Knowing Better Doesn't Equal Doing Better

The MotherHood: Vulnerable Stories from Powerful Mothers

Knowing Better Doesn't Equal Doing Better

Written by Rachel Sklar

I’ll never forget driving down San Antonio Road with two toddlers in the back seat as I sobbed and begged them to explain themselves to me. Through tears and desperation, I pleaded, “What do you need from me? What am I doing wrong? Please tell me.” As if they could. As if the fear in their eyes wasn’t enough.

I knew better, but in that moment, I couldn’t do better. That’s what parenting was like for me, and for so many parents I meet today. It doesn’t matter what we know. It matters how we feel.

Before I had kids, I felt excited to become a mom. Children were my thing. Every dollar I earned from age 12 to 30 came from kid-related jobs. I had a master’s degree in Social Welfare from Berkeley, where I specialized in Children and Family Services. I even won the research award for my thesis on the effectiveness of parent education. As a social worker, I supported foster parents who faced unimaginable parenting challenges.

I was an amazing mother…until I had kids.

Nobody tells you the dark side.

They just recommend parenting books and remind you that the days are long and the years fly by, which is not very helpful when you’re driving down San Antonio Road.

But I’m a good student, so when my son wouldn’t sleep, or my kids couldn’t get along, or macaroni and cheese was the only food they’d eat, I hit the books and followed the rules. If the book said cry it out, we cried it out. If the book said use time-outs, we used time-outs. If the book said sneak vegetables into brownies, we baked after bedtime.

And we continued to suffer.

People like to say that kids don’t come with an instruction manual. I call B.S. They come with too many manuals. And most aren’t written with your kid in mind. Those books made me feel like something was wrong with me, or worse, with my children. Why I kept reading them, I’m not sure. Maybe because the blog posts, parenting workshops, and advice from well-meaning relatives weren’t much better.

Even my mommy groups made me feel alone. Parenting wasn’t supposed to be a competitive sport, yet there we were, comparing stories and walking away with invisible awards, or that sinking feeling that no one else could understand. We’d be standing at the park chatting about our kids, and I’d ask, “Hey, my son hits other kids when he doesn’t get his way. Does yours?” And they’d say, “No, but he whines sometimes.” Sometimes? I would’ve killed a puppy for “sometimes.”

Over dinner I’d ask, “Does your son ever bang his head against the floor when he’s upset or cry for hours in the middle of the night?” The looks that followed told me that was the wrong question for a Mom’s Night Out.

Looking back, those moms were probably as confused by my questions as I was. But all I saw in their faces was judgment, fear, and dejection. If I’d realized I was projecting my own feelings onto them, I would have denied it. It was easier to drop those friends for being “unsupportive.” At the time, I didn’t realize I was choosing being right over staying connected. But that realization would ultimately change everything.

Almost as hard as parenting was feeling like a complete fraud. I wanted to go back to work just to get a break from my kids. But how could I? My biggest professional strength had become my Achilles heel, and I was terrified to admit it. What if I returned to my post, helping children and families, and someone found out what a terrible mother I was? Who was I to help other parents when I couldn’t even help myself? I had been professionally successful and personally ashamed.

Long before I knew the term impostor syndrome, I was living it.

We couldn’t afford a nanny. I had to either change careers or get better at the career I had. So I did a little of both - while delaying the process entirely. I went back to school and trained at The Parent Coaching Institute. It was a cop-out, but only I knew that. My plan was to get parenting support without admitting I needed help from anyone else.

I don’t know when I started believing it was shameful to need help. Somewhere along the way, I learned that the best help came from within. “If you want it done right, do it yourself,” my mother used to say. “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.” Having my act together was a badge of honor. My mother went to therapy every Tuesday night of my childhood, but somehow I didn’t come away with a desire to do the same.

That’s why the parent coach training program was so appealing. I could enroll under the pretense of starting a private practice, while secretly hoping to coach myself through this dark time. If it worked, I could always hang a shingle.

And that’s exactly what happened. But it wasn’t a straight road to parenting heaven. Not even close. There were twists and turns, plenty of face-palm moments, and lots of “What have I done?” realizations. But every one of those breakdowns led me to a breakthrough.

Eventually, I saw that nothing was wrong with me…or my kids. We were fine. The problem was that I was looking to experts and gurus to tell me how to parent, instead of looking right into the eyes of my children for answers. I was asking the wrong people. Instead of checking in with my own values, I was waiting for Alfie Kohn to tell me what to value. Instead of knowing my children deeply, I was searching Dan Siegel’s books to figure out what made them tick. Instead of noticing the conditions that helped us thrive on good days, I was scraping the internet for ways to survive the bad ones.

I had been trying to life-hack my way through parenting. It wasn’t fair to my kids. They needed me to say, “You bring so many delicious ingredients to the table. Let’s make a yummy pie out of it.”

Once I started connecting with my values and seeing my children for who they were, not who I thought they should be, everything changed. The biggest shift came with my oldest son. His temperament was so different from mine that I couldn’t make sense of it. Back then, I didn’t understand the difference between temperament and behavior.

I’ll never forget sitting on my red bedspread when the realization hit. “Oh!” I thought. “That’s just how he is. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just that way.” A wave of acceptance washed over me, and I could finally give him the thing he needed most.

If he had been able to answer me that day on San Antonio Road when I screamed, “What do you need from me?” he would have said, “Mom, just accept me the way I am. The only thing you’re doing wrong is resisting who I came here to be.”

And he would’ve been right.

He wasn’t what I had imagined when I dreamed of motherhood, but he was perfect in his own way. His way of being wasn’t wrong or bad. It was simply different. And it was workable. I realized those parenting tips that didn’t work weren’t anyone’s fault. They just weren’t what he needed. He needed something different. And I wanted to figure that out, with him by my side.

After that, I started loving parenting so much that I went ahead and had a third child. I stopped begging the world for answers and started asking better questions. I anchored myself in what was good and right about me and my kids. I began to see them as well-intentioned in everything they did - just little people trying to get their needs met, doing the best they could. Just like me.

Today, I’m inspired by my three boys and everything they bring to the table, smelly socks and all. I try to prioritize my relationship with them over the rules of parenting. I don’t always get it right, but I look for acceptance. I look inward. And I trust that someday, they’ll be driving down San Antonio Road, doing the same.

Knowing better still doesn’t mean I always do better. But knowing that my relationship with my boys can handle the mess? That’s good enough for me.

Rachel Sklar is a PCI Certified Parenting Coach, speaker, licensed social worker, and founder of The Boy Mom Academy (and 3x boy mom). With a background in child welfare and over 15 years in private practice, she’s helped thousands of moms raise strong-willed boys to be kind, calm, and cooperative, without losing themselves in the process. If you're looking for a proven, relationship-based approach to parenting your son, check out The Boy Mom Academy for expert guidance and lifelong community support.