​There have been many times when I've felt like I don't have a clue about what I'm doing as a mom, like when my first son was born and no parenting book or parent education workshop truly prepared me for life with an infant; when my second son was a baby and fussy all the time; and during the terrible twos and even more terrible threes when there were days that wrung me dry. 

As the mom of two teenagers, I'm again unsure, wishing for a roadmap on how to parent my sons into young adulthood. There aren't major roadblocks but the territory is all new. My husband Bill often turns to me and asks, "What should we do?" and I wonder why he's asking me. I have absolutely no idea. 

My inner critic is loud and a constant voice in my head these days. Friends tell me I'm doing a good job, I'm a great mom, my boys are lucky to have me. The inner critic doesn't agree. 

Am I the only one who feels like she's failing as a mom of teenagers? Logically, I know that this can't be the case. But most of my close mom friends either have young adult children now or they're parents of little kids. The moms with older children offer advice and are highly empathetic. The moms of younger children are sympathetic but don't fully understand how the balance of life with teenagers can shift in one brief moment, one unsettling circumstance, one regrettable argument. 

Recently, my husband and I met with a parent educator at Parents Place, a family support organization with several Bay Area locations. The parent educator approved of what Bill and I are already doing and offered additional ideas for parenting our teenagers. 

My biggest takeaway from that meeting, though, was to trust my intuition. I've fallen away from that place of trusting myself. I've been afraid I'll push my kids away. I've been nervous I'll make a mistake that I won't be able to undo. I've often acquiesced to Bill's decisions even if I don't agree with them, mainly because I don't know what else to do and I want to keep the peace. 

I've been thinking too much, which creates fear and indecision. Lately, rather than searching for ways to avoid not knowing, I'm learning to lean into not having a clue, allowing the unknown to shape my way forward. 
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I'm discovering benefits to not having a clue of what to do. Here are four of them, whether you're a parent of an infant, toddler, grade school kid, or teen:

1. When you honestly don't know what to do next, you may be more likely to stay in the moment and respond to what's happening right now, whether your crisis is an inconsolable baby or incommunicative teenager. When you find yourself not knowing, take a few slow breaths and ask, "What's the next best step?" and do that. If the first thing doesn't work, breathe a little more and ask again. Avoid the shoulds, supposed tos, and have tos, if possible. Thinking that way takes you down a long, bumpy road where you can't hear the quiet voice of your intuition.

2. By staying in the moment, you can ease stress and reduce your inner chaos by making choices and creating solutions based on what's really happening rather than coming up with a long list of worse case scenarios, most of which will never happen. 

3. Being clueless also allows you to get ideas from your child. When your child is part of the decision-making process, you're more likely to come up with a negotiated solution that your child will accept. With younger children, finding solutions may look like offering your child two options from which to choose, like asking if your child wants to wear the blue shirt or the green one, eat apple slices or cheese and crackers, play in the backyard or go to the park. Tweens and teens can be involved in a bigger way, like working with you to resolve differences in curfew instead of you as parents dictating the time. Working together to come up with solutions might lead to your teen, tween, or "threenager" actually doing what's best.

4. Not having a clue allows you to be in beginner's mind, a place where you are open to possibilities and not reliant on preconceived notions of what's the right solution or what you should do. A study published in  The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed that people who consider themselves to be experts are more closed-minded. "In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few," wrote Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

So, when the baby is screaming, the toddler is whining, or your teen is sullen, scowling, and sequestered in her room, see if you can allow the moment to be an invitation. Wrote Wendell Berry: "It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."

My son owes me and my husband money for some purchases and a broken iPhone screen repair. Instead of having him do extra chores (above and beyond his regular household help), I put him to work for my business instead. I'm creating a new life coaching program that includes a crafting kit for each mom; there's a lot of prep work involved in gathering, organizing, and packaging the supplies. My son and I agreed to an hour of work a day during his spring break. 

Every day, I eagerly anticipated that hour. My son and I sat side-by-side at the dining room table and built an inventory spreadsheet in Excel, ordered supplies, measured and cut paper, and divided up larger quantities of items into small ziplock bags and plastic containers. 

This time with my son was the shortest hour of my day. 

Based on the number of times that my son looked at the clock on the screen of his newly repaired iPhone, it was the longest hour of his. 

This is where we are now: the years when my boys would much rather be with their friends than family - or doing anything but spending time with me, the years when my husband and I are too embarrassing to be introduced to friends, the years when planning for family time activities is met with barely restrained groans. 

Looking back, I see it started early, my son's leaving and my letting go. Like when he was three years old and ran off to be with friends at daycare without looking back. When he was six and didn't want to hold my hand anymore. When he started asking at nine years old if he could just stay home instead of going with me to run errands. 

Last Sunday evening he came home after spending the night at a friend's house followed by a full day of hanging out with his friends at the mall, the park, another friend's house. I met him at the front door with a big hug and said I missed you. He pulled out of the hug and replied with a smile that it had only been a day, then walked to his room and shut the door. 

He's growing up, pulling away, doing exactly what he's supposed to do. 

I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to do, too: slowly letting him go, whispering quietly to myself as he walks away, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. 

We adopted a dog in December, a little rescue poodle from DPS Rescue in Palo Alto, that we named Jasper. In her early explorations of our home, Jasper found Angry Bird stuffed animals, discarded and forgotten under the boys' beds. She carried the toys one by one to the family room, delighted by her discovery. 

As Jasper made our home her own, she found balls, more stuffed animals (some determined to be off limits by their human owners), a rope dog toy that I had bought for a previous foster dog, and a cat toy discarded by Traviesa the tabby cat.

Jasper likes to collect her toys in one place. If I'm working in my office, she'll bring an Angry Bird stuffed animal upstairs with her. On her next trip up the stairs, she'll bring the cat toy. Then, the ball. One by one, all of her toys end up where she is, whether it's upstairs in my office, in the family room, or on the rug in the hallway. 

Watching Jasper surrounded by her toys, joyfully launching an Angry Bird stuffy into the air, a long-time massage therapy client asked me if I had anything in my life that brought me as much joy as Jasper's toys bring her. 

I had to stop and think. In my coaching work with moms, I teach them a self-coaching tool called the Five Delights to help them figure out what brings them happiness and joy. It's been a while since I've done the exercise myself, though, so here's my Five Delights list for today:

My Five Delights:
1. My bed at the end of the day with my two perfect pillows and warm comforter
2. Bergamot essential oil (its citrusy scent eases stress)
3. Rubbermaid stainless steel travel mug (it keeps my chai tea hot for hours!)
4. OverDrive app connected to the Peninsula Library System on my phone so I always have something good to read, for free!
5. My box of vintage buttons

Now it's your turn. What delights you? Take a moment and write down five things (or people, furry critters, or activities) that bring happiness into your life.

The Five Delights self-coaching tool is a gratitude practice, of sorts, allowing you to focus on the happy things that are already present in your life. Research shows that gratitude is a powerful shortcut to happiness. A gratitude practice can increase your happiness set point; make you more resilient to psychological, mental, and physical stress; and even improve your sleep. 

A gratitude practice like the Five Delights is simple: take a few minutes a few days a week to discover what's already good in your life. Just like Jasper the dog uncovered joy in the stuffed animals hidden under the bed, your happiness, too, is waiting to be found, waiting to be brought into the light, to surround you with so much joy.


Interested in learning more self-coaching tools to help you to build the life you love? Schedule a life coaching session with Kathleen Harper, certified life coach and author of The Well-Crafted Mom and Signs of a Happy Baby. Use coupon code NEW30 for 30 percent off your first session! ​

I've always been able to muscle through, tell my body exactly what needs to happen to get s#!t done. Strong-arming my body has always worked, whether the mind-over-matter situation was getting to the end of a hike with a broken toe or to the end of a pitocin-induced labor with no epidural.

This weekend, however, my mind isn't nearly strong enough to surpass the matter of being sick. Even though I told myself I don't have time to be sick, I don't have time to reschedule my mini-retreat to another day, I couldn't cajole or convince my body into feeling better. 

I've had to make time for what I don't have time for.

My life is pretty busy; I'm sure you can relate. There never seems to be enough time for everything that needs to fit in the too short hours of a very full day. Lying in bed at the end of the day, I chronicle what didn't get finished, what needs to happen tomorrow because it didn't happen today. I make lists and set deadlines. What I need is another me: another me to make the shopping trip to Target, another me to contact the director of the art school I'm looking at for my younger son, another me to drive my older son to his jazz workshop on Saturday while another me is at a couples seminar with my husband. 

There's not enough me to go around. The person who feels this lack most keenly is probably my husband. I used to think my husband got the leftover me at the end of the day, the me who had worked all day, picked up and drove the kids around and made sure they had what they needed, like clean laundry, clothes that fit, permission slips signed, and enriching activities. 

Lately, it doesn't even seem like there's a leftover me, just an empty, exhausted shell on autopilot as I brush my teeth, wipe off my makeup, and crawl into bed.

Muscling through doesn't make me strong. As I've had to slow my pace and lower my expectations of myself this weekend, I've realized that rest gives me more strength than hard work. Working so hard that there's nothing left of me at the end of the day doesn't serve me or my marriage, my kids or my clients.

Years ago, I led a coaching + craft mini-retreat where moms learned how to determine how much time and energy they had each morning using a decorated dish and little glass coins. Each coin - up to 10 a day - represents a certain amount of energy you have to spare. Activities throughout the day, whether it's going to work or going to Costco, cost time and energy, represented by the coins. The goal of the daily game is to figure out how to plan and live your day so you don't end up depleted and overdrawn at the end of it. (You can download a copy of the coaching + craft activity guide here.)
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This morning, I pulled out my little dish from where it was tucked away in a cabinet by my bathroom sink. I allotted myself three coins, just three to remind me to spend the day resting, watching the Olympics, cuddling with my hubby, and building my strength. 

Are you feeling a battered sense of relief you've made it to the shore of a new year? Does the past year look so much like a shipwreck on the rocks?
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You can walk away from the wreck of the last year, but you can't really leave it behind. You wear your past like clothes: your pockets are full of memories, your shirt smells like the sea of your experiences, life lessons are left in the seams.

It's lovely and hopeful to look forward to a new and improved year. But it's far stronger to begin the year with what you learned from your struggles, the strength you've earned from slogging through what didn't go right, the wisdom gleaned from being wrong and doing things the hard way, over and over again.

Here's how I want you to ring in the New Year: Celebrate what didn't go right in the past one. Make a toast to the arguments, the bad decisions, and the failures. Make a list of your struggles, disappointments, wrong turns, and dead ends. And then next to each unfortunate incident, uncomfortable memory, or broken promise, write down how it's a gift to you and your year to come.
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Here are a few things from my list ... 
A struggle: I've been dealing with insomnia for almost a year now.
The gift: On my search for sleep, I tried everything except for prescription drugs: supplements, herbs, homeopathic remedies, breathing techniques, acupuncture... And then, I surrendered. I'm finding my way toward a fragile acceptance of my insomnia - and a hard-won recognition that I can do difficult things with little sleep (like write a book).

Bad decisions: I've worked way too much this past year because I couldn't figure out how to feel done for the day, which has affected all of my relationships - and not in a good way.
The gift: I'm being more realistic about my schedule for this coming year, building in time for friends and family, making room for creativity and quiet, and honoring Sundays as a day off with my family.

A big problem: I've neglected my marriage.
The gift: I've missed him, missed us, and I'm so clear on what I need to do to be more connected.
It's tempting to abandon your past, just walk away from the disappointments like you don't need anything from the damaged year. But when you do, you lose all the treasures you've collected along the way. Because your rewards are often so heavy, it's easy to mistake them for only rocks in your pockets, weighing you down. 

But when you truly look at the last year, the wreckage becomes riches: the heavy memories shine and the little mistakes glitter in the sunlight, each and every one a pearl of wisdom to carry forward into the New Year.
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(This post was originally published a few years back but the lessons continue to be meaningful: stay in the present moment, be kind to myself and others, focus on what matters most.)

Would you like a little help figuring out how to turn the wreckage into riches? Set up a time for a free call with me. We'll find your treasures and ways for you to use those well-earned rewards in 2018. Click here to schedule your session with me. Use coupon code NEW50 for 50 percent off your first session. Hugs, Kathleen