Tamara 00.00

Hey moms out there. We are so excited to be meeting with you today. Have you ever felt like you needed more connection to the women around you to other mothers? You have questions that you want answers and don't know who to turn to? Today we have questions and answers for you. Stay tuned.

Welcome to the American Mothers: Mom to Mom Podcast. The show that lifts, encourages, supports, and educates mothers to do their best in their awesome responsibility to raise, teach, and champion the rising generation. Join us as we talk to and answer questions from mothers nationwide about the challenges, heartbreaks, joys, and lessons learned from one mother to another.

I think one of the best questions to start this episode off with is so many times we, as moms come across problems that we feel are so unique to our little family. We're not sure quite how to solve them. And as women, we go to the people we know. We ask our mom, our sisters, our friends, here's the situation I'm dealing with.

How would you solve this? And sometimes they give you really good answers and sometimes you'll put it out there and get 10 answers and then you'll go online and find 20 more. And you're like, okay. What do I do now? I have 20 ideas and I'm not sure which one I should try with my child. What would you say to somebody like that who's trying to figure out a solution to their particular child and problem?. How would they solve that, Deanne?

It reminds me of the time that we're supposed to give the advice to the new mother. I knew her mother very well. She's a very great lady, raised a lot of children, great valuable information.

But I told this soon to be mother, I said, you are going to get a lot of experience shared with you, from people around you that love you. And they're only trying to help and you can listen to that, but you need to recognize you will be the mother. You have this innate ability, this mother's intuition, the inner voice of a mother, whatever you want to call it, that you can listen to everything, what everybody says, but you need to listen to what your heart, your inner voice is telling you because you know what is best for that child.

And you can just say, thank you. I will take that under consideration. And be kind about it but you also need to trust yourself. And I think that's the hardest thing as a young mother, especially a new mother. There's so many things. Oh, they're spitting up. When you go to a doctor, the doctors sometimes just say, yeah, well, don't worry about it. It will be fine. But you are not hypochondriac mother, you are a mother who's concerned and knows your child, and there is something different. So don't let them, especially new mothers just say, okay, well they said it's going to be okay. And maybe it will be, it's important not to overreact at the same time. You learn that when you're a new mother and it increases as your children grow.

That's true. That's true. I remember when I was young mom and my second child, Nathan, we hit his 18 month checkup and I took him into the doctor. And my biggest concern with him was, shouldn't he be talking more about. And I remember my pediatrician saying, oh, some kids don't talk til they're three.

And I'm like, okay. My other kid wasn't like that. And my oldest wasn't like that, I know each kid is different. So I was like, all right, well, if you say so, you know, but inside I knew something was wrong. It wasn't too much later that Nathan was diagnosed with autism. And so I don't think that would happen nowadays because there's so much more awareness about autism right now.

But inside my soul, inside my heart, I knew something was wrong. But I kind of let him talk me out of it. Do you know what I mean? So it, I think you're right. I think it's learning to trust that motherly intuition, especially when you're a young mom, you're just like, well, maybe he's right. Maybe I am overthinking this. Maybe I am overreacting. If I could go back to that young mom, I would've said, oh no, you follow that up and say, what else could it be? Hindsight's always 2020.

I totally agree with that. With the internet available, we can create problems sometimes where there are none, but you can also learn about things and ask questions that might help the doctor also. We didn't have that one when I was a young mom or even an older mom with teenage children.

I'm going to share an experience that I have been given permission to share. Challenges come up with children all the time. You hear about how other people have handled runaways or whatever, but you don't know what it's like until it happens to you. One morning, about 1988 and our oldest son was a junior in high school.

I went to check on him. He usually is up and I had heard him. So I went in to check on him and his bed was made, which was always nice. And on the bed was a note that said, I need a couple of days to think about some things I'll be back. I mean, What would you do?

Freak out.

Disclose you're here. He's the oldest of eight children. So I still had seven other children to care for and get off to school. Try recognizing that if I acted panicked or concerned, that would also impact them and how they handle the day. So. I put on my happy mom face and like, okay, we're fine. Where's Oh, he's okay. Let's just get you off to school. So as soon as the children are off to school, the concern hit and I go, what do I do? I had to just calm and think for a minute, I go, I'm going to call his teacher that I know he's really tight with 'cuz, he's in charge of the afterschool activities my son was involved in. So I called him and he said, Okay, Mrs. Taylor, I want you to not worry. He just left my office. He's fine. He just needs some time to work through some things.

So what does that mean for me? What am I supposed to do all day? Obviously I prayed that he would be fine. Of course, I called my husband who was already at work. So we talked a couple of times during the day, but we knew we had to figure out a way before he gets home, how we were going to handle this.

What did he need? What did we need to teach him? What did he be able to learn through this experience? So I prayed for that strength, so when the children got home from school, we told them that when Lynn got home, we needed to talk to him. So, they would kind of be on their own for awhile.

When he got home, we discussed why he left. Why did he feel he couldn't tell us what was going on. And after the discussion, it came to me, I said, we need to work through this somehow. So we came up with a plan, a rule, actually, a new family rule. That the children would be allowed a sick day, not a physically sick day, but a mentally, emotional day once a quarter with the understanding, there were no assignments due, and that was not a test day. That we all need a day to decompress. I knew that I needed that as a mother and we recognized our children also needed that. Something else, we kind of came up on later, is that, well, the 1988 anxiety, wasn't an issue.

It wasn't talked about. Depression was you're put away, you know, you don't deal with that stuff. And I've come to learn and we've come to recognize that most of my children have anxiety. And I don't know why. I'm baffled, uh, it to some extent, not extreme, but he was dealing with that at that time.

And if I had not listened to my intuition, my inner voice that told me to step back and look at what's happening, I might've reacted differently. He might've had a different future than he had. He's gone on to be an A-10 pilot and very successful. He's an author and very successful in any capacity that he steps into. But together we're able to work through that until we could find out what was the base.

Hmm. I love that story because it shows that you figured out the right solution, not only for your son, but the right rules to then implement in your specific family. And each family is going to look different.

And so each child is going to be different. So. Figuring out those right things. I love that you just listen to your motherly intuition, you talked it through with your husband, with your son's professor and you know, so you, you involved others in the choice, but ultimately the decision was listening to your motherly intuition and staying true to that.

So I think that's a good lesson for all of us that yes, you can get advice from other people, but ultimately, say a quick prayer, follow your motherly intuition and you'll be led to the right decision.

That's true. I had most of the day to work through this. Yeah. Sometimes you have to do it instantaneously,.

So true.

Don't second guess yourself sometimes. Sometimes we second guess. And um, usually it turns out really well, if you true to what you're feeling.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

We're going to take a quick break, but when we get back, we're going to talk a little bit more about more mom's stories and also a little bit about our Mother of the Year nominations and what that is and what it looks like and what it feels like. So stay tuned for that.

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Welcome back with us Mom to Mom. I have really loved getting to know Tamara, and she has an amazing story that I think she should share with us, some of her mothering experience and some of the things she's learned.

I think my experience with motherhood has taught me that. It's not what we expect. It's going to look like. I think in my mind I painted this picture of motherhood, that it was all rosy and happy and everything would just go hunky Dory. And for some reason, I just never pictured the hard times in mothering until I'm in it. And one of the things I've learned first off was, you're a perfect parent until your child learns to say no at about 18 months, you know what I mean? Yeah, you're not a perfect parent anymore, but I think our kids teach us so much and I was blessed with three sons and a daughter.

My oldest son is wonderful, has ADHD, a hard time holding still, ever since he was a little child. Then my two middle boys are on the autism spectrum. Nathan is my second son and he is wonderful, but he has low functioning autism. So he has a hard time communicating verbally. And so when he was little, because he couldn't communicate, that looked like a lot of tantrums. It was really hard to get him potty trained. It was very, very challenging. And then our next son was also on the autism spectrum and he also had a hard time communicating when he was younger, but he kind of learned and grew out of that, which doesn't always happen, but it did in his case. So then we have a daughter at the tail end and she's wonderful. And she struggles with anxiety. And a couple of my kids struggle with depression as well. Has mothering looked exactly like I thought it would? Absolutely not.

One of my hardest moments in my mothering journey was when Nathan was diagnosed. I lived for a long time in denial. We knew that he wasn't speaking well. I'd had one therapist tell me he doesn't have autism cause he'll sit on your lap and he let you hold them and touch them. Like, yes. So anything that validated that he didn't have autism, I clung to that. While other people are like, well, that probably needs to be ruled out by some professionals. Okay, fine.

So we finally took him to get diagnosed and with a team of specialist at the Dennis Developmental Center in Little Rock Arkansas, because that's where we were living at the time. And I remember when they said he had autism, it was like all these dreams and thoughts and emotions that I had for Nathan and about Nathan. It was like somebody had taken it and slammed it on the ground and stomped all over it. And I was left just with this tremendous sense of loss and grief and I cried most of the way home. It was a three and a half hour drive home, and I just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I don't think my husband had ever seen me cry like that, but I think I cried both for him, but also for me, because I knew that this diagnosis was not just changing his life it was also changing my life.

And I think that's probably why I lived in denial for so long, for so many years, because I didn't want my life to look different than I had imagined it. And it took me a while to go home and process that emotion and to process that idea that my life was going to look different than I had ever imagined. And so I think what I would tell any parent who goes through a life change like that, where you, you, you have these expectations of what you think life is going to look like and all of a sudden they're snatched away and they're shattered on the ground. I want to let you know, it's okay to grieve those because those dreams and expectations were so real in your mind of what life was going to look like and what you expected it to look like and all of a sudden here you are, and life is not going to look like that. Maybe it's. You're going through a divorce or maybe you have a child who passes away or has some diagnosis that is life altering and life changing. And so I want you to just give yourself permission to grieve that it is okay to grieve these changes that come upon all of us. Some things are major and dramatic and some things are minor. Sometimes you expect the day to play out a certain way and it sure doesn't and you feel like, oh, my dreams for this day were shattered. So I think learning to deal with all the emotions of mothering and motherhood. Wow. It's almost like you need a degree in psychology. I don't know.

Yeah. I totally agree with that. Yeah, that's amazing. I remember your story that I really liked is when you wanted to go for a walk, seeing people walking outside. Would you share that? Because I think that was a pivotal moment in the way you perceive things.

It really was a pivotal moment. And I think one of the things I grieved the most is that we were never going to do things the way everybody else did them again, like we would never be normal. And this story happened a few years after Nathan was diagnosed on the spectrum and it was like the first beautiful day of spring and I remember looking out my front window and you know how that first day of spring is you're just cannot wait to get out of your house. To get out into the sunshine. And so I remember sitting there and of course I'm home with my four children and I cannot take them out by myself because of, especially the two with special needs one would, was a runner, and so he would just run as fast as he could away from me, which in and of itself was very stressful. But I couldn't handle the four on my own, out in public. And so I always had to go somewhere with someone if I was taking them anywhere, for their own safety.

And so I remember when my husband got home from work and I said, we need to go on a family walk just around the block. It doesn't have to be anything big. So we ate dinner, we got the kids put together double stroller on two. The other two were on little bikes or trikes or walking. And we seriously got, I don't know, one house down from ours. And Nathan threw this huge tantrum, the kind where they drop their feet out from under him and refuse to go another step.

And we tried to tell him we're just going around the block, but of course, because of his autism, he couldn't understand what we were trying to tell him and explained to him. And he just cried harder and longer. Finally, my husband threw him over his shoulder and walked back in house. And so this dream of walking around the block with my family just did not play out the way I had envisioned it would.

And it had been a long day. It had been a long winter and I was exhausted on so many levels. So as I finished that walk, I think it was just the straw that broke the camel's back. And I remember dropping to my knees that night and praying to God and just asking him all those hard questions.

Why do we have two children with autism? Wasn't one enough? Why can't we go on walks like a normal family? Why can't we be a normal family and somewhere amidst all my tears, I felt an answer in my heart. And it was this: Tamara, this is normal for you. And it was like, oh, it was like, he lifted my sights to a higher perspective and said, quit looking out your front window and what everybody else is doing and realize you're going to do things your own way and your kids are going to do things their own way and you don't have to compare. It was such a life-changing and pivotal moment for me to realize, no, I am not like everybody else. My children are not like anybody else, but they don't have to be, to have worth.

They don't have to be to have value. They can be normal for them. I can be normal for me. And it kind of stopped my rant in my sorrow for that. I just realized this must be how God looks at them. They are normal for them. And this is, this is how your life is. So, get over it, get on with your life. You know,

That is so powerful. I think when I first heard that story, I go, every mother should learn that for themselves. Their story is not the same as the person down the road. You see everybody out shopping or going to a meeting and they're all dressed up and look good and you go, oh wow. She's got it all together.

You don't see what goes behind the doors, the closed doors at their home, and the sorrows and the struggles and the joy she has. But I love it that wherever we are, it's normal for us and we are better off if we don't compare. We just embrace what we have as mothers and love it, enjoy it, and thrive in the moment.

Thank you for sharing that, Tamara. I want to mention something else: you were nominated for Mother of the Year. How did that impact you? How did that feel? Knowing the background and the struggles you were still recognized as a mother of value.

You know, at first I felt kind of, um, intimated by the whole process, just because I'm like, oh, I think as women we're like, oh, I'm nobody special.

Unfortunately, I think you're right.

And so I think we all feel like, oh, I don't deserve this because I'm not a perfect mom. Well, news. None of us are so, so it was, it was kind of a humbling thing, but I kind of had to pause, and I was asked, do you want to proceed with the nomination? And I thought, what is the goal here? Is the goal to only have perfect moms up there. Or is the goal to shine the light on even the messy parts of motherhood. That motherhood is not always easy and it's not always perfect. And so if that's what they're looking for. Yeah, I qualify. I have joys and sorrows, ups and downs. Lots of lots and lots of learn by error, trial and error mothering moments. So, if that's what you're looking for, then yeah, you can proceed.

Every mother has a story that's unique and whatever story she shares, just like the story you shared today, and my experience from my one son. We hope in sharing those that other mothers can feel some hope, some strength, some, oh, now maybe if I have something like that, I can take a step back cause I've heard that story. And that's why recognizing mothers and honoring mothers in all areas of their life or the most important thing is to share your story. Because some mother out there needs to hear it. And I appreciate that you went forward with that nomination. You weren't selected as a Mother of the Year, but you are certainly honored because you were willing to step up and share your story. I appreciate you doing that type of thing.

Oh, it was, it was a wonderful experience. It really was. And I always just figured, you know, if I'm supposed to win, then I'll win. And if I don't, then, I've got plenty of other things that keep me busy, including my sons with autism. So I figured if it was meant to happen, it would happen. And it didn't, but it didn't break my heart because I'm like the person who won is amazing. So yeah. It wasn't the right thing for me.

Over the years, I've had a hard time. The winner, the mother of the year is the winner. She is the representative of mothers who were selected from that state.

She represents them, their values, their goals, and their dreams. And she might be the spokesperson for the year for the mothers at that state. I'll tell you, the mother who was selected does not feel like the winner at all, because she feels the responsibility of representing the mother's of her state.

Yeah.

And I'm happy that that's the way the mothers of the states feel, because she is representing wonderful women of her state who value their children, love their children and give back to their communities in the process. But I appreciate your insight. So if anybody out there is nominated or would like to nominate a wonderful, outstanding mother. It doesn't have to be your own mother. It can be any mother who has impacted your life. Nominations are open from Mother's Day until September 15th every year. Just go to americanmothers.org/nominate, and you can find out more about the nomination and submit a nomination yourself.

Wonderful. And it is. It's wonderful. I have a couple of women that I know that I would love to nominate for Mother of the Year. I think I probably should ask them first. What do you think, Deanne?

Not always. Not always. Some women

Just nominate them anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. Just nominate them and then leave it. Then you can say, oh, by the way, I nominated you from Mother and they do it after the fact.

Okay. Cause I was wondering if I should approach them first.

Not always, not always. In this new selection process, it's really fun. You can nominate and then national will send them an email that says you've been nominated. There is one mother when she received a phone call a month or two later, it says, we've never heard back from you about your nominations. She goes, oh, I thought that was a joke

I thought that was spam. I deleted it.

No, actually she didn't know anything about American Mothers and the nomination process. It was kind of intereting. And by the way she was selected for her state.

Oh, that's so funny. So don't think it's a joke you might really be nominated.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Deanne. This has been fun to share stories today and talk about these amazing parts of American Mothers. It's an honor to be a part of this incredible organization where we honor women and try to help them feel like wherever they are just keep doing your best. Right?

Absolutely. That's all we can do is our best and support those around you. Recognize when they do something. You don't have to be mother of the year or nominated the mother of the year to recognize a friend or say thank you to a mother.

Because we all work really hard.

We really do.

All right. We have a wonderful mothering mishap to share with you right now by Dalene Basden who is the 2022 Massachusetts Mother of the Year. And here is her funny mothering mishap.

Funny now, but it wasn't at the time I have a house full of rambunctious, little boys, and it kind of lacks the rules a little bit. So they know that if you're not bleeding, please don't bother me, especially with Nani's making a cake. So I'm in the kitchen making a cake and the oldest grandson comes running in , Nani, Nani.

I think Steven's hurt. And my response is he bleeding, is there blood. He says no, I said, okay, go play. I hear the guys in there talking. You tell her. No, I'm not going back in here. No, you tell her lots of whispering. Finally, another one comes over and says, Hey Nani.. Yes. Does it count if he's not moving? At which point I dropped the spatula and run to the stairs to discover this little guy totally laid out.

Knocked out.. Turns out he had jumped on the back of one of the other boys coming down the stairs. They both trouble, he hit the wall and that was it. We rushed him to the hospital. He did indeed have a serious concussion and was hospitalized for a couple of days. So no more, if there's blood, it also includes if they're knocked out, that's considered an emergency and yes, you can disturb Nani for that one.

Have you ever wondered how to identify the strengths in your own children or possibly even yourself? What about your ability to lead your family? Our guest next week has some wonderful tips and amazing ideas for us. So you want to join us next week. Mom to mom.

Ashley Ray Klinger, the 2021 North Dakota Mother of the Year has some wonderful advice about mothers using their maternal energy.

She says, All women have maternal energy. How we use our maternal energy will be unique for each of us, but in order to realize it, to make a positive impact, we must first recognize that we have it. We must then embrace and harness it. And then we must identify the appropriate and most effective ways for us to use it in accordance to our own unique gifts and passions.

I think that is great advice. Have a great week.

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