Meg Meeker - The 10 habits of happy mothers: reclaiming our passion, purpose, and sanity

While the stories presented in this book did in fact happen, some of the names and personal characteristics of the individuals involved have been changed in order to disguise their identities. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

Copyright 2010 by Meg Meeker, M.D.

The 10 Habits of Happy Mothers Tool Kit copyright 2011 by Meg Meeker, M.D.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B ALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of
The Random House Publishing Group.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meeker, Margaret J.
The 10 habits of happy mothers : reclaiming our passion, purpose, and sanity / Meg Meeker.1st ed. p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51808-8
1. MothersPsychology. 2. MotherhoodPsychological aspects. 3. Self-esteem. I. Title. II. Title: Ten habits of happy mothers.
HQ759.M438 2010
646.700852dc22 2010037887

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design: Victoria Allen
Jacket photograph: Aurora Photos/Masterfile

Cover design: Victoria Allen
Cover photograph: Aurora Photos/Masterfile
Author photograph: Shea Petaja

v3.1_r1

Contents

Introduction

AS A PEDIATRICIAN of twenty-five years and a mother for twenty-six, I have listened to a whole lot of mothers. And I think that I have come to understand some fundamental truths about us. At least, some things that I think are true. First, we are a group that wants desperately to be good at what we do. We want to be good to our friends and husbands and we want to be great to our kids. We love intensely and we work hard. But we have a problem. In the past fifty years, we have been given an overwhelming number of opportunities. We can be whoever we want to be and our hard work will (usually) be rewarded. This is good. But in the midst of the onslaught of opportunity in our lives, we have become confused, and some of us have become a bit obsessed.

We stress over how well we are parenting and if we are taking full advantage of other opportunities. We wonder if we should work outside the home (of course, some of us dont wonder, because we have to). Others wonder whether we are working too much or too little. And there is so much more. We worry about whether our kids are given enough opportunities, whether their friends like them, or whether they are being bullied at school or at day care. But mostly, we worry about what we can do for our kids in order to make their lives better. We do this because we really want to be good at mothering. We want to get it right, just as we want to get our jobs right.

This needto get parenting righthas become an obsession for many of us. It consumes our thinking, our energy, and our time. Let me be clear: Striving to be a great mom is a noble goal, and as a pediatrician, I applaud those who choose it. But thats not what Im referring to. I am talking about a full-blown obsession with getting mothering right. And it is taking many of us down.

Over twenty-five years I have seen us move from worrying about which school to send a daughter to, to which band to hire for her high school graduation party. I see mothers work two jobs in order to afford piano lessons for Susie and guitar lessons for Mike. I have watched mothers scream at teachers who gave their kids a C on a paper when just a short time ago, we would have let that child rewrite his paper to get a better grade or told him to work harder on the next paper. We are tired. We never feel that were doing a good enough job at almost anything we do; not because were not good at things, but because we are trying to do too much, too well. We have become competitors. We have learned over the past twenty-five years to compete with other mothers and compete with ourselves. The problem is, none of us feels as though were winning.

In short, weve gone off the deep end. Dont take this personally; were all in the same boat. Employed, at-home, adoptive, biologic, wealthy, poor, young, and older motherswere all in this together. We have arrived at a similar place. So, we have a lot of company in one another. Thats the good news.

Heres the rest of the good news. We can make some simple changes that will bring us back from the edge (or pull us back on top of the cliff if weve fallen off completely) and bring some fun and sanity into our lives. We can love being moms again. We can sit. We can laugh with our kids. We can stop running around, acting like crazy people. We can love life and enjoy our wonderful kids. In the following pages, you will find real mothers whose lives illustrate our collective plight, and you will find many mothers who have moved over to the positive side. They are getting this mothering thing right. No, they arent better mothers, but they are enjoying being mothers more. This is not a book about being a better mother, because there are plenty of books on that. This is a book for you, and only you, to help you become a happier mother.

Freeing ourselves from some of the craziness that we have adopted means changing some habits. This is hard, but we can do it because we are mothers and doing hard things is what were really good at. If we can endure pushing an eight-pound watermelon through an eight-inch opening we can do just about anything that we put our minds to. Anything.

In the following pages, youll learn about ten new habits that work to bring joy, order, and calm back into our lives. Listed briefly, they are understanding your value as a mother, maintaining key friendships, valuing and practicing faith, saying no to competition, creating a healthier relationship with money, making time for solitude, giving and getting love in healthier ways, finding ways to live simply, letting go of fear, and making the decision to have hope. Some may seem peculiar at firstletting go of fear, for instance. Others may seem too simple, but keep reading because usually the simplest changes are the most profound. Some of the habits you will be able to adopt right away, while others may need to wait until your kids are a bit older. But I can guarantee you that they work. I have seen other mothers adopt them and I have seen their facial expressions and their demeanor become calmer. I believe the reason that they work is that integrating these habits into our lives nurtures the core of who we are as mothers. And we have veered way off track when it comes to nurturing our inner selves. We have been lured into focusing on the external parts of our character and spent far too much time, money, and energy on things that dont matter at all in comparison. We need solitude, not another diet. We need to figure out our spiritual lives more than we need another activity to run our kids to. We need hope instead of more stuff to do, which will only make us more anxious. We need to spend less so that we can loosen the grip that money has on us. There is much more we can get out of life.

I wrote this book with a grateful heart because I am thankful for you. I am so appreciative of the hard work that you do and of the love you have for your kids because taking care of kids has been my lifes passion for many years. When you succeed, kids get healthy and that makes me very happy. My hope is that the following pages will open doors for you to have greater joy and contentment in your lives. So lets get started!