Hey Moms: I couldn’t care less what after school activities your kids are doing but I care how you are really doing.

After 16-years of parenting three kids, I’ve been in every type of social interaction with other mothers. The most common small talk seems to be what the kids are doing, family schedules or at best, tips that work well for one parenting challenge or another. The least common and most interesting conversation is how we are truly doing in our mothering.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to have a rich and real conversation with a mom I had just met. We were at birthday party for a mutual friend. The venue was noisy and I wasn’t sure I would stay long. To my surprise, I ended up in a deep conversation about how to make changes in the family lineage. We talked about how to parent in ways that we weren’t parented and how to succeed at charting a new course.

If you believe, like I do, that our children mirror all our unprocessed emotional material, then changing how we parent involves a seriously commitment to personal growth. It’s relatively straightforward to parent differently in surface ways. Every generation stands on the shoulders of the previous and progresses from there. However, the deeper changes can be surprisingly difficult.

In a moment of stress, have you ever found yourself reacting exactly like one of your parents did? The way we were treated is in our tissues. We have the benefit of all of our parents’ strengths and the opportunity to heal what they couldn’t us. Our parents gave us as much as was within their capacity to give. To give more, we need to grow our inner resources and our capacity, which often requires sitting with the pain of what we didn’t receive and moving through it.

This journey is personal and it’s delicate to figure out how to share honestly about it. Mothers suffer greatly from comparing themselves to their perception of how other mothers are coping. In one way or anther, every mother is challenged.

Be honest. Be real. Be vulnerable. Surround yourself with mothers who support you in being the kind of mother you aspire to be.