Struggling with the mental load of motherhood and trying to keep the peace at home can feel like a never ending task. Trust me, I've been there—juggling the emotions of my family and feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. Journey with me through this heartfelt mini-episode of the Jenny VIP Thought series, where I peel back the layers of this universal struggle and share the epiphany that it's perfectly fine if not everyone is happy all the time. Join me as I recount how I navigated these emotional waters, and let's explore the liberation in accepting the harmony we crave, may not always be the harmony we achieve. No guests, just raw, unfiltered insights into managing life's emotional ebbs and flows.
Struggling with the mental load of motherhood and trying to keep the peace at home can feel like a never ending task. Trust me, I've been there—juggling the emotions of my family and feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. Journey with me through this heartfelt mini-episode of the Jenny VIP Thought series, where I peel back the layers of this universal struggle and share the epiphany that it's perfectly fine if not everyone is happy all the time. Join me as I recount how I navigated these emotional waters, and let's explore the liberation in accepting the harmony we crave, may not always be the harmony we achieve. No guests, just raw, unfiltered insights into managing life's emotional ebbs and flows.
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Jenny Benitez:
Hi everybody, Welcome to the Jenny VIP Thought series. This is just like a little mini-sode series that I've been developing over the past few months. Essentially, I just want to be more in touch and be more transparent and, honestly, more alignment with all of you who've been listening to the podcast. These little episodes are really meant to give you all just real thoughts, snapshots in the moment, things that I think that I'm struggling with or emotions that I'm going through. I want to be able to share them with all of you because I want you to know that we're all going through this. If you're having a particularly rough week, maybe one of these little mini-sodes might resonate with you, because we all have them.
Jenny Benitez:
Life has tons of ups and downs and I think it's just important to know that you're not in it alone. This is really what the point of all these are. You won't hear the same topic over and over again. Most likely it's going to be very different from episode to episode, but I really hope that you find them helpful. I would love to hear from you on them. Let's take a listen.
Jenny Benitez:
Hello everybody, I want to share. I don't think it's wisdom, but something that I have come to terms with as a mother, I'm always of the mindset of oh, I'm trying to not mindset, but my goal pretty much all the time is, up until this point, has been always like I want to make everybody feel happy, my children and husband especially, obviously. But I want everyone to be in a great mood. I want everyone to enjoy themselves. I'm constantly feeling this mental load, which we've talked about before, to carry everybody's emotions. I've said this on a few occasions to my husband and my kids, because I'm pretty blunt with them as well. I've said to them I'm like it's exhausting at the end of the day for me because I feel like I'm carrying everybody on my back. I'm carrying everybody's emotions, I'm carrying everybody's everything on my shoulders and I get to the end of the day and I'm like what the hell? I'm exhausted, I'm burnt out, I've got nothing left and I don't know why. But it just hit me this weekend and it gave me this massive amount of peace. There is never going to be a moment where everyone is happy and that seems like well, duh, obviously, Jenny. Like that's common sense? Yeah, sure, perhaps, but this revelation came to me this weekend.
Jenny Benitez:
I was spending a lot of time with my kids. My husband was not feeling well and I was trying to keep us all out of the house, to be perfectly honest, because one I wanted to let him rest, but also I wanted him to keep his germs through himself. So we spent a lot of time outside doing activities. Not outside we went to, we did laser tag one day and like a bounce house thing, and then yesterday I took them to the aquarium and we had like a fun time with that. So you know, we spend a lot of just quality time together because I mean, I do that normally, but like a little bit more extensive this weekend because I was trying to keep them out of the house and in my head while this was happening I was like, oh, this is going to be so fun. You know, I feel so blessed and I do, and I'm blessed that I'm able to do activities like I did this weekend, but each time only two out of three of my kids were happy and I would get enraged, Like piss, Like I was, like I don't understand, Like how is it that you're not happy?
Jenny Benitez:
How is it that you're not just over over the moon with like being able to do all these activities? Because when I was growing up, my parents definitely didn't do the extent that I do with the kids. Like I mean, it was much more simpler. It was more like you're home, there's a pool in the backyard, that's it, Like, occupy your yourself. And so I'm always like why are you so upset? Like you know you should be thrilled that a mommy's even doing this. Obviously they don't know, because they're living the life with me and they know how I always do stuff like that with them.
Jenny Benitez:
But in any case, yesterday was when it really hit me and I was driving home from well, we were at the aquarium. It was very lovely. If you live in New Jersey you should check out Jenkinsons. It's very nice facility, very clean facility, well operated, well run facility, Strong, recommend Watch out for the gift shop with your kids. But it was really lovely. We went and we had a nice time.
Jenny Benitez:
But one of my twins just kind of had a chip on her shoulder. I suspect she's going through a growth spurt, which I'll talk about on another episode. But she one of the twins. She apologize, I got distracted because I'm multitasking. She just had a chip on her shoulder and I kept trying to just make sure she was okay. But it's just, she just kind of just was being mean, Like you know, it is what it is. And we got to the end of the aquarium and we went to the gift shop and I bought everybody something.
Jenny Benitez:
I let them all pick something out and she just kind of immediately was like she picked out the wrong stuff, Like after I paid for everything, but she picked out the wrong thing. She wanted something else, whatever. You know, like kids get bratty, I kept my cool, which, I'm going to be honest with you, I'm patting myself on the back here because I am, unfortunately, I will admit that I am not the greatest at not flipping out, so I've had quite a temper over the years. Whatever was like losing my, my cool with the kids. So I'm trying to course correct that. But yeah, she wasn't in a good mood and it wasn't triggering me.
Jenny Benitez:
And all of a sudden, or it was starting to trigger me, and then all of a sudden I had this revelation and I was like well, the other two are okay. So, and one of the other twins came over and they were like mommy, I'm happy, Like I'm happy, we're here, and she was trying to make me feel better and I just sort of paused and was, like you know, like don't let the one child like drag you down. Enjoy the fact that at least two of the kids and now at least two of the kids are enjoying themselves. So now I came home and I said to my husband I was like I had this, like revelation today, and it really kept me from losing my temper and I'm okay with this Like if I could get two thirds of my children happy and they're in good moods and they're, like you know, enjoying themselves, that's a win.
Jenny Benitez:
And so I wanted to share that with everybody, because I think there's probably a lot of other moms who are in the same boat, where you feel very overwhelmed and you feel like you're, you know, trying to keep everybody happy, trying to keep everything you know above board and make sure that, like you're doing what you need to do as a mom and it's exhausting, and so we have to take these small wins for what they are and really be, you know, if I was taking those odds and anything else and be like, all right, two thirds, that's awesome, that's almost all of it Like great, this is awesome. So I kind of want to just share that with everybody, because there's never going to be a moment and this is like kind of across the board there's never going to be a perfect, perfect, perfect moment. Despite what you see on social media. There is never going to be a perfect moment. So you have to adjust your perception. 99% is still really awesome, 80% is still really awesome, 75% is still really awesome. Like you could literally 50-50, that's a shot, Take it. So I just want to share that with all of you.
Jenny Benitez:
This morning, even though we also still had a tough morning here because that same twin again I'll do a growth for it episode that same twin gave me a run for the money this morning as well. So I'm kind of trying to recover from that, but I'll take what I can get. So I hope you all have a wonderful day and hang in there and we'll go to get through this, Take care. Thank you for listening to Jenny's little VIP thought episode. I hope you did find it helpful and, again, these are little mini, quick hits, so won't take too much of your day and I hope that it just brings you some clarity, some peace, maybe some joy and some instances knowing that we're sort of all in this together. Check out some of our full episodes which have guests and my co-hosts and lots of great things in them, but I hope that these mini-minisodes are helpful to you. Thank you and take care.