I'm the same woman who once knit wool diaper covers in my efforts to be the ultimate thrifty, faithful Mormon mother. Same hands. Same needles. (Who am I kidding? I have ADHD. I lose needles like sunglasses.) What changed wasn't the knitting. What changed was the purpose. The motivation.

The good Mormon homemaker

As a young mom, knitting fit right into my stable of homemaking skills. I made dishcloths. I made wool diaper covers. Everyone got homemade scarves for Christmas. I saved money and made useful things for the people I was taking care of. There was real pleasure in that! There still is. A stack of something you made with your own hands is satisfying in a concrete, wholesome way.

But in that world, those handmade items meant something about me. Like everything I did meant something about me. A wool soaker meant I was frugal. It meant I was nurturing. It meant I was the kind of woman who sacrificed and provided. Lovingly crafted. Which was the kind of woman I'd been told God wanted me to be. Those dishcloths were doing some heavy lifting. Besides wiping counters and faces they were also proving that I was doing everything I could not to let my Savior down.

It's not that I didn't enjoy knitting. I loved it! Something I could do for myself that didn't feel selfish because it wasn't. It was also productive. And then I stopped.

My arms got more and more full. Little fists grabbed and tiny people got mobile. And the knitting got tucked away. That part wasn't ideological. Squishy babies and pointy needles are not a great combination, and I needed my hands pretty much around the clock for a number of years.

The needles and yarn were packed away with every intention of picking them up again one of these days. Just as soon as I had a few minutes.

Picking the needles back up

Coming back to it was the hard part.

I wrote in my last essay about disappearing into my family. In the years after leaving the church, I was processing betrayal trauma, grief, and the loss of basically every framework I had used to understand my life. Add ADHD, a lifetime of scrupulosity, and some very big feelings, and my nervous system was a mess. Now we're going to throw in delayed adolescence and being "new again" to alcohol and I did an endo right into a drinking problem. That's a really common story for people with ADHD. And yet I didn't see it coming at all.

Knitting became part of my safety plan. When I would have been cracking open a drink and sipping my way through a movie, I picked up my needles instead. It gave my hands a job. It soothed me in a way I still can't fully explain.

It also felt complicated. Here was this thing I genuinely needed to do to stay okay, and it came packaged with everything I was trying to get away from. Every time I sat down in a pile of yarn, I was also sitting down with the good Mormon homemaker I didn't want to be anymore. It's unnerving to lean on a tool for your mental and emotional well-being and resent it at the same time.

But picking up the needles again felt like a lifeline. Something solid I could grasp onto when the rest of my world and my reality was shifting, shaking, slipping, swirling around me.

I knitted constantly for a long time. I knit so much in my solo travel time that any time I left my brother's apartment in SoHo, I left a fresh stack of his very special, very gay dishcloths behind. (A pattern I created just for him and will someday share with the world. When I feel the world is ready.

Why it worked

My hands understood something way before I did.

Betsan Corkhill, a physiotherapist who has done most of the research I could find on therapeutic knitting, describes it as a bilateral, coordinated, rhythmic pattern of movement that crosses the midline of the body. Using both hands together, across your center, while watching what they're doing. It takes up a lot of brain capacity. And when that's happening there's less room left for doom spiraling or the creative catastrophizing us neurodivergents are so good at.

My therapist compared that back-and-forth movement to the bilateral stimulation used in EMDR trauma therapy. The research on that is still thin, so take it as her observation, not settled science. But I know what it felt like to knit through a hard feeling instead of drinking through it. It felt like my body had something to do with the panic besides just panic. A place to channel that energy. To release it. Even relieve it.

Herbert Benson, the Harvard cardiologist who coined the term "relaxation response," said repetitive needlework can bring on a state a lot like meditation. A 2013 survey of more than 3,500 knitters found that most of the respondents with depression felt happier after knitting. And a small 2023 study from a neurological institute in Milan found that experienced knitters paid better attention after only twenty minutes of knitting.

That last one makes total sense to my ADHD brain. Knitting makes me a better listener. Give my hands something to do and my brain will actually stay in the room.

Taking the needles back

To ease the dissonance, I started knitting things a good Mormon mother would probably not make.

First, profanity dishcloths

.

Then my first pattern invention. The one I think the world is still not ready for. Sorry… don't let the suspense kill you.

And eventually, the boobie beanie.

I get that this sounds like a big, intentionally rebellious gesture. That wasn't it… entirely. Rather, as I walked through the valley of my religious-trauma-induced delayed adolescence, I kept noticing what made me laugh. And then I did more of that. I wasn't making things to prove I was good anymore. I was making things that entertained me and my friends and served no higher purpose whatsoever. And if it made a random stranger cackle irreverently as they registered what hung on my needles? So much the better.

That turned out to be what I needed. It wasn't enough to stop believing knitting made me a good woman. I had to make something that couldn't possibly do that job. A dishcloth that says Fuck It isn't proof of anything except that I think it's funny.

A pattern for my actual brain

The beanie took me a year. I made the first one last year for a friend's daughter who was into boob everything. I went searching for a pattern and the internet was flush with them. But only for crochet! I don't crochet. That's a story for another day. There were knitted baby boobie beanies, and other patterns that came close but were just not quite what I was looking for. So my second original pattern was born. My second irreverent, inappropriate pattern.

I gifted my friend the first one and then changed every single iteration in some way or other for the next year. Until I had the perfect, foolproof pattern that worked every time.

I approached it the same way I approach coaching. I didn't try to turn myself into the kind of knitter who loves long, tedious projects. I paid attention to where I got stuck, bored, or irritated, and I changed that part. It's simple where I want to zone out and interesting where my brain needs a little novelty. The yarn doesn't make me want to crawl out of my skin, and it's short enough that I actually finish it.

That's basically my whole philosophy in a hat. You don't fix yourself to fit the pattern. You fix the pattern to fit you.

Needing it and wanting it

I still knit through uncomfortable meetings and the scary parts of movies. The regulation part didn't go away, and I don't want it to. I'm not going to pretend the knitting that held me together was some lesser, unhealthy version of a hobby. It did real work. It kept me okay when not many things could have

The difference now is that the knitting doesn't have to carry all that weight. Most often, I pick up my needles because I want to, because the project is fun and I want to see how it turns out. Because I want to gift the gift of my time and my sense of humor.

Leaving the church made me want to shake off everything that came with my assigned divine role for a long time. The skills along with the expectations. So I had to change who the knitting was for. It used to be for God. For survival in the system that made me worthy to be with my family again in his eyes.

Now it's mostly for me. And sometimes it's for boobs.

P.S. Yes, I really do knit the boob hats. And yes, you can actually buy them. I’ve listed a very limited quanity as well as the pattern in my little Etsy shop, TuffKnitties, if you’re curious.

I tried to squash it. It burned so bright I was afraid they could feel it when I hugged them. It made no sense. I loved my kids. I wanted to hear their thoughts. I loved their curiosity! I loved that they wanted to share it with me.

So I did what I had always done with a feeling that didn’t make sense. I condemned myself, numbed and stuffed, and tried harder.

Until one day in therapy when it all came apart.

What we found was me, standing in the hallway with a load of laundry in my arms, on my way to three other things, listening to a random science fact for as long as it took. The child telling it to me didn’t notice the laundry or that I was in the middle of something. That child, it’s worth mentioning, had also not put away their own laundry. Ever.

And I was standing there making sure they felt heard. Loved. Understood.

Arms full. Chest on fire. No clue why.

It had literally never occurred to me that I could say, “Walk with me,” or “Tell me at dinner,” or “Give me five minutes.” It had never occurred to me that I didn’t have to be the receptacle for every child’s every random thought. That I didn’t actually have the capacity to be everyone’s best friend.

It turns out, the fire wasn’t failure. It was a signal. Some part of me recognized my right to exist as an independent being. To honor my limits and capacity. To meet my own needs. And it was trying to tell me so. It had been trying to tell me for a long time.

I just wasn’t listening.

After leaving Mormonism, the deconstructing didn’t end. It was no longer just about what I believed but what I had built while I believed it: a marriage, six children, a motherhood organized around service and sacrifice. A life in which being needed had become so fundamental to my identity that I had no idea where usefulness ended and I began.

I went through a long period of grieving that.

I grieved the life I might have lived if I had known myself before I was told who to become. The career I might have pursued. The number of children I might have had, if any. The places I might have gone. The version of adulthood I might have constructed if motherhood had been presented to me as one possible

Had you asked me as an active member I’d have sworn I chose my life. Made an informed, active decision. I no longer see it that way at all. If everything you know about yourself, your life, and the world is a lie, any decisions you make based on that information go away once the fairytale dissolves.

Regret.

Not regret about my children as people. That distinction is everything. I loved them so much it physically hurt, and I could not imagine the world without a single one of them. Wouldn’t want to.But I had to face the fact that loving the people who came from my choices did not retroactively make the conditions under which I made those choices free.

I loved my life. I had not fully chosen it. It would be a long time and alot of work before I could learn to live inside both those realities.

So I kept escaping. Girls’ nights. Trips. Book clubs. Lunches. Anywhere I could step outside the machinery of the family and become a person whose preferences mattered again.

The first time this ever felt real to me was in New York. I visited my brother and spent days moving through the city with almost no one to account for but myself. Hungry? Eat. Tired? Go home. Want coffee? Get coffee. Want to wander through a store for an hour? Wander. No one needed me to make the experience work.

I remember thinking, with embarrassing sincerity:

Oh. There I am.

I had met adult me. And then I had to go home.

On my last night I sobbed on the subway. Huge, humiliating, heaving sobs. I loved my husband. I missed my children. I also felt like I was leaving myself behind.

The question I could not answer was how to bring her home. I didn’t want to visit her twice a year, or let her out for girls’ night, or take her to Manhattan and feed her pasta and let her browse vintage shops before locking her back up again when the plane landed.

I wanted to know how she could live there. In the house. With the children. At five o’clock when everyone is hungry. When someone needs a ride. When one child is upset and another wants to tell me a fourteen-minute story about Minecraft and there are dishes in the sink and an email waiting and somebody cannot find a shoe.

How do I remain a whole person then?

For a while, I thought I solved it.

I set boundaries. I stopped making everyone else’s needs my emergency. I made my work matter. I wrote a book. I started saying things like, “I’m not available right now,” and “Tell me at dinner.” Sometimes I chose the movie. Sometimes I made the thing I wanted to eat even if it caused disappointment. (VERY hard for a food-is-love girl.)

Revolutionary stuff.

I began to understand that a family is not six children plus the adults who facilitate them. I am one of the people who lives here. My experience counts. My comfort counts. My time belongs to me. My preferences are valuable information. My work is real work even when no one in my family directly benefits from it.

For the first time, home started feeling like my home too instead of somewhere I worked.

And slowly, I wanted to be there more.

I always assumed putting myself first sometimes would pull me farther away from my family. Instead, the less I disappeared inside them, the less I needed to escape them. I missed my kids when I traveled. I wanted to pick them up sometimes. I planned trips with them because I genuinely wanted to go. I could be around their needs without feeling consumed by them quite so quickly.

It became much easier to love people once loving them no longer required laying myself out on the floor for them to walk over.

For a minute I told this like a before-and-after story. Then life kept going. And I learned that life doesn’t really DO before-and-afters quite like that.

Families are especially good at reorganizing themselves around whatever is easiest. And for most of my kids’ lives, the easiest thing in our house was me!

Mom knows. Mom remembers. Mom will drive. Mom has the password. Mom knows where the thing is.

And sometimes I do! That’s what makes it so slippery.

I’m not walking around thinking my needs don’t matter anymore. I know they do. It’s sneakier than that now. It’ll only take a minute. I’m already headed that way. I don’t mind. And half the time I really don’t.

But I carried everything for everyone. Everywhere. All the time. And I can still catch myself on one of my missions through the house, three or four stops in a row, standing in the hallway with my arms full, nodding along to a fact about the deep ocean like I have nowhere else to be.

So I protect a little space, and then someone needs something, and then there’s an exception, and another one, and one day I look up and I’m the customer service department for the whole house again. Nobody did that to me. I did it one “it’s no big deal” at a time.

I really thought that once I believed I mattered, I’d just… act like it. All the time. Nope. I can believe it with my whole heart and still plan dinner around everyone but me. I can know my work matters and still feel guilty working when a husband wants to spend time with me.

Part of the problem is I’m REALLY good at this. I can see a meltdown coming three exits before we get there. I can make a whole day run smoothly without anyone knowing how many tiny saves it took. For most of my life I thought that was love.

And some of it is! Feeding people is love. Listening to a science fact is love. I don’t want to stop doing those things. I just want to stop disappearing while I do them. Just when the cost is too great.

So these days the question isn’t “Was I a good mom today?” It’s more like: Was I here too? Did I get to want anything? Did I notice I was tired before I was furious that nobody else noticed while pelting me with needs? Did I let someone be disappointed without interpreting it as failure?

Sadly, I’m not getting a do-over. No adulthood redo, knowing what I know now, without the church in my head. I don’t know what I would have picked, and I’ve mostly made peace with never knowing.

What I can pick is how I show up in the life I’ve got. The me who likes things and wants things and gets tired and needs quiet. The one who sometimes puts the laundry down and says, “This sounds really interesting, tell me at dinner.”

The woman I met in New York did come home. She tends to wander off. I keep going and getting her.

It’s my family too. My dinner. My hallway. My life.

My home too.

Love your family deeply and still wondering where you went inside it? You’re in good company here.

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Every night the kids dig through the baskets for shirts, shorts, and socks, careful not to topple the pile. It doesn’t bother me in the least, as much as my husband wishes it did. Well, that’s not strictly true. I’d love one of those Instagram family laundry basket systems that embraces this and makes it organized and functional, but the house isn’t in agreement there. So we live in perpetual failure of an aspirational traditional laundry system. Clothes meant to be hung on hangers and folded in drawers.

After twenty years of self-flagellation over my perceived failure as a wife and mother (laundry is obviously a core quality of those roles), I have accepted that I am just not a laundry person. It’s one of my limitations as a person. And when I weigh its merits on the priority list of traits to work on, laundry never makes the cut. I DO get the laundry washed. No problem. It’s clean, probably dry after a couple rounds in the dryer, and then into a basket. But that’s where the process ends for me.

UNLESS.

There is one exception to my complete inability to finish the laundry. A shortcut. A little band-aid. A body double. That sounds creepy, right? Body doubling is an ADHD strategy where another human sits with you while you work on a task. My laundry body double isn’t your typical body double, though. Family members won’t do, and neither will incidental visitors. It has to be a friend who is there expressly to sit with me while I fold and put away the laundry. I don’t need their help, not physically. Their presence is enough. Then and only then can I accomplish this most mind-numbingly futile task. But laundry body doubles are unfortunately in short supply on your random Tuesday.

But why? What’s the difference? Why is there absolutely no way for me to get laundry done under any other circumstances, but let a friend sit on my couch and it’s as good as done?

More importantly, why did I never think to ask that question before? You would think the exception would have made me wonder what was different. Instead, I treated it as proof that there was no real reason I couldn’t do it the rest of the time.

If only that were the only weird contradiction I was carrying around.

A few years ago, I took a job as a professional housecleaner. A move that probably baffled most of the people who regularly visit my home. What my house does not demonstrate is how much I enjoy cleaning. The movement, the gratification, the reward of a job well done over and over. A clear start and a clear finish.

That is NOT what it feels like to clean my own house. Well, it does when I get down to the deep-clean level, I guess. But on top of the fun cleaning are layers of decisions waiting to be made, emotional minefields, attention booby traps, and distractions. This makes perfect sense to me.

There is also a big difference between project-based hyperfocus cleaning and maintenance cleaning. Ew.

The hyperfocus kind I’m very good at. I wrote a book in under six months. Just plowed through it. Day or night, it didn’t matter, I could not be stopped. Other things slipped and other people stepped in to pick up the slack while I poured my heart out into my laptop, and I let them.

Before that I taught myself magazine writing, and then freelancing. The editors at the parenting magazine I ended up working for told me I was their most professional freelancer, then asked about my educational background. They were shocked to find out I was self taught.

So I’m not a person who can’t finish things. I’m also a person who cannot put away a basket of towels. For most of my life I couldn’t figure out how both of those existed in the same body.

I did have a theory. If I could do the big thing, I could do the small thing. And if the small thing wasn’t getting done, that was a me problem. Character. A lack of it.

It took becoming a coach, and being deep in therapy for my scrupulosity, before I could even make room for another possibility: that maybe something was different on the days it worked. Up until then there was a clear right and wrong in all things. If I wasn’t doing the right thing, the only variable was me. You don’t go looking for conditions when you already know who to blame.

I know where I learned that. Conference stories. Mothers who worked tirelessly around the clock and never complained. No one in those homes ever had to wonder whether there would be underwear in the drawer. They took care of everyone else before themselves. Our homes were temples. They needed to be in order so the spirit could dwell there. Mothers set the mood of the home. Our actions affected everyone’s spiritual well-being. So, no pressure. Somewhere in there a basket of unfolded towels stopped just being a basket of unfolded towels.

Now look at the cleaning again. Other people’s houses are simple. There’s a checklist. I’m unattached. There are no big decisions, I just move everything. There’s nothing I look at and get frustrated because my husband didn’t fix it, or it’s a return I never took back, or my kids keep peeing on that wall, or it’s a stack of bills I’ve been putting off dealing with.

At my house I start cleaning my closet and end up sorting through old photos. Or keepsakes. Or the Christmas decor. Or my son comes in with an emotional meltdown and needs help, and I’m not cleaning anymore. Or there’s a broken appliance I can’t decide what to do with, so I just clean around it.

That’s not the same job.

Right now the dryer is full and there’s no basket for it to go in. There are a couple in my room, a few in the living room, probably some in the kids’ rooms.

That’s a condition. A stupidly small one. I could go find a basket right now. Dump one out, carry it to the laundry room, empty the dryer, and… well, let’s not get crazy.

But for most of my life I wouldn’t have counted a missing basket as information at all. The laundry wasn’t done, and nothing else mattered. Not being tired or overwhelmed. Not being able to do it with a friend beside me but not alone. Not being able to happily scrub someone else’s toilets for money while I walked around the clutter in my own house. Those were excuses. The task was the task, nobody ever said so out loud, but I understood it was mine. And if I didn’t do it, the problem was me.

Which is probably why it took me so long to notice how consistent my inconsistency was. I can work late into the night with ferocious focus, but mornings, not at all. I can throw myself into a giant project for months, and maintenance makes me want to slam my head into a wall. I can clean for hours if cleaning is all I’m doing. Put a few decisions and some unfinished business between me and the dirt, blink, and I’m wandering around holding a screwdriver and a permission slip. I can put away laundry with a friend on the couch. Without one, I will probably just buy another basket.

For years I saw all of that and cringed in hot-mess-mom shame. Now I mostly go, huh. Why that time? Why with that person? Why could I do it Monday and not Tuesday? Maybe I slept better. Maybe somebody was waiting on me, or there was a deadline, or I knew where to start. Maybe I screwed up. I don’t know.

Me failing at the task doesn’t necessarily mean that the expectation was wrong. But it doesn’t mean I need more discipline either. It just means something happened, and if it keeps happening, especially if it doesn’t happen every time, I should probably get curious about it.

I still don’t have a functional laundry system. The dryer is full, there’s nowhere to put what’s in it, and there are clean baskets sitting in my living room as I type this. Eventually someone will need the dryer badly enough to go hunting for a basket. Mostly I just wonder where all the fucking baskets went.

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At the base of the drawer was a bamboo organizer, not overfilled with perfectly arranged office supplies. Pens, staples, post-its, stamps, pencils, tape, paper clips, etc. My jaw dropped. I’d been doing my Christ-like best not to judge this woman as a slob and now this. It felt like a bucket of ice water poured over my head.

She was me. I was her and she was me.

I’m about to reveal some of my inner-most crazy. So bear with me and see if you relate. Or just sit back with your popcorn and enjoy for entertainment value. Whichever.

I didn’t know I was a perfectionist until I was in my thirties. Don’t you have to have done at least SOMEthing perfect to claim that title? Because I never did. Turns out, no. You don’t. You can be an absolute fucking disaster and still be a perfectionist.

In fact, the disaster might actually be a direct result of the perfectionism.

I was a hot mess in school. But every semester I started over with the same plan.

This was going to be the semester. I was going to stay organized. Keep track of everything. I was going to write down all my assignments, and in an unprecedented second step, look at the place where I had written them down and get them done.

For a little while, I’d have an A.

Then I’d miss something. Or lose something. Or forget something existed until three days after it was due. A couple things would pile up. I wouldn’t know exactly what I was missing anymore.

And then I’d just stop. All the way. An A first quarter, then a B, then a C, then a D, then my teacher pulled me into the hallway. “If there’s anything you want to talk about… I’m here.”

Same with planners.

If you’ve seen my home on any random day, you might be confused why my husband spent so many years trying to talk me into lowering my housekeeping standards. From the outside, they definitely appear to be low enough.

They weren’t. And the household perfection I had in mind was only achievable through elaborate household systems. Each zone broken into granular jobs slotted into all throughout my calendar.

Daily. Weekly. Monthly. Quarterly.

Not just toilets and vacuuming. Moldings. Picture frames. Cabinet fronts. Inside, underneath, behind.

There was an assigned time for all of it.

Which worked great until the day I woke up and remembered I don’t like to be told what to do. Not even by myself. I don’t like consistency and I abhor monotony. So I skipped that day.

Now I was behind. But behind on what? Everything. So what should I do first?Everything.

Eventually the whole grand, unwieldy plan came crashing down. Not because anything was wrong with my plan, mind you. No.

My system was excellent. I, however, was apparently a piece of shit.

That one was just a schedule falling apart. But I had a version of this that started earlier. Back before the pens or the vacuuming. It was about becoming a person worth loving on the inside.

Mormonism.

I could just not Mormon right.

And this one really mattered. Deeply and eternally.

There was a right way to be. Things I was supposed to do. Things I was supposed to think and want and feel. Obedience wasn’t enough. Transformation was the goal. Fully becoming.

I knew very young that this was not going well. By fifteen, I had figured out that being perfect was completely impossible for me. And perfect was the point. Imperfect hurt people. Most especially the savior. Who loved me so much. So I gave up.

And I don’t mean I became a slightly less committed Mormon teenager who occasionally skipped Mutual and swore. I went off the deep end. Boys. Alcohol. Drugs. School didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. For a while I didn’t try very hard to keep living either.

There’s obviously a lot more to that story than perfectionism, and I’m not going to reduce some genuinely dark years of my life to a failed spiritual diet but I can see the pattern now.

I knew how to try to do it right. And I knew how to say fuck it. I was really, really bad at anything in between. Which is probably why it took me until my thirties to figure out I was a perfectionist. Because look at my life.

I wasn’t the person with the immaculate house and the 4.0 and the meal-prepped lunches lined up in matching glass containers. I was the person surrounded by abandoned attempts to become that person. And underneath nearly every one of them was a bamboo organizer. A perfectly reasonable-looking system for how this was all going to work.

What I know now is that all of those failures were bursting with information.

If I bought a planner every year, used eleven pages and then abandoned it, that was information.

Housekeeping systems repeatedly crashing. Diets requiring a lifestyle I couldn’t maintain. Information.

If I had spent years trying to become the kind of Mormon I was supposed to be and eventually concluded that the only alternative was to blow the whole thing up, that was definitely information.

But somehow none of the information was ever about the standard being wrong for me. A misfit

The standard was fine. Maybe. I don’t know. I never questioned the standard. Never. If you had letters after your name or a priesthood ordination, you had my trust. Wholesale.

I was the problem. The common denominator that kept failing the systems that seemed perfectly viable. That seemed perfect on paper. That were working so well for all THOSE people.

I just needed to be more disciplined. Consistent. Less lazy. Less impulsive. More organized. More committed. More righteous. Better at following through.

If I would just USE the planner. STICK to the diet. FOLLOW the schedule. My problems would all be solved. Maybe I’ll just try another new one and see if it will keep my attention.

And maybe it does for a minute. Until…

Until someone gets sick. You forget something. You don’t sleep. You get busy. You buy a candy bar at check out. You run out of the ribbon for that wreath. You miss the assignment. You don’t do the laundry. You have a bad day. You have a good day and decide you’d rather do something else with your time and energy.

For most of my life, if I missed a day (skipped the workout, ate Oreos, didn’t open the planner) I didn’t know how to just miss a day. I only knew how to spiral or quit. Missing Tuesday meant Wednesday started in debt.

It sounds obvious now, but it took me decades to learn: you can just do Wednesday. You don’t have to catch up on Tuesday first. You don’t have to restart, or figure out how to prevent yourself from ever slipping again. You can just do the next thing.

I still hate this. I’d rather build a system that never lets a Tuesday go wrong in the first place.

I LOVE systems.

I want the right system. The one that finally accounts for every variable and makes everything click into place and means I never again have to stand in my kitchen at 4:37 p.m. wondering what the hell everyone is going to eat.

But my brain now flies neon red flags at systems that require me to become a different person in order for them to work.

For example, I don’t do lids. This is stupid, but stay with me. If you want me to consistently put something away, I need to be able to do it one-handed. Preferably without moving anything else.

If its designated home has a lid, I will put it on top of the lid. If its designated home is behind something else, I will put it in front of the something else. If I have to pull out one container to get to another container, the item is becoming random clutter somewhere else.

None of these things are hard to do. Opening lids. Setting down whatever else is in my hands to move one thing, lift a lid, etc. And that used to matter. If it wasn’t hard, and it was organizationally sound, I should be able to do it. Just make it happen, Brittney.

I wasn’t asking if that system worked for me and the way I move around my space. I was telling myself the way I thought a human should behave in a space the way a space should run. See the difference there?

Not: Does this work?

Why can’t you do this?

That question has followed me everywhere.

Why can’t you just keep up with your assignments?

Why can’t you just use a planner?

Why can’t you just keep the house clean?

Why can’t you just stick to the diet?

Why can’t you just read your scriptures?

Why can’t you just do the very normal, reasonable thing that other people seem perfectly capable of doing?

I was always the defendant in the courtroom of my own brain.

Which is why I think that bamboo organizer hit me as hard as it did.

I had been pulling handfuls of crap out of this woman’s drawer and trying very hard to be a good person about it.

Don’t judge. You don’t know her circumstances. Everyone struggles. Very Christ-like. But obviously, underneath all that benevolence, I had an explanation for this mess.

She was a slob. She didn’t take care of things. She didn’t try. And then I hit bamboo. Oh. She had tried. At some point, she had bought the organizer.

She probably stood in the kitchen aisle at Target and looked at the different sizes. Maybe she’d even measured the drawer. Then she’d brought it home and put the pens in one compartment and the batteries in another and the tape where it still sat.

And for a while the drawer looked exactly like it was supposed to. And then life happened. One thing that didn’t have an obvious compartment, then another. Until eventually the system was buried so deep I didn’t know it existed.

And my first instinct, looking at the end result, had been to evaluate the woman. The way I’d always done it.

I had spent years standing over the accumulated evidence of my own life doing exactly the same thing.

Failed systems. Abandoned planners. Bad grades. Messy rooms. Abandoned projects. I could see perfectly well that whatever I was trying to do was not working.

I just never thought that gave me permission to question any of the standards I was holding myself to.

The standard remained untouched. I didn’t.

Every new failure went into the file:

Lazy.

Inconsistent.

Undisciplined.

Too much.

Not enough.

Can’t follow through.

There are things I do differently now. I use open bins. I put things where I’m actually going to use them. I have much less respect for where something is “supposed” to go. I am learning, very slowly and with considerable resistance, that missing Tuesday does not require a new life plan beginning Monday.

But I’m not about to pretend I’ve solved this. My brain still autopilots into unhelpful thoughts. Something isn’t working and before I’ve even figured out what happened, I’ve started building a case.

What did I forget?

What should I have done?

Why didn’t I keep up?

Why can’t I just do this?

The old questions.

The one where the answer is always the same.

Me.

I’m what’s wrong.

But now I try to catch it and ask different questions.

Not why can’t I make myself do this?

Or, what kind of person would let it get this bad?

Just:

Does this work for me? Why or why not?

I’m spending the next several weeks on this topic.

I’ve been writing about what happens when the rules go away but the grading doesn’t. The voice in your head that keeps checking, correcting, explaining, measuring, and asking what you did wrong.

I call it the Internal Auditor.

This is the second piece in that series. If you recognize yours, stick around.

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Not that he had anything more pressing to do. In fact, school pickup is his assigned job. And it’s not that I was finished working. I’m still catching up from the summer and am, in fact, climbing out from beneath a pile of waiting projects.

So, why, then was I ready to pack up my laptop and head for the school? For the same reason I’m buried under a mountain of overdue work, actually.

This summer, my boundaries got really slippery. The kids were home. My husband was even home on medical leave. Everyone was always around. They needed me. But more than that, I wanted them to feel like the priority. To know how much I wanted to be with them. And the best way to show them was to be with them, at the expense of everything else. To show them they mattered more than my work. Than myself.

Wait, did we just go back in time? YES. But how? It’s complicated.

But here we are, back to school. Back to work. And I’m officially relieved of school pickup responsibility. One of my adult sons lives wth us and carpool is part of his arranged contribution to the household.

I had another project to start but once that thought arrived, that I could pick them up, the old tape started playing. I was already out, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Besides, they’re my kids. It’s really my responsibility.

Was my older son taking on too much? Was this parentification? Was I making him go out just for my convenience when i was perfectly capable of doing it myself?

And the younger kids really don’t like riding in the car with him. They don’t like his rules. They like me. They want me.

I could surprise them! Frankly, it’s the least they deserve.

And really, how much difference were a couple hours of work really going to make ayway?

And then the kicker: Are a couple more hours of work really more important than my children?

Well, fuck.

Except a little alarm was quietly going off in the back of my brain. The one I’d ignored all summer long. Hello! We’ve done this work. Remember? Your brain is lying to you!

My son isn’t being forced to raise his younger siblings. This was an arrangement we’d made for our benefit but our son’s too. There is purpose there.

The kids were safe. They had a ride. They might prefer me.

But I used to know that the children preferring something doesn’t automatically make that thing my responsibility.

That: Just because I could do something, doesn’t mean I should.

So, I didn’t go. I started my next project. And part of me felt like shit about it.

Mothers feeling guilty about working is definitely not breaking news. And being raised Mormon adds quite a few tiers to that shit cake.

But interestingly, this slice tasted less like the doctrine I was raised with and more like one I made myself.

There was no bishop’s voice in my head. No one quoting The Family: A Proclamation to the World. No apostle speaking over the tabernacle pulpit about my divine role as another. No messages from Heavenly Father that day regarding my children’s afternoon transportation.

Instead the argument sounding in my head was in my voice.

I care about not parentifying my children.

I care about being available.

I care about whether my kids feel loved.

I care about not becoming so consumed by my work that the people I love get the leftovers.

Those are my values.

And somehow the voice in my head knew exactly how to use them. It didn’t use the church’s outdated rhetoric. It used mine. What matters to me.

When I wrote for the magazine, most of my work happened during naptime and bedtime. Or in whatever scraps of time I could grab.

When a deadline bore down too hard, my husband would corral the kids while I hammered through the last of an article.

I often typed with one baby strapped to my front and another strapped to my back. No one explicitly told me this was how it had to work. I just knew I was already bending the rules by working. A venture outside my diving role and purpose. But there was no direct criticism or correction. I just knew.

I grew up swimming in stories about good mothers.

They were told over the pulpit in General Conference. In primary, young women’s and relief society lessons. Over time I assembled in my head a composite of the perfect Mormon woman.

She was gentle. Self-sacrificing. Consistent. Hard-working. Patient. She served.

She never uttered the sarcastic thing that would have slipped out of my mouth automatically.

She baked bread to lift the weary. And had fresh cookies waiting when the kids came home from school.

Everyone had clean underwear in their drawers and never had to tear madly through laundry baskets full of clothes on the way out the door to school.

She noticed the needs of others and filled them. Without a request or a complaint.

Then she did more.

She disappeared behind the image of the savior which filled her countenance.

The messaging that women shouldn’t have work outside the home faded out as I got older. But what stayed was the idea that work should bend around what really mattered. And that “no success could compensate for failure in the home”.

The kids and the home came first. Work was a cute way to fill the time left behind when kids went back to school. It might be helpful someday if something should happen to your husband.

My work fit well inside those bounds. But if my child had a need, my work took a backseat. My needs did too. Forget about wants.

I don’t believe that anymore. Or at least I don’t think that.

I’ve invested years of work reevaluating what I was taught about women and motherhood and work and sacrifice. I no longer believe a good mother should erase herself in service to her family.

I certainly no longer believe my kids’ preferences should dictate my schedule.

My work matters. I protect time for it. (Usually)

So where, exactly, did the I-could-pick-up-the-kids thought come from?

Here’s where things get weird. Our beliefs don’t necessarily stay in the same language or voice as they were when we learned them. When we rehearsed, recited and sang them into our bones. They grow with us. They age with us. They acquire knowledge and information. They learn new concepts.

They get access to therapy language and parenting books and feminism and Instagram. And whatever else we’ve been feeding our brains for the last twenty years.

They become harder to recognize.

Good mothers have to be 100% available for their children no longer gets me. An easy-to-spot lie.

I don’t want to parentify my son is harder. That’s something I actually care about. In my brain and my heart.

My kids would be happier if I went is even harder. It’s true.

And then there’s: I’m already out. I could.

That just sounds like common sense. Efficiency.

They are rules I lived by long enough that they had become part of my operating system. All sewn in tight.

I’m not saying that every uncomfortable thought I have was originally Mormon conditioning. There’s not some perfected version of me underneath it all, and if I could just shake off all the chains of my upbringing life would be sunshine and roses. I do not believe that.

That’s not how people work. I’ve got my own problems. Baked right into my brain.

And some things I was taught as a child are still very important to me. They’ve survived examination and re-examination and been found valuable and true. Some values I learned inside Mormonism are values I consciously choose now.

A belief isn’t false just because I learned it at a church I no longer believe in.

And sometimes I probably should pick up my kids. Sometimes my son might need a break. Sometimes two more hours of work genuinely aren’t as important as what my family needs from me.

Picking them up or not isn’t really the problem. The problem was what the voice said it meant if I didn’t. If I could make their lives easier and chose not to, I was selfish.

The problem was not stopping to ask whether or not I actually believe that.

There are certain sentences that used to run my life that now register as red flags.

I should.

I’m supposed to.

I can’t just…

I need to explain.

I should be able to handle this.

I don’t want to be difficult.

A good mom would…

That would be selfish.

It’s not that these phrases are automatically wrong. But for too many years I treated them as a given. True unless proven otherwise. Without ever making that decision.

So I’ve been trying this question:

Says who?

Not SAYS WHO? while throwing two middle fingers up at anyone looking my way.

Actually:

Says who?

Where did I learn that?

What do I think would happen if I didn’t do it?

What would it mean about me?

Do I still agree?

Or is this outdated information?

Does it belong to someone else? Is there voice hiding behind mine?

Sometimes it’s family. Sometimes culture. Sometimes fear. Sometimes experience. Sometimes something I actually believe.

And sometimes I have no fucking idea. That can be useful information too.

My son picked the kids up that afternoon.

They rode home with the brother they who drives them a little crazy.

I worked. A little more. Not an earth-shaking amount.

Part of me still believed the voice and wanted to go. That it would have been the nice mom thing to do.

Part of me was pretty sure that a mother with her priorities in order wouldn’t have needed to think this hard about whether she should choose her children or two stupid hours of work.

The voice did not disappear just because I caught it this time. But I’m getting better and better at spotting it.

I wasn’t really choosing between my children and my work.

I was deciding who was doing school pickup. Just that day.

When I first left the church, I thought leaving meant nobody got to tell me what to do anymore.

I didn’t understand how long it would take to notice all the ways that voice was living inside my body. It took years to install. I'm not getting rid of it today. But one says who? at a time I can continue to distill my own from the scripts that have been running my life.

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It was a bizarre feeling. Because I was also bursting with love for them. Enormous, aching, would-do-anything love. I was doing anything. I gave them everything I had. I put them first. My kids more than my husband, sorry Allen. And still, some nights, I couldn’t be in the same …

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What?!

Somehow in the next minute or two I was singing in “I want the world… I want the whole world!” from Willy Wonka to her. It was a day.

There she sat in her comfy little chair telling me I can, in fact, NOT do everything I want to do in this life. That I am human. That I will die before I am finished. That I can do…

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I read it. I have some idea of how to respond. I’ve opened it and closed it four different times.

If you asked me why, I’d probably say I’m procrastinating. Avoiding it. I’m just overwhelmed.

But as a coach, I know that if you looked at five different people in my situation you will find five differe…

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To fail to plan is to plan to fail. An ounce of prevention. Put on the armor of God to withstand the fiery darts of the adversary. You didn’t just plan a talk. You rehearsed it until it was memorized. Plan A, plan B, plan C. Back-up plans.

A few years ago, I was the president of the young women’s organization at our…

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Today’s essay was inspired by this discussion question from Celeste Davis’s Women’s Circle discussion group: What would it look like to raise boys without a sense of…

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I think almost every adult has a thing:

a form

an email

a phone call

a text

a donation box

a thank- you card

a library book

a return

something they’ve already decided to do. It would probably take ten minutes. And you’ve been walking past it for six months.

In my work I call this the Knowing/Doing Gap. It shows up in small ways like this. But also in major life decisions. Like knowing for years your relationship is over. You’ve made the decision in your therapist’s office, you’ve written the letter, you’re mentally gone, but you just keep showing up rather than have the conversation. Same thing.

You know what you need to do. You did the research. Read the reviews. Read all the conflicting articles. Sought out expert advice. Made a pros & cons list. You’re sure. And you’ve been meaning to start. But it’s like there’s this alien forcefield between you and the thing.

Procrastination? You just need to try harder? Need more motivation? Whatever it is, you don’t have it.

Why does knowing what to do so often fail to change what we do?

We act like knowledge should solve our behavior. But has that ever been a reliable pattern? You know sugar is bad for you. You know you need eight hours of sleep. Five minutes of meditation a day is a small price to pay for improved mental health. If you’re doing those, backing up your photos, and saving for retirement, you can just skip the rest of this article.

This is pretty standard human behavior. But now your A1C is up, your doctor has given you some dietary guidelines which you are going to start any day now for the last year, and you’re baffled at your inability to launch the program.

The more stuck you feel, the harder it is to start, and you might even feel the pull back into the research phase. Maybe one more podcast will fix it. One more article. One more review.

What if obedience trained us to solve the wrong problem?

For me it felt like falling through space with nothing to hold onto. Nowhere to land. Nowhere to turn for help.

When I ran to my husband with the horrifying discovery that the foundation of our lives – our religion — was a lie, I never expected to be disbelieved. Isn’t that funny? I think we all feel that way. It’s the biggest discovery of our lifetimes. And we are treated as messengers of the devil. Digression.

The point: You are never so alone. Your world is the same. Your family. Your church. Maybe your calling. You show up. You are asked to keep showing up in the same way. Everyone knows you don’t believe. They ask you to keep trying. You want out. You know it’s wrong. You know you are done. You know you want to leave. You know you can’t do this anymore. But you do. I did. For years. How many years did you go? How many years did you keep pretending? To keep the peace. Until you couldn’t anymore. Until it hurt too much. Or until something outside of you shifted.

This is also the Knowing/Doing Gap.

We were trained in a specific pattern.

First came certainty. Through God in some fashion. Usually priesthood authority. And then prayer to confirm that authority through personal revelation. Then came action. There was a right choice and a wrong one. Always. And so many signs to point the way. You didn’t have to generate the feeling that it was okay to act. The feeling was provided. Externally. You knew where to look for it.

Then the source disappeared. But you kept waiting.

Same effect. Different mechanism than the library book. But the same muddy feeling of knowing and not moving.

Most of my clients are both people with ADHD and former believers, which is its own kind of double exposure. The gap looks the same from the outside. The same months of a thing sitting there. A different reason why.

For the ADHD brain it’s a starting point problem. No clear entry. No concrete first step. No on-ramp. So the brain keeps circling. And ambiguity can be paralyzing.

In both cases, the person sitting in the gap has come to the same conclusion about themselves. Something is wrong with them.

That’s the part I want to interrupt.

I’m going deeper on all of this — the certainty piece, the ADHD piece, and what actually bridges the gap — in a one-hour workshop on July 7th @ 7 MT (Arizona). If this landed somewhere specific, that’s probably the room for you. Free for CNRS members here. And my paid subscribers below the jump.

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It doesn’t make sense. I’ve done so much work trimming my life down. I used to say yes to everything. Now I’ve defaulted to no long enough that I’m rarely asked.

But I guess there are new partners now. New endeavors where I’m still an easy yes. So the to-do list is growing again. And my kids are out of school and the routine…

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We’ve just discussed the overwhelm on a brain deconstructing from high-control religion. Demands that are new. Managing your life, your time, decisions, and charting a new course both inside and outside of your brain. It’s too much and you were not prepared.

The church has always told you where to be and when. What to do and how to do it. What success looks like. And failure. What to wear, how to behave, what to eat and drink. The answers to your questions and a framework for decisions. When belief dissolved, your external executive function disappeared with it.

So collapse is to be expected. And the answer isn’t more external structure. It’s not discipline or trying harder.

Enter scaffolding.

You may have noticed I always struggle to answer this question with the clarity you want. This is because scaffolding, done in a supportive, shame-free way is so very individualized. It looks wildly different from brain to brain. Person to person. In my coaching sessions we dive deep to understand where the exact disconnects are in your brain and your life and create solutions uniquely tailored to you. So they really work. They really stand the tests of stress and time.

But I will do my best here to break it down in a way that you can get started building some scaffolding on your own. With your brain and life in mind. There are generally five types of scaffolding we use to externalize the demands that are crowding your brain. Time scaffolding, environmental scaffolding, sensory scaffolding, relational scaffolding and decision scaffolding.

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The beauty part? None of these require willpower to work.

Time scaffolding starts with what already exists. Not a new calendar system. Not an alarm you’ll eventually start ignoring. Your day already has a rhythm. You already make coffee. You already sit down after the kids leave. You already have a moment before your first meeting that you usually lose to Instagram. Those moments already run on autopilot. You didn’t have to build them and you don’t have to maintain them. Attaching something to one of them borrows that structure instead of trying to manufacture new structure from scratch.

That’s the difference between a calendar reminder and a natural sequence. The reminder asks your brain to respond to an external prompt. The sequence just carries you forward. One thing happens, and then the next thing happens, because that’s what comes next.

Built-in anchors work the same way. Your commute. Your lunch break. The moment you put the kids to bed and come back downstairs. These are already load-bearing moments in your day. They don’t need to be created. But they can be used.

Environmental scaffolding is letting your space remember things for you. Shoes by the door. Journal open on the table. Objects placed where the action needs to happen, so your brain doesn’t have to generate the reminder from inside the fog.

Sensory scaffolding is the playlist you only play when you’re doing one specific thing. A hoodie. Cold water. A candle. The body settling before the brain is asked to work. We used to play It’s a Hard Knocks Life during clean up times. The kids’ bodies knew what that meant as well as their brains did. I can’t shift into work mode without my playlist and my coffee.

Relational scaffolding is the presence of another person that makes your nervous system feel safe enough to start. Body doubling. Not accountability, not supervision. Just not being alone in the effort. I do these sessions sometimes for clients and subscribers. If you’re interested in these (free) send me a message.

Decision scaffolding is reducing options before you’re supposed to choose. Defaults. Small menus. Systems that make the decision for you until you have bandwidth to decide. I teach a framework for this in coaching sessions to simplify the process.

None of these are complicated or impressive. That’s the point.

When scaffolding fails, it’s almost never because the person didn’t try hard enough. It’s because the scaffolding assumed things about their nervous system that weren’t true. Wrong time. Wrong sensory environment. Too much ambiguity. Too many steps.

You will hit walls. Something won’t work and your brain will want to make that mean something. It doesn’t. It just means the scaffolding needs adjusting.

Revise the scaffolding. Not yourself.

For paid subscribers, below is a one-page scaffolding reference. Each of the five types with specific examples you can pull from, and a short set of questions for figuring out which mismatch is actually happening when something stops working.

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The stakes were clear. If I sinned. If I made a mistake. If I let go for even a moment, the Holy Ghost would leave me. And if the Holy Ghost left me, my children could be dying in the next room, and I would feel nothing. No prompting. No warning. Just me, oblivious, while something terrible happened that I could have…

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I wanted to be a good wife. A good mother. A faithful member of the Mormon church. I knew what each of those things required. Exactly. I knew what a good Sunday looked like, what a good woman wore to church, what a good family ate for dinner, how a good person spent her discretionary income. I knew what…

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