Somewhere along the way, "calm mom energy" became a personality trait people are supposed to aspire to, like it's a goal you can hit if you just breathe deep enough and buy the right diffuser.
I want to be clear about something. I do not have calm mom energy. I have "I found my keys, we might still make it" energy, which is a completely different vibe and frankly a more honest one.
I tried, for a while, to be the calm one. I read the articles. I practiced the slow voice, the one where you crouch down to your kid's eye level and say "I hear that you're frustrated" instead of saying what you're actually thinking, which is usually something closer to "we are leaving in four minutes and one of us is wearing pants." The slow voice works for about ninety seconds. Then real life happens. Someone spills juice on the one form you needed signed by Friday. The dog eats a sock. Somebody's missing a shoe that was, provably, on their foot eleven minutes ago.
Calm mom energy assumes you have a reserve tank. It assumes that somewhere underneath the chaos there is a still, centered version of you waiting to emerge if you just meditate hard enough. What I have learned, three kids and several thousand mornings in, is that there is no reserve tank. There is only the tank you've got, and most days it's running on fumes, dry shampoo, and the specific kind of willpower that comes from knowing nobody else is going to find the missing shoe.
What actually works for me is not calm. It's fast and a little unhinged but ultimately functional. I yell sometimes. I have absolutely negotiated with a six year old using the threat of cancelling a birthday party that was never actually going to be cancelled. I have said "because I said so" out loud, unironically, the exact sentence I swore I'd never say, and you know what, it worked, and we made it to school on time.
I think the calm mom thing sells so well because it's aspirational and aspirational things are easy to package. Nobody puts "barely holding it together but we got out the door with shoes on" on a tote bag. But that one is true. That one is most of us, most days.
Here's what I've stopped doing:
apologizing for not being the calm one. My kids don't need a serene robot. They need someone who shows up, even loudly, even messily, even while muttering under her breath about juice on a form. They need to see that you can be frustrated and still be safe to come to. That you can yell about the shoe and still hug it out two minutes later. That's not a failure of calm. That's just being a person raising other people in real time, with real feelings, in a house that never, ever stays clean for longer than nine minutes.
So if your calm mom energy looks more like a slightly frantic woman doing math in her head about how many minutes until the bus while simultaneously locating a shoe, a lunch, and her own dignity, welcome. You're not doing it wrong. You're doing it honestly. And honestly is the only energy I've got left to offer most mornings anyway.
I'm Nathaly from Yo-Momma: single mom of three, hockey rink regular, and curator of the stuff that actually survives real mom life. No fluff, no sponsored nonsense, just what works.
