We Had So Much Fun: A Different Way to Mother

A fellow student in my Martha Beck coach training small group passed away during our training. She chose to do the training even knowing she had end-stage cancer.

Six months after she passed, her daughter shared a montage about her mother.

The through-line was simply — we had so much fun.

Her daughter posted it on Instagram. It has hundreds of thousands of views.

That phrase echoes in my head a lot these days. It is how I felt after playing with my grandson in Nicasio last week. I hear it when I am hiking. I want to feel that way after retreats, family vacations, and dinners with people I love.

It is how I want to remember things and be remembered.

So simple, so beautiful — and previously not on my agenda at all.

We are trained to look for what needs fixing

In medicine, we are trained to scan for the problem. To find the inefficiency. To spot the loose end.

We do this in our work. And we bring it home.

As mothers, we focus on what needs to change and improve. We manage. We keep everyone in check. We get it right.

We hold mothering heavily.

When the mind has been trained to find what is wrong, it will find something. Including in our relationships with our children, our mothers, and ourselves.

We had so much fun is a different lens

Aspiring to ‘we had so much fun’ is a magical way to approach mothering — and being mothered.

This is true even and especially when the mothering you got was complicated.

Most of us look at our mothers and see what was wrong. Where she fell short. What we did not like. What hurt us.

‘We had so much fun’ does not bypass any of that. It does not pretend the hard parts did not happen. It is not Pollyanna, and it is not emotional bypassing.

It is simply choosing a different lens — one that makes room for fun, for sparkle, for the moments that actually mattered alongside the ones that hurt.

The approach determines the landing.

Notice that the line is we — not I

We had so much fun is relational. Shared.

It includes the people we mothered and the people who mothered us.

You only get to say it at the end if you build it together along the way.

It is also the line that points us to who we want to become.

I want to be the mother and grandmother who, in the end, says we had so much fun.

And I want everyone I mothered and grandmothered to nod their heads in agreement.

That is a different goal than getting it right.

Why this is also a nervous system practice

This is not just a mindset shift.

When your attention is constantly scanning for what is wrong, your body lives in a slightly braced state. Your shoulders are tense. Your breath is shallow. Your thinking narrows.

When you choose a different lens — one that includes what is working, what is loving, what is funny, what is connected — your nervous system registers something different.

Your shoulders drop. Your breath deepens. Your thinking becomes more flexible. Your creativity returns.

You are less reactive. You repair faster. You interpret more generously. You stop keeping score, at least a little.

This is the same physiology I teach in yoga and in 1:1 coaching.

Different lens, different state, different choices.

The fun is not separate from the structure

I am not saying skip the structure, or the teaching, or the hard work of raising humans. You cannot have so much fun without all of that.

The structure is the reason the fun is possible.

But without the fun — what is the point?

It does not have to be big or wild.

The moments that are so fun are often love-filled and connected — a dinner conversation, something that just happened off the cuff.

The lightsaber game in the redwoods my grandson made me repeat eighteen times last week. The view from a hike. A laugh in the kitchen.

A few questions to explore:

Where in your life can you already say we had so much fun?

Where do you want to be able to say it next?

What might you say yes to? Or no to?

If you watched another mother and thought she was having more fun than you, do not judge it. Follow it. Jealousy is a clue. She is pointing at something you want.

Go do that.

This blog was originally a yoga class

I weave coaching themes into my yoga classes because transformation happens most effectively when you are relaxed.

When your system softens, you learn, absorb, and integrate at the somatic level. That is how real change happens — how new pathways get built, how the body begins to trust a different way of being.

We move. We stretch. We breathe. And we practice a different relationship with our minds.

I teach free yoga most Saturdays (sometimes Sunday) at 9 am Pacific on Zoom. I also offer in-person retreats at Nicasio Creek Farm — which, truly, are the best way to practice live.

When women physicians gather in community — in a bamboo studio, among trees, eating real food, coaching honestly, laughing often and hard — there is a beauty that is hard to replicate anywhere else.

Most of the women who come arrive sure they need to fix something. They leave noticing they had so much fun. That is not incidental. That is the medicine.
Practice yoga with me on Zoom. Join me at a retreat.