I stood, glancing around the room, noticing all of the unfinished things on the “list” that my child was to do when picking up the room he had been asked to clean.
I identified a couple of things that had been moved around and put into different places, but even those were done hastily and looked disheveled.
My son had adamantly told me that he had been working “so hard for hours” on his cleaning and that he was nearly done. I walked upstairs and, half-jokingly, told my son that his definition of clean versus mine was NOT in alignment and that there was no way he had been down there for “hours working so hard” based on what I saw.
Things quickly escalated, and my half-joking turned into full-blown frustration as he began to assert that it was never good enough for me.
In many ways, I wanted to call his bluff, to bring forward the illogical argument he was making. Part of me wanted to laugh, believing that surely he could hear how this sounded—especially with the evidence I had just seen with my own eyes: a room half-done, mess all around. But the other part of me could see the very real and raw emotion on his face. He was serious—he truly felt like he had worked SO HARD, and I was over here rubbing salt in a wound, pointing out how he “couldn’t do it good enough.”
As my brain tried to catch up to the speed at which the escalation was occurring, I caught my husband’s body language out of the corner of my eye. He was stiff, looking down, with a slight shake of his head. I could see that his mind was deep in a narrative about the situation unfolding in front of him.
We took a brief reprieve from the disagreement for my son and me to compose ourselves, and I was organizing my thoughts in hopes of bringing this conversation back to a healthy place without skirting the deeper issues at play.
Just as I was about to approach my son again for round two, my husband brushed past me in the kitchen and snapped at me as he did.
A wave of defensiveness washed over me. My husband was frustrated WITH ME. His snippy response, cold body language, and averted glances said everything. Reality seemed to distort in that moment. Any headway I had made in my mind on how to approach round two of the conversation with my son vanished as I found myself consumed by this new awareness: I was not simply having a conversation with my son; I was now on the defense against a perceived threat from my spouse, who was unraveling a narrative in his mind about me, and his body language was doing all the talking.
I pulled myself back to the present moment and felt wholly unable to re-approach my child and find resolution to our disagreement. There was an unspoken evaluation happening, my actions quietly measured and ranked.
I excused myself to the bedroom to try to calm my nervous system, which was in complete overdrive.
I listened through the walls as my son unloaded on my husband all of the things he was feeling about me—how I constantly point out his undone chores and hardly ever focus on the hard work and progress he has made.
I heard his heart feeling defensive and hurt. I knew his lived experience and feelings were valid. My heart ached for him, but I was also trying to honor my own lived experience—staring at a very dirty room, one where I could hardly tell that any progress had been made.
How do I honor both truths at the same time? How do I navigate this teaching moment not only for myself but also for my child? And how do I do that while combating this threat from the side—my husband’s unspoken frustration?
I will admit, I was not able to conquer it that night. I avoided them both, and I went outside to the backyard to be alone. I put on some worship music and let myself get lost for a while in the uplifting words. Then I began to pray and talk to the Lord about the complexity of everything that had unfolded.
I wanted to handle this “right” as a mom… and in an entirely different headspace, I was also processing the complex feelings I had about my husband’s tone and body language toward me.
My co-dependent side wanted to cower under the pressure from my spouse, to default to his opinion of me and the situation, and to feel badly about myself. The negative self-talk, which is on a constant loop in the background, was trying to make its way to the foreground and have a heyday with my self-worth.
But before it could, I recalled something powerful spoken over me a couple of weeks ago during a training.
This coach in the training was sharing about her own journey with self-sabotage and how she had identified three ways that self-sabotage likes to weasel its way into our lives. One of the ways really caught my attention—she said that self-sabotage can creep in when someone says something negative, and instead of rebuking it, we rehearse it in our minds.
That really stuck with me, and I found it coming to mind as I was processing in my backyard that night. What narrative was I allowing myself to rehearse rather than rebuke?
I was letting the belief that I am “the problem” and “not good with my kids” take root. I began rehearsing hurt from my past—memories of times when those things had been spoken over me. When I was accused of being the problem. When I was accused of not being a good mom.
I thank the Lord that He brought me full circle—witnessing myself in a spiral of self-sabotage. I felt an unusual strength wash over me, and I began to speak LIFE over my mind.
I am not a bad mom. I can have arguments with my children, and it doesn’t mean I am the problem. I can even look back and reflect on those arguments to see where I need to grow, shift, or change for the better next time. I can lean into my gut about the deeper message going on and choose to stand with confidence, resisting the real (or perceived) threat from my husband—what he may or may not be thinking or feeling.
I can choose to recognize that this situation brought up feelings for him and also choose not to absorb his feelings as my own burden to carry.
I can re-approach my child in humility and share that I never want him to feel like my standards are impossible to meet. That I never want him to feel like I do not appreciate his efforts. AND I can ask for his transparency and honesty about the level of work he did and the overall task when it isn’t complete.
I can do all of this because the Lord gives me strength. His power is made perfect when I feel weak and inadequate.
I may not have conquered that conversation that night—but I felt like a conqueror by combating self-sabotage and speaking words of life to my heart. To lean into the empowerment of being the mom that God made me to be. To make mistakes. To come at something too hot. To say things I would shift next time—and to remember that those things do not make me a bad mom.
In fact, they make me a really great one.