Craving Praise

End of January, February, particularly in homeschooling, we see a lot of homeschooling burnout. A lot of: I’m buying a new curriculum, I’m changing things up, I’m Googling schools and thinking about putting the kids in school, and I just share this because so much of what we do in the Catholic Mom Calm community is to the extent that we can predict the difficult things that are kind of come up. And I have a lot of friends who are really affected by the weather in winter when you know, there’s not a lot of sunshine. They really get sad and low. I’m a redhead, so I don’t have that. Actually, it’s much harder for me to live in the sunshine than it is for these overcast days. But it’s just good to know that if that happens to you every January and February, We can just pause and have a moment and say, hey love, what do you need?

And I really find candles and classical music and puzzles, and we just kind of pull out different things in the winter when we’re all a little cooped up. Things that are beautiful or colorful. Or things we only do, my kids do. They tend to do diamond art. I don’t know if you’ve seen this diamond art, but, there’s all these tiny little jewels. It’s not great to have around little kids, but we have the girls put them on a board. That they can then put high up when they’re not doing it. And then it’s color coded.

It’s almost like paint by numbers, but instead of paints, there’s these tiny little jewels. And that’s something that they do more in the winter because you know, we are inside a lot more. And then we put them away. So they feel exciting in the winter because we don’t do them in the summer. And so you can, in your mind, be thinking about what are some special things that we can set aside. For the winter that we can look forward to. So we’re not just sitting there being like it’s, it’s cold, it’s dark, I’m unhappy. I’m, you know, bored. I’m sad. We can just solve this problem. This podcast is definitely not about being sad in January and February, but, as I said It’s January. I kind of went off on a tangent there. Today’s podcast is about craving praise. I got an email from one of my clients. Who said, you know, I’ve got all these kids, I do all these school activities. I volunteer a lot and you know, I was thinking about why do I do that? Why do I over commit myself? And the problem was really being over committed and feeling overwhelming stress and not having time for herself. And she said, I realized that I crave praise and acknowledgement. And I just loved this phrase as soon as I sought craving praise and I could tell that she felt terrible for saying that. She was like; this sounds so terrible to want praise for my husband, for my friends, from other people.

You know, I think a lot of us. When we accomplish a lot and someone says, wow how do you do it all? You know, of course there’s a part that often feels good. Or like, yeah, I do do a lot. I’m proud of all the things that I do. I think there’s probably a healthy version of feeling proud of, of all the things that we do. And then a sinful prideful version where we’re like, yeah, I’m pretty great. Look at all these things that I can do, it feels different. But as she was saying this to me and listening almost all the time when I’m coaching you guys, you always say it to me quietly. Like, let me tell you something like it’s the first time I’ve ever heard it. And then I just want to tell you, uh, it’s everyone. All the people I coach. Almost all of us crave praise.

And so today I want to talk about St Therese and Teresa of Avila. Uh, no, not Teresa of Avila; Faustina and for a long time when I would read writings from St.Therese or Faustina, I would feel bad. You know, they had such a way of dying to themselves and living for the Lord and choosing the worst path and just letting things go. And I think of Therese. You know, dealing with annoying sisters and then just being like, I’m just going to love her harder and I’m going to take the worst jobs. And here I am with all these kids, like already kind of drowning. And the idea of doing the worst things is taking on. You know, more painful jobs, serving people harder, longer. Letting go of sleep. I mean, even in Faustina, always wanting to wear a chain or a hair shirt. I mean, she was so intense. She was just like a more suffering Lord. And the Lord has to beat. The Lord told her, the Lord said, listen, you have to ask your spiritual director. If you can take on any sufferings, I will speak through him. And if he says, no, the answer is no. And it often was no, cause she also was very ill. And so, she just wanted to do all these things and it was so far from my life. The idea of wanting to wear. A heavy, painful chain around my waist to add pain to my day. Like I was so disconnected from that concept. Having all of these kids and it already felt like that was so difficult. And, and of course here are these nuns with a just completely different life than I have the rhythm of their life.

And it was just so unrelatable and it used to just make me feel bad. I would just be like, well, that’s it, Lord. I just, I’m not even remotely close to either of these women. I am selfish. I am a big baby. I don’t want any more pain. I can’t even handle this. And it would just make me feel so far from the Lord. And as I was thinking about, and I’ve really been thinking about recently, rewarding behavior, rewarding behavior and children, rewarding behavior in ourselves. I was listening to a business podcast that was talking about “Human Behavior” and how there are rewards and punishments. And, you know, you can use both of those things to get the behavior that you want, but it’s much trickier than just simple rewards or simple consequences. And in this example, he was saying, you know, for example, if you’re like a grumpy boss and you yell at your team all the time, they will eventually just tune that out. It just becomes a constant and then no longer is it really a punishment? They just adjust and then it stops being as powerful.

But he was also talking about just the importance of really understanding the behavior you want from your team, and then creating a reward and punishment system around that and punishment here. You know, don’t think that that’s so terrible. It’d be like, hey, if you come late to work every day, you’re probably going to get fired. Okay? We’re not like zapping employees with electricity. You know, and, and there are some things, uh, for children even to like, Hey, if you whine a lot. You’re not going to get the thing that you want. It’s not always like spankings or timeouts, or I think when we think of punishment, we think of maybe, the most extreme versions, the most painful versions of punishments, but there’s, there’s very subtle. Punishments and rewards like your time. We can remove our time with the kids. As a form of punishment, we can give them more of our time. As a reward and the other night, you guys, it was just the cutest thing. It’s nice when God gives us these parenting moments, but my eight year old, who is not the biggest fan of my six year old, feels like he’s always encroaching on her space.

And he was one of the little kids. So we would say little kids, big kids. And she was one of the big kids. He was one of the little kids and he’s, you know, six and a half and he’s aging up to be one of the big kids. We won’t call him one of the little kids soon. And she’s not loving this transition. And last night, they were sitting on the couch together. And she was reading books to him and it was so sweet and I love watching her read. You know, it’s vulnerable for a child to read out loud. And she was reading to him and they were both smiling and I was watching them thinking I would love to reward this behavior. I would love for her brain to connect. This was what my mom wanted. This is a good thing; I will be rewarded for this. And I want to tie this back to the mom who wrote me the email, who was rewarded publicly by volunteering for a lot of things and having a lot of kids. And then somebody said, wow, I don’t know how you do it all with such an amazing compliment. She was rewarded at that moment for that behavior and that spurs us on to want to do more of it and brains and their basic functioning do more of what we get rewarded for and avoid the things that we get punished for.

And I was thinking about motherhood, particularly rubbing it up against employment. And just realizing that we have so few rewards. Our Boss isn’t saying, hey, good job we don’t get any raises, we don’t get a Christmas bonus, we don’t get surprised lunch and this is silly y’all, but I remember working in offices where they would like to surprise us with lunch or take us out to lunch and it felt so amazing and fun. And when we owned that fencing company, we would just bring breakfast burritos or subway sandwiches to the guys sometimes, and they loved it. And they’re just, isn’t that in motherhood really? Or in a funny way, we are also the giver of the reward which changes it a little bit. I still think we can use it and I’m going to talk about that at the end, but, I want this mom and all of us to just pause for a moment and say, of course we crave praise. Of course we do and as I was thinking about Therese and Faustina, I realized they craved it too. They just had adjusted the praise that they wanted to be from the Lord.

They wanted to do a good job, Faustina wanting to be a good girl. Right. That’s why she wanted to wear the chain to suffer wealth to please the Lord. She craved serving him well-pleasing him. Well, I don’t know that for her. She would use the word praise, but I think she would use the word positive reinforcement or some form of reward. Pleasing the Lord is a form of a reward. And that, you know, we’re always talking about how God sees what we do. And I think that’s why the saints, as they get older and older, lived more and more austere lives or lives of service, or they saw more of their sinfulness. And it was from this desire of wanting to please the Lord.

Therese is the youngest doctor of the church. And, you know, it’s interesting when we look at what she has done compared to what some of the other doctors of the church have done. You know, I think it’s a good idea to ask. Why was she elevated to that status at such a young age? But we elevate someone to a doctor of the church when they taught us something that we didn’t know before they had, you know, a mystical experience or a deep mystical understanding of something the Lord wanted to teach us. And the Lord kind of brings us this new knowledge through this person. And for her, it was this little way. Before her, it was considered inappropriate to want to be a Saint. But she recognized through the grace of God, that God made her to be a Saint. And that it was a good and holy thing to desire sainthood and to be a Saint that it wasn’t from our own efforts. That it was through the gift of God and through these little things that we do to please him. And so, I think that we can acknowledge this desire for pleasing the Lord. For being a Saint for growing in holiness and it misfires a little bit. And wanting praise from the world. But if it makes so much sense to me, that is what we want.

And it comes out in this other way sometimes. Like, no, we shouldn’t let what other people think about us dictate our behavior, particularly if it’s taking you from your family and if it’s stealing your peace because you’re overly committed and you’re doing a bunch of things that sound great. But then you go home and you have a choked up feeling of not getting things done or never having any rest. But it’s good to see the root of our desire and then ask, how can I do this in a holy way? And Therese tells us, she says we will be rewarded for all of these little moments, these little sacrifices, where we turn away from the world toward the Lord. And sometimes that means taking on suffering, but I think also it’s about our prayer life and giving him these gifts of time. Praying with him and saying, I am yours, Lord. What do you want me to do? If I took this mom and I said, all right, we’re going to spend half an hour in silence, praying. To find out if God wants you to do each and every one of these commitments that you have. And we’re going to wait until he really tells you. Her life would change. And if the first thing that she would tell me is I don’t have time for that. It’d be like, well, then we definitely know that you’re over committed. If you don’t have time for that.

Now we don’t always get silence when we have a one, two or three-year-old, but I think her kids were older than that. No one of them was. Like a year and a half. So it does take some planning to get half an hour of quiet time when you have a year and a half year old. But, I can tell that when you guys come to me, particularly when we’re in this overwhelming place and there’s all these things spinning around in your mind. You want to know, like what’s the right thing to do, but when you’re literally in that state of mind, you will not hear the right thing to do. You need to slow down and lay it all at the foot of the cross and maybe hold up each thing and say, Lord should I be doing this?, should I be doing that? And, can we really embrace this desire to please the Lord? And there’s this positive version of that, which is wanting to make the Lord happy and wanting to store up treasure in heaven. I feel like people talk about that and I don’t really understand what that means, but I believe there’s some sort of like, we do things here and it matters there. And then, the punishment part of it is of course, you know, fear of the Lord. Praying for the gift of fear of the Lord to have him show you how to steward your time.

Well, it is a good thing to have a well-ordered home or to volunteer at church individually, all of these things, we can make a case for them being good. But if you are losing your mind, if you are snapping at your kids, if you’re crying, often. I mean, I remember there were phases of my life, where I was crying maybe every day. And just like so hopeless. So despondent, so Overwhelmed and I’m a crier. Like I cry at songs and movies and I have bad days sometimes, but I’m not crying every day. I would say, like, my head is above the water. I can see things clearly and sometimes I have a bad day maybe related to my cycle and I’m like, oh, we’re not making decisions today. You’re just kind of a mess. And I love you. And we’re just going to have this kind of day. I would say, you know, those kinds of one-off things are okay or circumstantial sadness. You know, my mom just got diagnosed with cancer and then we’re like, oh, that’s so terrible and you know, of course you’re going to feel bad, that’s contextual sadness.

But some of you are living in a near constant state of anxiety or depression, some form of that. And maybe it’s because you’re craving praise or craving some system of reward. And so first and foremost, I think we should connect that to the Lord. Hey, Lord, I want to live a life that’s pleasing to you. How can I do that? And then, this is what I’ve been thinking about. I have been thinking about how moms can create rewards against the behaviors that they want to have in their lives. So let’s say you want to be a better homemaker and you want to create a decluttering system. We’re going to do decluttering for lent. And, you know, you have tried that many times and you burst through it for a few days and then things just pile up and there’s no system and it’s just chaos. Well, I’m very curious to know for each of us. How we can create a reward system around that. That really feels real. Because that’s a tricky thing when you’re rewarding yourself. If you’re kind, I would just do it anyway. Let’s say you’re going to purchase something. Let’s say that you want, I don’t know what people want. Let’s say you want a piece of furniture? And I literally, the other day was like, I want this piece of furniture. And I went and looked at the one I really wanted was $500. And there was kind of a Chibi cheap version of it on Amazon for $110. But I really wanted the $500 one, which I felt like was kind of indulgent and maybe not prudent for us right now.

But, If decluttering your house and having a system was worth $500 to you. And you talked to your husband about it and said, Hey, if I do this, can we buy this supposing that you can handle it? And it really was something you wouldn’t have bought anyway. Would it be motivating? Should we start creating our own rewards? And it might not be buying something. It might be time. Maybe giving yourself permission to have time. But I think we can use this, this base system for us because the truth is motherhood is just invisible. Like I said, there’s just really very few built-in rewards. And so, it’s kind of easy for us not to do the things that we don’t feel like doing. And it makes a lot of sense to me that we would then prefer or prioritize a public facing thing where we do get rewarded because we’re so desperate for it. We’re in like a praise desert.

So I want to say again, To show you guys don’t come for me. I definitely think that the praise that we are actually craving is to please the Lord and you need to talk to him. To know if what you’re doing is pleasing to him. So that is step one for everyone. I want to be pleasing to the Lord, but then I hear things from the Lord about the kids or the house or my job, things that I feel like he’s calling me to do. And then I still like a petulant teenager, I don’t feel like doing them. And that’s where I think we can create a reward system. And I’ve been playing with this with myself, just thinking like, what makes me happier. What are the things that I don’t do for myself? But if I actually think of how beneficial it would be to our families. If we had a place for everything in the house, and we put the things back in their place and we had some system for managing the stuff, a continual system so that it would build up, which is fine. And then we would have a system for putting things back and mostly the stuff in the house was contained. Now, for those of you that have lots of little kids and, or homeschool them, like when we’re in the house all the time, your house is never going to be tidy because you’re living in the house. I mean, you might be able to have that for a moment. Like we tidy up before lunch, but then literally after lunch, the girls pull out all of their diamond art or puzzles or whatever, and it’s immediately he has stuff in it again. And that doesn’t bother me. But there’s a difference between stuff piling up in the entryway and like whose jacket is that it’s none of your jackets and why is this Kiwi crate thing here? And, you know, it’s like that kind of clutter where it’s, it stays for a while and it shouldn’t be there. How valuable would it be to the piece of the home? If we had a system, everyone knew their part in the system. Kids actually desire to have jobs and to have work and to feel important. I know it seems like they don’t, but you all know when they have nothing to do. And wide open days, especially many days in a row, they go a little batty. Humans were made for work and we do like structure.

And so how much money do you think it’s worth to your family? To have created a staff system and inside and jobs for everyone. Everyone knows what they’re doing and the house runs more smoothly. Now it may not be money. Like I said it may be, that then you take a whole day off and you go visit a friend or you take a day trip somewhere. Or you have a day where you just sit around reading books and it’s fantastic. But maybe I’ve been asking myself what would be worth it to our family, which for me means that my husband agrees that it’s worth it to, to buy a nicer piece of furniture, $500. That will probably last way longer than the $100 one. And can I work for it and then reward myself with that. The other thing is I do it, I just want to create like a God sandwich here. So we pray on the front end then maybe in the middle we’re thinking of rewards that we can create with ourselves, with our husband kind of gamifying motherhood.

The other thing that I do is when I do things, I look up and I go, did you see that Lord? I just enjoy God. And I just let it feel rewarding that I know that he sees. And I just have that moment with him. And I just feel like he smiles at me. I see I’m proud of you, I love you. Thanks for caring for this home. Thanks for taking care of these kids. Those comments that we crave from other people. I think that if we slow down and we just pull in the holy spirit, we can hear those comments from him. Because he sees and he wants you to do this work of motherhood and it is invisible to the world. So nothing is wrong with you. If you feel unappreciated and you’re noticing the sense of, you know, no one ever tells me that I’m doing a good job. There’s no reward for motherhood. And I don’t mean no, like that sweet moment with violet and forest on the couch was, you know, in one way, a reward for motherhood lake teaching her how to read and then creating an environment enough that they felt safe to read on the couch.

Like in a way that was a reward for the parenting that we have done. But it was unpredictable. And infrequently those kinds of rewards, I think we can create more things like, okay, we’re going to get this done. And then Sterling, I’m going to reward you with, you know, 30 minutes of sitting and drinking tea and reading a book or playing Scrabble on your phone or researching something like you could just fill up a page of things that you like. And then begin to just connect them. If I do this, then I do this. When you believe that there is a reward, your behavior. The one you want to create will increase. The only reason that we are not managing our homes better is because we are not rewarded enough for doing so. And we are not punished enough for not doing it. Sure it’s annoying if there’s clutter or we can’t find, you know, Susie’s Basketball Jersey. But it’s just not enough. If it was, we would do it. A great example of that is putting gas in the car. Okay. When you run out of gas and have to walk to a gas station to fill up gas in a gas tank and walk back. That is so punishing. That you make sure that gas is in the car. And so again, we can go in from either angle. Rewards, punishments both but if we’re not getting the behavior we want in ourselves or in the children we can just look and say, what is it? What are the punishments? What are the rewards?

And just to bring it back to Therese and Faustina, I have been really paying attention to how they describe their day-to-day life. And I see that there were these rewards built into it. It was a reward when they got to have social time with the other sisters and it was a reward for both of them to have adoration. That was such a reward for them. And so they would, you know, I would say coach themselves to come in to do this work and I’m going to give it to the Lord and I’m going to suffer, but then they knew that they were going to have this, this reward of, being an adoration. And so we could get to the point where our prayer time feels like a reward. And we soak it up because remember the reward is really just about creating enough dopamine in your brain, that your brain goes, Ooh, we like that.

If we do X, then we get why. And we really like why she’s making that connection. Now, I don’t think that we should withhold prayer time from ourselves to work. But I’m just saying, if you said, all right, we’re going to knock out some laundry and tidy the kitchen, and then I’m going to sit down and read a spiritual book or pray. You might’ve prayed anyway, but just saying it this way makes it feel like, okay, maybe we’re hustling on that laundry a little bit more because the faster you do the laundry, the more time you get to pray. While the kids are sleeping. So, to this mom and all the moms of course we crave praise and acknowledgement. And in the vocation of motherhood it’s not really built in. There is a lot more structure in terms of rewards and maybe even punishments, but mostly rewards. When we go to work, I think it is such an important job.

And I think that we can bring the Lord in. First to pray and discern, should we be saying yes or no to anything? That we’re doing. Especially when you begin to feel like there’s too much on your plate, just take the plate to the Lord and be like, all right, do you want me to keep doing all of these things? The answer may be yes and then how can we game a fine motherhood? How can we build in some rewards? How can we give this to ourselves? And lastly, when you are doing it, just look up and say, did you see Lord? This is please you, are you proud of me? I’m doing this for you. He’s always there and he loves you so much. And he did create you to take care of these kids and do this work.

And it has helped me to see that I am more like treads and Faustina than I thought. I just have a different life. And accepting the difficult things in my life is my version. Wrapping the chain around my waist. And saying, I will do this from the Lord. We just have so many opportunities to carry our cross in motherhood that we don’t need to make up extra ones. But all of us could be carrying these crosses with more peace with less grumbling, with less resistance, with less doubt. We can be at peace in our lives. And one of the ways that we will be at peace more often is by spending time with him and taking all of these things to him. He will tell you. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.