Breaking Parenting Cycles Without Breaking Yourself

Ever find yourself swearing under your breath while trying to be the "good mom" – only to feel overcome with guilt moments later? You're not alone. The messy truth about mom rage rarely makes it to social media, but it's something almost every mother experiences.

What happens when you're a therapist who can't follow her own advice? In this raw episode, I share a particularly hard parenting day where I experienced that uncomfortable yet surprisingly righteous anger, then questioned my parenting afterward. We explore why healing while raising kids feels impossible sometimes, the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it, and how our unhealed patterns affect our children.

As a therapist who specializes in working with moms, I've seen how this cycle plays out – and I'm living it too. From elaborate hotel games gone wrong to kids' shows teaching us about taking things slow, we dive into why the "Puffin way" of slow and steady might be the key to breaking generational cycles without burning out.

Topics covered:

• The irony of giving advice you can't follow
• Why mom rage feels righteous in the moment
• Why healing can't be Amazon Primed
• How childhood patterns show up in parenting
• Regulation techniques that don't always work
• Giving yourself grace in the hard moments

Resources mentioned:

• Inner child healing books
• Puffin Rock (surprisingly wise kids' show)
• The Motherload Membership

Chapters

• 0:00 The Hard Things Worth Doing
• 1:28 Anger and Rage in Motherhood
• 3:37 The Hotel Play Gone Wrong
• 8:13 Children as Mirrors and Sponges
• 11:08 Slow, Steady Healing and Resources

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Before sitting down to record this, I'm pretty sure I told all four of my mom clients to be gentle with themselves and that healing takes an effort, and sometimes you have to do the hard thing, even when you don't want to. The hard things are the type of shit that future you thanks you for. When I wrote what I'm about to share with you, it was 9.47 at night. I was sitting in my bed in the aftermath of another hard solo parenting day where I did none None of the good healing things.

Speaker 1: 0:36

Hi, I'm Kayla Huzar, host of the Chill Like a Mother podcast, and I am a therapist Moms for moms. I am a therapist moms for moms, and when I wrote this it was the quiet aftermath. I could hear the dishwasher humming. I had been trying to convince myself for almost 20 minutes to get up and do something, not just something productive, but something for me, something that made me feel whole, not like a shell of who I am. And so I'm sharing this with you, because I have been yelling a lot, even swearing, under my breath it's supposed to be under my breath, but it's not really under my breath, because, tell me if this is also true for you, it feels really good to feel angry. It even feels good to yell or scream or slam something. The part that doesn't feel good is that other people are either on the receiving end of it or they witness it. Anger in motherhood, or rage in motherhood, can feel righteous. Anger in motherhood or rage in motherhood can feel righteous. I myself describe it and my clients can describe it as I feel like I deserve to feel this level of anger. I deserve to feel this level of frustration, writing all of this out at the end of the day. I knew I knew that I wanted to wake up regulated tomorrow morning, but I find it so hard because there's this easy stuff. There's this easy stuff that makes me feel good immediately, like scrolling, like not sitting with my thoughts, like not acknowledging my feelings, like numbing out, distracting, avoidance, right, and so I'm going to get to the whole story.

Speaker 1: 2:38

But the evening that I wrote this on, my kids and I had watched Puffin Rock right before going to bed and the episode was all about doing things. The P. They were watching this. It hit me like a brick. I'm not taking things slow or steady or intentional. I am rushing through life, trying to avoid feeling at all costs, and it is costing me. And so, here beside me, my kids were learning about how to take things slow and steady. Well, I'm over here, wanting motherhood, wanting healing, wanting to break generational patterns, to be quick and easy. I'm wanting to rush through the process. I don't want to people please anymore. I don't want to be codependent. I don't want this, that or the other thing in my life anymore. I want the Amazon Prime solution. I want it to be quick and easy and I want it to arrive with same day delivery. So here's the story.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Okay, we had had a day and my son had come up to me and he wanted to play hotel and he wanted to arrive at the hotel. He had this whole vision Okay. So he was going to go for a bike ride and then arrive at our house like a hotel. So he went out, I got the phone keys ready, I got the little scanner thing set up on the wall and I programmed the iPad so that the apps wouldn't open without the codes on their cards. And I had like made little checkboxes of like shower pajamas, brush, teeth, and I had kind of created this whole elaborate game where they were going to complete the bedtime routines for the codes so that they would actually work.

Speaker 1: 4:25

So something happened while my oldest was on his bike ride and he came home in a bit of a mood, and when he came home in a mood, we dealt with that. That was about 20 minutes. Then my youngest was having a hard time transitioning into the shower because he had just had 20 minutes where he kind of had to be quiet and just like observe what me and my oldest were doing and talking about. My youngest started acting out. My oldest we had just spent this, like you know, time regulating and storytelling, and I was really trying to be present and all I could think was as soon as my youngest started acting out was guys, I'm trying to have fun here. You guys asked for the fun and I made it fun. I brought the fun and now you are making it hard for me to feel fun about it.

Speaker 1: 5:11

Quick side note, if you're new here, I have ADHD and so I'm sometimes not very good at being flexible, but I was trying. All I could think was damn it, you guys, you're not being flexible. This was your idea, and so this point of the story this is where the book I'm reading about inner child healing would tell me that I probably need to name my feelings and process them and sit for a minute with it. And all this stuff just reminds me that, all of the ways that I love, the ways that maybe I couldn't have the words to get from brain to mouth to express myself, and it triggers in this moment because my kids are needing me to have this like emotionally intelligent language, and sometimes I can't access it, and so what I find hard about these moments of parenting is that it kind of reminds me of that.

Speaker 1: 6:13

And so when they're asking, they're kind of needing me to show up in this emotionally intelligent way and and I can't access that part of myself like I'm overwhelmed or flooded or I just need the day to be over, right, like this was supposed to be the fun part before, the easy part of the day, and and sometimes this is how my clients describe it is like their, their children are needing them to show up in the ways that they they weren't given that as a child, right, they were told to be quiet, go away, do this, do that, don't bother me. Your emotions are too big, too dramatic, too whatever, and so it's hard to access that within yourself in this moment. And so here's the reality is that nobody literally no one, not even your kids, get out of childhood without some kind of hurt or mistranslated message or need that is not met. I can show up 100% of the time for my kids and there will still be something that I'm not able to show up for. There will be a day, there will be a time and I've got a 10 and a 5-year-old. I know that I've already done it once, twice, probably a handful of times, but it doesn't matter how intentional we are, because there's just shit that our parents couldn't do, there's shit that we can't do. There is stuff that we just can't show up for, things that we're navigating, things that are hard because life gets in the way. We are all humans, having a human experience. We have human emotions and in your relationship with your children, just like me in this moment with my children, I am learning what one person needs, different than another. I am learning that sometimes we have to do the hard things for them. We have to do the hard things for them, for our partners, for our parents.

Speaker 1: 8:10

Okay, so back to the hotel play, the height of everyone's emotions. I was trying to breathe. I was doing all of the good things to regulate. I moved my body. I had a drink, I closed my eyes, I did the deep breathing, I shook out my body, I told them I needed a minute. I even walked away. I recircled back and I tried to be silly again. I tried to connect, I needed to reset, to find my center and nothing was working. Nothing was working. It felt exhausting. It felt exhausting. That's not their fault. I was probably loud and intense and something some moment in all of that, and I wish that they knew that it wasn't their fault, that the anger and the overwhelm and the stuff that that's me, that's my stuff, that I'm working through and I'm doing it one messy day at a time.

Speaker 1: 9:02

And so why? Why am I sharing this with you? Because I hear from moms all the time, as they can see, that their patterns, that their things, are affecting their children or they may affect their children, and when they're really little, maybe you can brush it off because they just love you so goddamn much. And now that my kids are older, that love is, oh, it's still there. It's deep. It's deep but it's less shown. You know, they don't necessarily run to me when I get home anymore. They still need me in a lot of ways, but they're old enough to give me back what I've given them, and sometimes that stings. They are sponges and mirrors and minis, and this kind of conversation matters because they don't owe me anything. I actually owe them a lot and right now, in this hotel playing moment, I was doing a pretty bad job of it. I was doing a pretty bad job of staying regulated, of attempting to regulate them. And here's about regulation. That I've learned recently is that you can't regulate another person. You can be the calm in the storm, but you can't actually take on their regulation. They have to learn how to regulate. They actually have to want to use the tools you can show them, you can model them. You can do all kinds of amazing things with it.

Speaker 1: 10:34

In this moment, when I was doing all of the good healing things, what I was pissed off about was that they weren't doing their part. They weren't doing their part. They're 10 and 5. Their part is to fall apart. That's their job. Their part is to fall apart. That's their job. Their job is to fall apart. And my job is to be the calm, steady leader, which I'm not always.

Speaker 1: 10:59

But in this moment, where my rage and my anger came from and I can walk it back, I can see it now was that I was doing all of the good things, proper things, and they weren't, and that's what made me mad, and that is quite vulnerable to say out loud. But I go back to this moment where I'm stuck in my bed. At the end of the day, we've gotten through the moments right, we've done the hotel thing, we have watched Puffin Rock, and now they're asleep and I'm stuck in my thoughts, my whirlwind, my waves of feelings. I know what might make me feel better, but I didn't want to do it. It had already been a day, and so what I found interesting about sitting there, stuck in the thoughts and stuck in the whirlwind, immediately I thought I should probably just write this down, and then I avoided it for a bit, and when I finally gave in, when I wrote it down, it didn't seem so hard. I didn't want to do the hard thing, and then I ended up doing the hard thing because it brought me relief, but it was hard to get there, and I just want to say that the point of this whole thing is that I find it hard sometimes to be present, to not just tell them to get over it or to shake it off, because I know that once they shake it off, they're fine. This is a glitch, not an experience, and everything within us, everything around us, wants us to rush through it, slow and steady.

Speaker 1: 12:38

If you took anything from this conversation today and you want other honest conversations about the reality of parenting, you can join my newsletter list where I share unfiltered truths about motherhood, healing and breaking cycles, because knowing you're not the only one and you're not the only one yelling under your breath or swearing under your breath makes all the difference. Also, if you happen to just be in the Leduc or Edmonton area, offer one-on-one individual counseling sessions in my office at the Leduc Co-Work, and I also work virtually across Canada. Sometimes we need more than a podcast or a newsletter or a blog can offer. Sometimes we need someone to sit across from us and hold space for the hard stuff. So if anything resonated today, please feel free to text me, call me, email me, follow me on Instagram. I am here for all of the messy and hard parts of motherhood. Hope to see you next week.