Sometimes I think socks are invisible and that I have magical sight because it seems that I'm the only one that notices them sitting on the couch. It's all fun and games until you realize you're frustrated, resentful and exhausted because you're the only one that seems to see the mess around you. How can you take work off your shoulders if you feel like you're the only one that cares?
You're not alone. You're valid. Let's talk about what to dow hen no one sees the mess but you.
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Episode transcription
It's okay to admit that mom life feels harder than you ever thought it would be. It's also okay to want it to feel easier. We're surrounded by mixed messages all day. Keep a clean house, but not too clean. Take a rest mama, but not too long. That's just selfish. Homemaking is dead, but you better still take care of everything.
Everything. We're told you have two choices, be Pinterest perfect. Or a 24 7 hot mess. I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted. And over it, I'm Kendra Hennessy, founder of mother, like a boss, and I put reluctant homemakers back in the driver's seat of motherhood with realistic routines and practical mindset shifts.
I believe in empowering you to create a home that feels like a safety net, not a tight rope, I believe in martyr free motherhood. That puts you behind the wheel of your own life. As a mom of two, I'm here to give you judgment, free strategies and have honest conversations. But you with what you need to live your absolute best mom life.
Welcome to the Mother Like a Boss Podcast.
Hey there friends. Welcome back to the mother like a boss podcast. It's your host, Kendra Hennessy and every now and then I like to do a really short episode, not every single episode that we do needs to be 30 or 40 minutes long. It doesn't have to be full of tips and things that you need to write down and come back to.
Sometimes I just like to do an episode that is validating and encouraging and supporting and just me from, you know, from one mom to another, just really reminding you that your feelings are valid and that the things that are happening inside your home and inside your relationships and mother. Are not abnormal most of the time and are, um, completely like valid and that you're not alone.
Really. I've been digging into this feeling of what it means to be lonely. I posted about it on Instagram recently. Um, so you can go check it. At mother, like a boss on Instagram, um, really just digging into this feeling of like loneliness, even when you're not alone feeling lonely, even in like a room full of people.
And I think that sometimes one of the things that causes loneliness for moms is the feeling that we're living our lives inside a vacuum. And that really no one else sees what's going on inside our homes and inside our lives, except for us. And it can feel like we're the only ones dealing with it. So today's episode, I wanted to just talk quickly about when no one sees the mess, but yeah.
When you're the only one that seems to see the piles, the socks on the floor, the toys, the dishes in the sink, the overflowing garbage can yet, again, the toothpaste stuck to the bathroom sink, you know, the stuff all over the floor, the laundry piled up when it seems like no one else sees that, but you now I'm talking to moms because this is the mother, like a boss podcast.
I will also say that sometimes. It's the dad sometimes it's, you know, there may be people listening that aren't moms. And so maybe it's you in a relationship or maybe living with a roommate, but I will say because I talk to moms, it's some other like boss podcasts. That's who I'm talking to here and. A lot of times, it's this feeling that why am I the only one that sees this mess?
And I just want to validate you that you're not crazy and you're not obsessive. I mean, maybe, maybe you have obsessive qualities, but that's a whole other story and something, you know, something different to discuss today. I want to discuss the fact that. I know what that feels like. I understand, and that it can feel very lonely, frustrating, angering.
You can develop resentful. It's disappointing. All of those words and feelings come up when it seems like you're the only one that sees the mess. Why am I the only one that sees it? Why am I the only one that recognized it? Why am I the only one that cares? Okay. That's the part that comes up. Why am I, the only one that cares about this, my spouse doesn't seem to care.
My kids don't seem to care. No one else seems to care. So I want to just remind everyone here that everyone has a different threshold and what we notice is going to be different from person to person. And when I started to recognize that in my own home, in my own life, even in my own business with my team, When I started to realize and not even realize, just remember, because I always knew this, that everyone is different and the things that people notice are going to be different than what I do.
And there's a different threshold for what a mess is. I know that if I went into some, some other person's house, they may think a mess is just having a crumb on the floor. I was actually just watching friends where we were watching friends again for like the hundred and 50th time. And there's a part where, uh, Monica is talking about there being crummy he's on the floor.
And Chandler's like, yo, I was so careful. And it started to make me think of that, about how like her threshold for a mess was very deep. Then Joey's, you know, where you could drop spaghetti on the ground. And he was like, eh, no big deal. And that is just because everyone just has a different threshold and everyone has a different definition of what a mess is.
And so of course it's going to be different from person to person. And when we can start to realize that in our own families, that each person and individual is different. Then we can start focusing more on the expectation of the home and how we can work together. Instead of always focusing on it, being up to us as the mom to decide what is a mess and what is not a mess.
And instead work together and communicate what that looks like and why feeling like you're the only one that cares is really exhausting and lonely. And how we can better communicate about that. The truth is that my husband notices a whole bunch of stuff that I don't notice having to do with like the mechanical things in the house, things I would just like ignore or forget about, or not even notice or noises or outdoor issues, you know, a lot of times it's like he notices stuff outdoors and I'm like, oh, I don't know.
Didn't even notice it doesn't even bother me or stuff with my car. Because that is what his wheelhouse is. That is what he is focusing on. But socks being on the ground may or may not be a big deal to him. This is why regular and open communication matters so much. It matters that you communicate how you feel because your feelings matter.
And what I found as someone who is by the way, disclaimer, disclaimer, not a relationship expert, not a communications expert, not a. Marriage counselor, but something I've really noticed is that a lot of times the women in my audience, aren't great at communicating with their spouses or partners or children.
Not because they're not good communicators, but because we think that our feelings aren't valid enough to community. We think that we're over estimating how we feel. We think that we're blowing things out of proportion. We think that we're being dramatic. All of these words that we're inundated with throughout our lives as girls and as young women and then moms and then wives or partners, right.
You're being overly dramatic, calmed down and. A lot of times that infiltrates into the way that we communicate, because it seems like, and this is a whole other conversation. It seems like, well, no one will listen unless I'm yelling. And I'm angry because that's the emotion that people will listen to. But many times it's that we didn't even try communicating a different way because we held back thinking that.
It was too dramatic and that I really shouldn't even be communicating about something like this. This is ridiculous. You know, I hear a lot of times, well, my husband works really hard and he doesn't need another thing to think about. Or my spouse, you know, is working and I stay home or vice versa. And so I shouldn't, I shouldn't be bothering them with this thing, but if we want our expectations to be met, if we want our needs to be met, we have to express.
If we don't express our expectations, how can people live up to them? How can people meet them? They don't even have to live up to them. That was a whole separate topic. People are not required to meet or exceed our expectations just because we have them. Communication is about expressing our expectations and our needs, and then asking others to meet us there.
And then us doing that for them. If we're going to communicate that, seeing the mess, maybe it's the piles of laundry and then not getting taken care of. Maybe if we're going to express that, that is very bothersome to you and that it causes anxiety and that you need more help, then we also need to be ready for what they communicate.
And there needs to be this, this compromise area. Cause that's what communication is. It's not about talking. It's also about listening and that's why it's so important. We people come to me and think, well, no one sees the mess, but me. And so can you give me some tips and tricks to help this? Well, the first tip and trick is have you even communicated this communication means sitting down and having a conversation, not yelling or screaming or nagging.
Which we've all done by the way. I am not excluded from that. But that would be my first tip, trick or hack is actually sitting down and deciding what, um, what the messes that you see that no one else does are. And do you even have routines in place to maintain them? So communication matters, but this is why routines help too.
So here, I'm going back to what I always talk about routines help with this because routines don't rely on anyone seeing anything. They don't rely on everyone. Being the same routines, make it a habit to get things done. Even when you don't notice, if on Mondays you do your laundry, then you do it. Whether you noticed it or not, it's just something you do.
If each week you guys all cleaned the house together. If everyone cleans the house, that's something you do. Whether someone noticed it was messy. Routines really help with this because then it doesn't really matter so much if someone doesn't notice that. So an example of this is my son loves to sit at our counter.
We have a counter that has, um, four stools and that's where he loves to sit. He lets just sit there and eat breakfast. He loves to sit there, Nita snacks. He loves to sit there, you know, play Minecraft on his iPad. He loves to sit there. Color it's like his little space. So it tends to get messier. It tends to accumulate more stuff.
It's tends to get dirtier. And so we just have this, this routine that at night, that area needs to be cleaned up. Now I know that left to his own devices. He just leave the stuff there. It doesn't bother him. It's the kitchen. What do I care? That's his thought, but we have a routine. Of at night before bed, this area needs to be cleaned up.
Actually, a lot of times, if it's very messy, it needs to be done before I make dinner. But, you know, depending on the day, it may just be like before bed, that area needs to be cleaned up garbage, thrown away toys, put away, take a little spray, spray it down, wipe it it's a whole routine. It doesn't rely on him seeing the mess that I see all day and sort of Twitch sometimes like, oh my God.
Cause in my perfect world, there would be no messes on any of the counters. And it would look like it was in a magazine, but that's not. Because that's not life. So we just have a routine around it. Now I'm not relying on him meeting some expectation of being a perfect kid who sees the messes that I do.
He doesn't see that he's eight, his mind thinks in different ways. And I don't expect him to see things in the same way that I do. And I don't expect him at this point in his life. To care as much about the kitchen counter being clean as I do instead, there's a bigger culture that I want all of us in our home.
Understand, which is, it's not about seeing the mess. It's about all of us respecting each other space and saying we all live here together. So it's important that all of us pitch in and do our part because we are all living here together. We all use the kitchen counter. We all use the floors. We all use the bathrooms.
We all use the living area. And so because of that, we all need to do our part to maintain it. That's part of a bigger culture, that isn't just about the small detail of making sure that the kitchen counter stays clean. That can be a routine. We want to talk about the bigger culture, which is all about communication and expectation.
For sure. We want to ensure at least in our home, and this is what I'm expressing to you, that we kind of set up expectations and then communicate them and agree upon them. A lot of times we think, um, as, as moms, that our job is to just set the expectation in somebody else's just supposed to snap too. But the truth is that great expectations are really about expressing your needs, hearing the other person's needs and meeting somewhere.
How can I have my expectations met and you have your expectations met and how can we meet even remove the word expectation? And talk more about our needs and our desires instead of expectations, which oftentimes can lead to resentment because we oftentimes have expectations in our head about how someone should act that we didn't express and that they didn't agree on, which causes a lot of friction and causes a lot of resentment.
So when it comes to no one seeing the mess, but you a great thing to ask yourself is where. Have I expressed these expectations of what I'm looking for it and do the people in my house even know that this bothers me. And how can I, um, start to set up routines so that it's not a matter of someone having to see things the same way that I do.
And instead we can just co-exist together and live together in harmony in our home. Also celebrating that each person is different and they're going to see things different and different things are going to bother them. Things bother my son. That don't bother me things about her, my daughter, that don't bother me and vice versa, and it doesn't make one of us right or wrong.
And if we can remove this idea that it's right to see the mess and it's wrong not to see it, if we can remove those labels, then we can start to be open more to cultivating a culture where everyone respects the living space and the expectations are different. Back and forth, but what I really just wanted you to know.
Is that you're valid and heard here and understood, and that it is frustrating and it's okay for you to be frustrated and disappointed and angry and resentful because those feelings are valid and we just get to choose if we want to stay there, or if we want to shift it up and I'll tell you what, I don't want to live in a home where I'm frustrated all the time.
I don't want to be resentful. I don't want to be angry. Those feelings don't feel good to me. So I honor them for what they are. They teach me what they need to teach. And then I want to choose something much different. So I hope that this has been helpful for you today. I'm thankful for you being here and listening.
Be sure to share this out with a friend that you know needs that you can come follow me. As I said on Instagram @motherlikeaboss
Let me know that you're listening to this episode, uh, and I'll catch it in the next one and as always go forth and mother, well, this episode may be over, but we don't have to say goodbye.
Head over to motherlikeaboss.com for more resources that will help you shift your mindset and put you firmly back in the driver's seat of motherhood. We're all in this together. And if you're on the socials, let's be friends. Follow me on Instagram at mother, like a boss for daily updates behind the scenes, fun and weekly live chats.
I'll catch you next week.
