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You get to decide how Mother’s Day goes. All of it.

In this episode, Sterling gets honest about why Mother’s Day feels so loaded — and why no amount of flowers, brunch, or Pandora bracelets will fix the real problem.

In this episode:

• Why your family can’t give you what you actually want on Mother’s Day (and whose job it actually is)
• The thoughts that turn a mediocre Sunday into a devastating one — and how to catch them
• How to ask for exactly what you want without resentment when it doesn’t happen
• Why interior peace on Mother’s Day is a barometer for something much bigger

Plus: Sterling shares what she’s been doing to get her own sparkle back, the app that’s coming soon, and a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to France for mothers and daughters.

You are a good mom. God sees all of it — and he doesn’t need a special day to tell you that.

Check out our mother/daughter pilgrimage to France: https://catholicmomcalm.com/france/

NEW! Emotional Regulation stories for kids: https://www.catholicatholickids.com/

TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW

  Hello everyone. Sterling here, we took a break from the podcast. We’ve been putting together an app and that’s gonna be out soon and it’s fantastic. And I know I’ve taught a lot of things in the last 10 years, but this app in particular is geared toward teaching moms to calm down in the moment.

You know, we have a lot of theoretical knowledge, you can read a lot of books, you can take a lot of courses, but I wanted to create something that really helped moms in the moment of their stress rising and their thermometer rising. And so that is coming soon. That is what we’ve been working hard on.

And God has just really placed it on my heart recently to jump back in and do some podcast episodes. So I don’t know how long I’m gonna do them, but I’m gonna do them because there are just some things that I want to say. And today, I want to say you 100% get to control your experience of Mother’s Day.

Okay? We often feel very strong emotions on Mother’s Day, maybe some joy, maybe some disappointment, maybe, some confusion. Like why did it go this way? Maybe some anger, you know, I have to do everything. If I don’t plan it, it doesn’t get done. I have coached four years, so many moms on Mother’s Days that they were really, really, really hurt by.

But if you follow my work, you know that I will tell you that your thoughts create your feelings. So if Mother’s Day feels terrible to you, it is because you are thinking a series of thoughts that create terrible feelings in your body. And the big ones are, nobody cares, I’m not worth it, I’m not worth any effort, nothing ever happens without me. It’s all on me.

You know, these are pretty common thoughts. I’m unappreciated. I’m unloved. And of course, thinking those thoughts feels terrible. You could do that right now. Right now, I just want you to sit wherever you are and just be like, nobody appreciates me. It’s all on me. I have to do everything. Those are not even really common thoughts that I have, and I feel terrible in my body right now thinking them.

So we have got to stop believing that everything that pops into our mind is true, and we have got to stop acting like we have no control over what we choose to think about on purpose. So yes, a thought might come up where you think that’s it, that’s all they did, and you would feel maybe disappointment or hurt or something.

But you have the ability to watch your own brain and to give it something else to think about. And we could do it ahead of time. Right now, you can decide, I’m gonna have a great day on Mother’s Day, regardless of what my husband, my kids, maybe your own mom, all of those things, regardless of what they do.

Really, truly. So I want you to imagine a mom, and she has three little kids, and her husband kind of forgets that it’s Mother’s Day, and they’re at mass, and they do the thing which I hate. Oh my gosh, I hate when they make mothers stand up because my heart is very sad when women who are struggling with infertility want to be. I just don’t like it, and I’m very grateful our parish doesn’t do that.

But anyway, the moms stand up, and they get a prayer, and the husband realizes, “Oh, it’s Mother’s Day. I did not plan anything.” So he fumbles it in the car. He’s like, “Well, maybe I could make lunch today, and maybe you should go for a walk or go do whatever you wanna do. “And the woman is sitting there thinking, “Wow, it’s really clear that you did not think about this and you did not plan that.

And so she begins having all of these thoughts about him and motherhood and how hard it is and it’ll always be like this because the brain is very dramatic. So anytime something bad happens, it’s like probably, this is forever. And she starts judging him and then she’s snippy with him or cold shoulders him or is like fine, but then is grumpy while he’s doing whatever he’s doing and it’s a terrible time.

Now, if I were your friend, okay, I would link arms with you and I would be like, “That’s so terrible. I can’t believe that happened. I can’t believe he didn’t remember.” And then of course he’s gonna make food, but then leave it there and you’re gonna have to clean up your own Mother’s Day brunch, right? Whatever.

Friends are supposed to do that. We’re supposed to just link arms and validate and be like, “That’s terrible.” Okay? But coaches are not supposed to do that. Coaches are supposed to show you your own brain and thinking a series of thoughts about that situation is totally within your control to change.

You can think this is not his strong suit. I love this guy. I did not marry him based on his event planning abilities. Most guys are not great at this. And then if you have little kids, they don’t even know what’s going on.

Like maybe Mother’s Day is different when you have a 16-year-old girl and she has the forethought to do something cute and then we see an Instagram picture about that, but your four-year-old’s not gonna do that. Your four-year-old is gonna draw a stick figure on a piece of paper and be like, “I love you” The day is not gonna feel very different to your four-year-old.

And you being upset about that is only going to ruin your own day. Of course, your kids don’t really understand how to plan an event that makes you feel something because events don’t ever make us feel something. Our thoughts about events make us feel something.

So my family, actually, this is funny, is gonna be out of town. My husband planned a trip for my kids. They’re gonna go to Boise. They go once or twice a year, they visit their godparents, he takes all of them, and I’m alone, which is amazing, but that’s not, they’re not like doing that for me. They do it for them, and they’re gonna be gone over Mother’s Day.

And when I realized that, I remember being like, “Oh, well, that’s a little disappointing.” But then I thought, “We don’t really do much for Mother’s Day anyway. We don’t really do much for Father’s Day either. We’re just not. I don’t know, we just don’t ham up the day a ton.”

And I also realized that they were gonna go stay with this other family, and they really do a lot for Mother’s Day. So my kids are gonna be down there watching this family really shower this mom with, like, love and compliments and cards and probably gifts and food and things like that.

And I had this moment where I thought, “Oh, I feel embarrassed. I feel embarrassed that my kids are gonna see that and then they’re gonna realize that they’re not doing that for me and they might feel bad.” Isn’t that interesting? I was having thoughts about their future experience hasn’t even happened yet.

And I was caring more about their experience than even my experience. So I was just watching my brain do that, but all of that that I just said, all of it are just stories. They’re just thoughts I’m having, first of all, about something that hasn’t even happened, but let’s say I’m right and it plays out exactly how I want, how I expect it’s gonna play out.

I still get to think about it what I want, and I can still think it’s so amazing that they get to go down there. It’s always such a great experience for them. I’m so grateful that my husband does that. I’m so grateful that I get time in my house by myself, which is probably what most moms want for Mother’s Day anyway.

And it is not a strong suit of my husbands to buy gifts or to write me gushy cards. And if I want something from him or the kids, it is my job to ask and to be very clear. If I want that, if I don’t want it, if I can manage my mind around not receiving something or not receiving what I wanted, then it isn’t a problem. I don’t need to tell them.

But if I want them to buy me flowers and make me eggs benedict for breakfast and watch a girly movie, I can’t, I’m not even sure what I would ask for, but like, I’m just picking those three things. Then a week before, I should tell my husband, “Hey, Mother’s Day is coming up. Here’s what I want. “

And if you’re the grocery store shopper, grocery shop for the meal that you want. Maybe get buy-in from him if he wants to make it. Like, I would never actually have my husband make eggs benedict. The timing on that is really, really delicate and it’s hard to do that with eight kids around.

But I really do love corn beef ash and I could ask for that. I could be like, “Can you make corn beef fash? I really love that. ” And he can make that. But I’m not feeling bitter if I have to go to the store and get it.

And if it was important to me that he make the meal and clean it up, I would ask that. I would make a request. I would say, “Hey, on this one day, it just makes me feel really special when you cook and clean.” It just makes me think that there’s one day where I don’t have to do mom stuff. I want to just feel like a woman and I don’t want to feel like a housekeeper.

And so it makes me feel really special when you do that. And if this was important to me, I would also be like, “And you can use paper plates.” But notice how what happens or doesn’t happen on Mother’s Day, we make it mean so much, and I will tell you that whatever you are making it mean, and I know this is painful to hear, is just a reflection of what you think about yourself.

Because if you feel rock solid, if you love yourself as a mom and you think you are doing a good job, and you are appreciating you. You do not need it from anyone else. And it doesn’t mean it isn’t nice or we don’t want it. It’s lovely, but it’s not devastating.

For those of you that feel heavy and devastated around Mother’s Day, I want you to sit with yourself for a little bit and talk to yourself about your own thoughts about you, because if you spend most of the time in your brain telling yourself that you’re screwing it up and you’re doing a bad job and you’re a failure of your mom, and this is most of you because I coach you all the time, there is nothing that your family could do to make up for that story at a brunch.

There just isn’t, and it’s not their job. It is not their job to program your brain with good thoughts about you. Now, does it make it a little bit easier to feel good about yourself when people around you are lavishing you with praise and encouragement? Yes. That’s why we all should be better at being charitable and kind and encouraging. But are you doing that for your husband and your kids right now?

Usually, when I am feeling like I’m lacking appreciation and encouragement, I very quickly see I am not doing that for other people. So right now, I want you to think about the perfect Mother’s Day that would make you feel like a million dollars. And I want you to ask yourself, okay, if all those things happened, whatever it was, what would you be thinking and feeling? What would you be thinking and feeling?

And then I really want you to look at those thoughts. I really want you to look at those thoughts and, and just sit with them and ask yourself, why do I not feel that way right now? Why do I not feel that way right now?

When I was thinking about it, I thought, uh, the best thing that I could think of was that my husband and my mom’s husband coordinated to buy my mom a plane ticket so she could come up here and visit me for a few days around that time. And it was a surprise because I really love that kind of surprise. I don’t love surprise parties, but I really love that kind of surprise.

And that my mom and I could sit and have breakfast together and drink coffee and just talk and laugh and be together because I really love my mom. That would be like the best thing that I could think of.

And as I think about that, my thoughts are, I really love her, I’m glad I get to spend time with her. This is so fun. They’re not even complex sentences, you guys.My husband appreciates me. My husband knows me. I think that’s one thing we really want. We want to feel known, but when you guard your heart and you have hardness of heart and bitterness, you can’t be known. Not for the real you.

But think, listen to those thoughts that I just said. If my mom doesn’t come, I can still have those thoughts. I can still believe my husband really knows me. I love spending time with my mom. I could call her. I could definitely call her more than I call her.

Whatever I happened to end up doing on Sunday, I could think this is fun. I have thought that about cleaning before. Cleaning without children is a good time. Driving somewhere can be really fun.

So notice that we think we have to change what’s happening around us in order to change our internal experience, but our internal experience comes from our thinking and you can change that. And the reason we put so much pressure on Mother’s Day is because we have a negative self image and we are desperately looking for other people to prop us up.

Now, again, I’m not saying it’s wrong to want that. We all want that. I want my husband to gaze into my eyes and say, “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world and I’m so glad that I’m raising kids with you. You are such a good mom.” It is not wrong to want that, and that feels good.

But in the absence of that, which he never says that, my engineering husband, can I believe that about myself anyway? Can I believe that I am beautiful? Can I believe that he loves me? Can I believe that he is proud of the mom that I am or that I am proud of the mom that I am?

If you can do this, you will feel so powerful. And I really believe that the barometer for sainthood is your ability to have interior peace in any situation. And the way that you do that is by managing what you think. You allow a thought to come by like, “Oh, I feel really unappreciated.” And you see it, but you go, “You know what? That’s not true. I am really appreciated.”

Kids really love their mom. Kids love their mom. However old you are when you get hurt, you still want your mom. We have a deep, for most of us, obviously there’s some cases where there’s been real neglect and abuse and narcissism and we’re no contact with that person. But for most people, they really love their moms. Your kids appreciate you at a kid level. It’s just never gonna be enough to change what you think about you. That is your work.

Now, I have, because we coach on this every year, I’ve had some women say, “Sterling, I did what you said, and I asked my husband, and I told him what I wanted, and he still didn’t do it. ” I’m like, “Okay, what do you want to make that mean?

Do you want to make that mean you’re a terrible mother and nobody loves you, appreciates you? Or do you want to make that mean that your husband lacks some sort of social skills or capacity for doing what you asked?”

‘Cause that’s probably it. I’ll tell you right now, if an adult man, if his wife says, “I would like you to make, I don’t know, egg casserole for dinner and it’s within his wheelhouse and he just doesn’t.” Doesn’t that make you curious? Like, what’s going on with that man? I’m so curious about him and his brain. I am not at all thinking that his wife is bad or doesn’t deserve it.

But of course, we feel that way. Like, why can’t he even, why can’t the kids even just this one day a year? All I ask for is one day a year. This is what your brain’s gonna do and it feels awful. And this is just one foray into this idea that you get to manage your own thinking, which changes your own life.

And it’s interesting, and one of the reasons I wanted to start putting out a couple more podcasts is I was trained as a life coach from the Life Coach School with Brooke Castillo, I don’t know, five, six years ago now, and then she shut her business down a couple years, two years ago to go on tour with her son, and then this year in 2026, she’s been doing weekly coaching. So that’s, so she’s still not certifying coaches I think anymore.

Anyway, she sent out this email a couple weeks ago to the people who had been through her coaching program, and they made the entire library of everything she’s ever taught available to us, which is so cool.

And I remember thinking, “My life doesn’t feel very sparkly, but it should.” Like objectively, if I look around at my life, I know it’s pretty great and it wasn’t feeling great. And I thought, “You know, I’m just gonna load up those videos and start listening to them.” And there are hundreds, and I have been.

And it’s so good to go back to basic concepts of your thoughts, creating your results. Just that basic concept, like you get to think about today, however you want to think about it. No one can change that for you. You get to think about yourself however you want to think about yourself, and no one can take that away from you.

You get to think about Mother’s Day however you want to think about it. How do you want to think about it? And first of all, we know it’s a commercial holiday. We know that companies created it. Jesus didn’t create it. Companies created it to sell flowers and candy and Pandora bracelets. Oh my gosh, my grandmother was so into that. Do you guys remember that? Those Pandora bracelets with the charms.

And my dad would just like, and he’d go buy them for her. And he loved her, but he thought the Pandora bracelet thing was stupid. But he’d buy it for her and she’d be so happy. But he didn’t even want to buy it. What does that mean?

And sometimes we think if someone does something really uncomfortable for us, it means they really love us. If they buy something for us that they don’t even really want to buy, that really shows their love. And I just want to go, “That’s such an interesting thought, isn’t it?

So I have been really enjoying these videos. I’m really enjoying my life lately, and I want to share that with you. So I think I’m gonna come and chat more about what I’m doing, what I’m working on, a little more off the cuff, but you guys like that.

But I wanted to do this Mother’s Day post, and I’m sure I have more Mother’s Day podcasts if you wanna go look at them, but you just get to decide, and nothing your family does for you on Mother’s Day will prop up your own belief in yourself.

And the greatest gift that you could give yourself is really learning to love and appreciate yourself, to give yourself high fives, to say, “You’re doing a good job. You are a good mom. Look what you did for those kids.” And then you just get to enjoy your family on Mother’s Day.

And I want you to ask for what you want. And if you already know that you have the kind of husband where you ask for what you want and he doesn’t do it, then you gotta manufacture it. You gotta … I mean, if that were me, I’d just be like, “I’m gonna take myself out to lunch and then go sit in a bookstore. I’ll be back in five hours.” That’s what I would do.

So you get to decide who you wanna be, what you wanna think about. Stop putting so much pressure on these guys who are not great at planning events. Your girlfriend would do a wonderful Mother’s Day for you because she knows you. Husbands are not great at that. Some of them are. Ironically, my dad is great at that.

My dad is great at presence and event planning, but even growing up I knew. I was like, “Sterling, that’s weird.” It, not weird, but uncommon. And I knew that I wasn’t gonna marry someone like that.

Decide what you want, plan your day, and then no matter how it goes, don’t make it mean anything about your vocation of motherhood. One day couldn’t sum up all that you do for these kids. You are doing a good job. You love these kids. God sees all of it, and he doesn’t need a special day to tell you that he loves you and you’re doing a good job. You can ask him to tell you that every single day.

All right, my friends, if you go to catholicmomcalm.com. You can see the pilgrimage that I’m running for mothers and daughters in France. And we’ve never done this before, but I’m doing it with Chantel Howard of Catholic Finishing School and her husband, Peter Howard, who’s just like an amazing human. He studied all of the Marian apparitions for his doctorate in Rome.

And I just love listening to him talk. Every time he talks, he starts talking about like stars and how the stars and the planets, something foretold, the Marion events and ties them all together. It’s wild and super cool. We’re gonna be in La Saux on Theresa’s feast day. I mean, that’s pretty incredible.

So if this is not the life stage for you or the financial stage for you, do not even think about it. Do not feel bad about it. I used to feel so bad watching people travel and do fun things because I was drowning in little kids and I don’t want to add that to your life, but there are people who happen to have older kids and more flexibility who can go to France for 10 days. And if that’s you, I want you to come with me on this trip.

And you’ll know because the Holy Spirit’s gonna bug you about it. You’ll be like, “No, I can’t do that. ” And it’ll just grow in your heart. I always want you to listen to that because this is going to be a very beautiful opportunity for these girls, being together in a super traditional Catholic environment and really learning how to pray and love the Lord. I mean, that’s really what Chantal and I are good at.

And we’ll do it for the moms too, but I’m excited for these girls to experience beautiful France and coaching and Catholic history. So you can check that out at catholicmomcom.com and stay tuned. The app is coming soon and it’s gonna be amazing.

All right, my friends, I am praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.  

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