totally, it can be in small ways if it’s too hard for your nervous system, but I think… I think delegation is hard because we’re used to hoarding it. We’ve often run our self worth based on how much we produce or get done at the end of the day, so if we’re not doing these things, are we as worthy? We have programming that makes conversation around need or asking for support from our partner that can make it really tricky. So I think delegating is hard because we have trouble letting go, we have trouble receiving, and we have trouble trusting. But I also think all of those things can be done in small and easy steps that make it easier for you. Not like a rip the band-aid off on your nervous system.

What if delegating isn’t an option?

Jessica: Yeah, I mean, for me it’s been about accepting the compromise, right? So it’s just not done the way I would do it, not done the way I want it to be done, but I try to let go of whole categories of things where I’m just like, “Okay, this is not going to be the way I want it to be done, but I can’t do it all, so I’m just going to accept.” So what about if delegating isn’t an option? So what advice do you have for parents who just feel like true victims of their circumstances, they’re just really between a rock and a hard place? 

Julie: I just think that’s a really hard place to be, and I think that at some point, we’ll all get there, and also to acknowledge that it’s much harder if you’re very isolated in your experience. So I think first off is just the acknowledgement of self, of going, “Okay, the way that I’m running life right now is really hard for me,” and being able to witness your own struggle. And then I would say, first, you’ve got to acknowledge yourself because no one else is going to acknowledge it until you do. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a relationship or not. Unless you can acknowledge where you’re at, it’s pretty rare that someone outside of you is going to do that for you. So we have to be able to witness our own vulnerability and our own struggle and acknowledge that it’s worthy to be there, first. And then we have to be able to take a breath. And I love to kind of think about how I could biohack life in a way. Like if this thing is not working for me, how else could I do it so it would work? So if I don’t have an option to get delegating, which as much as I had a partner certainly back in… I have a partner, back in the early days of parenting, I had two babies that were 18 months apart. We didn’t have support networks around us in terms of family, and he was a corporate kind of guy, so he was out the door at 7:00 and home at 7:00, 7:30 at night, so largely, the majority of it was me.

So I always had to work out, “This isn’t working. How could I do this in a way that would make it better?” So it’s things like… I love that whole idea of 20% of the work we’re doing is yielding 80% of the results. And I always look over my life and go, “How could I do this more efficiently so I free up more time where I could just be slow or experience more rest?” So if I’m spinning my wheels, spending an hour every day making lunch, how could I spend one hour on a weekend and batch-cook lunches so I’ve got them all week? When I’m making a meal, instead of spending an hour and a half every night making a meal and really negotiating the needs of kids around that, how could I batch-cook and on the weekend spend two hours and make five meals and they’re in the freezer and I don’t have to think about dinner anymore? If what I’m really finding hard is being at home when the baby’s sleeping, what could I do that would be inspiring to me in that time? Is there a book? Is there a podcast? Is there a course that I could use that time to feel like I’m fueling my mind? 

If the way that I’m doing life right now isn’t working, how else could this look? How else could this look? And look, I’m also a big proponent of getting our kids on board. I don’t ever think that this job is wholly and totally mine the way that I used to. I’ve lived that, but you really do end up exhausted and depleted and essentially unable to function at some point. It’s like running a car with no oil. At some point, you’re going to burn out and break down, right? So I always love the idea of doing things with my kids. So if I know I’ve got to clean the house, how do I involve my kids in that? Because kids love to vacuum, and they love to be useful, and they love to be needed. So how do I hand over that skillset knowing that at one point in the future, it’s really going to pay me back? So me now, thanks past me for all of those steps. Yes, it took longer to vacuum the house, yes, it took longer to cook dinner, but now, I have children who cook a meal each… From grade six, so here, that’s about age 11. They are wholly and totally responsible for a meal a night each. But that’s because pre them being 11, I taught them all of the skills on how to do that; how to look at a recipe, how to know what you needed, how to write it on a shopping list and how to cook. Now, they do it. So I don’t cook three meals a week, my kids do. 

So how else could it look for you to free up more rest time, I think, is the key to delegation because it doesn’t have to look like the way you’re doing it. And if you don’t know, look at the women who are doing life differently, or who are living the life that you want to live and ask them how they’re doing it, because they’ll just be approaching it differently. Actually, the other thing I’ll say there is sensory play, which I know, you know, obviously Lovevery is full of those sensory play experiences, but I have always been a huge fan of setting my kids up with a really immersive play experience, particularly one that involves sensory feedback because it’s always given me additional free time. If they can be immersed in play and have sensory feedback that’s giving them nervous system and emotional regulation, like feedback on their bodies, I have got anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour and a half of just do whatever you want to do. Lay in the sun and have a cup of tea, get the washing done, power out 20 minutes of work. So I always also think instead of just always feeling like I’m at the beck and call of their needs, how do I consciously create and set up experiences that I know kind of saturate my children in that experience, so I can get done what I want to do? 

Jessica: I love all the tips. And just so empowering and inspiring. I mean, kids making dinner, I just love it. It’s been so wonderful having you with us today. Thank you.

Julie: Aw, thank you so much, Jessica.

Julie co-hosts the podcast Nourishing the Mother. You can also find her at julietenner.love.

Here are my takeaways from the conversation:

1. If you find yourself resenting the people you love, it’s a sign you need to re-enforce your boundaries.
2. Score-keeping is something we slip into when we’re feeling under-valued. Time to have a conversation with your partner about what you need out of each of your roles. Julie likes to think about it as tending to the you, to the me, to the us and to the family inc.
3. One way to nurture “the us” is to be really conscious of your arrivals and your departures. Julie calls these pinnacle moments where you can 10x your connection.
4. This conversation around roles is constantly shifting. Revisit the agreements you make regularly because our needs as adults shift with the changing children around us. 
5. Julie talked about setting limits around breastfeeding and the inevitable resistance that a mother will come up against. That struggle is going to take the form of crying. If we are coming from a loving place, firm in our boundaries, we can respond with: “Yeah, it’s really hard for you. I know you really want to have a feed, but I can’t give that to you right now, but I love you and I’m here.” 
6. Julie is a big fan of delegating, not surprisingly! She reminds us that when delegating, we need to let go of how the task is executed. It’s not going to look exactly like it would have, if you had done it. But we can’t do this work on our own, so time to lean into the team!

Learn more on our Lovevery blog.