You know what nobody tells you about motherhood? That you’ll become the sun of your family’s entire universe, keeping everyone warm, everything in orbit, everything running, and then wonder why you feel completely burned out and unseen.

Here’s the thing: 2025 has been a lesson in resilience for most of us. And as we round out this year and look toward 2026, I want to talk about something that’s been sitting heavy on my mind. It’s about how much we give as moms, how little we receive in comparison, and how that’s actually our own doing.

I know. That sounds harsh. But stay with me.

The Stocking That Never Came

I’ll give you a real example from my own life. Someone asked me recently where my Christmas stocking was, you know, since Santa brings stockings for my kids, my parents, everyone. And I said, “I don’t get a stocking. Mom doesn’t get a stocking.”

Nobody thinks about that because I’m the one who sets the intention for what the Christmas experience is going to be for my family. I live that intention out, and I don’t necessarily ask others to participate. And honestly? I don’t think I’ve ever said out loud, “Wow, I wish I would get a stocking.”

When I sat down to really think about it, I realized there are so many things I wish were happening, things I wish I would receive, but I never ask for them. I never say out loud what I want or the help I need or the support I crave.

Sometimes I don’t say anything at all, and then I get upset when my kids or my partner doesn’t naturally become in tune with what my needs are and give them to me.

Why We Expect Mind Reading

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Yeah, but Dana, you shouldn’t have to set the intention that everybody helps you in the kitchen. They should just know to do it.”

And I would argue, you kind of do.

I had a friend years ago who had just had a baby. She was exhausted and frustrated with her husband. “Dana, I just want to take a nap and wake up to find that he’s cleaned the kitchen,” she told me.

“Well, are you asking him?” I said. “And he’s just not doing it?”

“No,” she admitted.

“So you didn’t ask him?”

“No.”

I pushed further. “Do you normally clean the kitchen? Is there a particular way you do it? Is he nervous he might not do it the way you want? Have you ever asked him before, or have you always just taken care of it?”

She paused. “Huh. I see what you’re saying.”

The Mind Reader Trap

We want people to read our minds because we read people’s minds. We’re looking ahead to what our kids need for tomorrow. We’re planning because we have to manage the logistics of our family and our life. That’s a natural instinct of motherhood, at least for a lot of us.

But most of the world doesn’t work that way.

Think about yourself before you were a mom. Think about instances where you were completely oblivious to how you could have helped someone, could have thought of something before it happened. You didn’t because you were in your own world, in your own universe.

Now? The universe of mom encompasses everybody’s universe. We don’t get our own universe anymore. We dabble in everybody else’s, keep everybody else’s running. We are the sun, keeping everyone warm, making sure everything’s okay, keeping everything in orbit.

And we expect that everybody else has that same thought process. They don’t.

The Anticlimactic Feeling of Doing It All

Before you go through the rest of your holiday thinking about all the things that maybe didn’t happen or that you wish would’ve happened, the things you tolerate from people who come into your family during this time, I want you to sit with something.

Christmas used to feel really anticlimactic for me. My kids are getting old enough now to really appreciate the gifts we get them, but when they were younger? I would take all this time to wrap presents (I love wrapping presents, my very first job was at Williams Sonoma wrapping wedding presents), and my kids just didn’t care. They’d open it, look at the present, say “yay,” and immediately want to open the next one.

I would feel like I did all of this work and nobody really appreciated it. My parents would get me something. My kids would make me something. But ultimately, I wasn’t really receiving big gifts or gestures from anybody, and I was exhausted from being the one who did all the doing.

Setting Boundaries Still Means Doing the Work

Even now, after I’ve set much better boundaries and I’m much clearer about what I want, asking my parents if we could have Christmas at my place so I don’t have to worry about getting the kids anywhere, so they have their own space to play, so I can relax, even with all of that, I still do a million things. More than I need to.

I’m doing crafts, painting things, wrapping everything, making cookies for the teachers, being my son’s class parent. All the things I don’t really have time for.

But here’s what I’ve learned: Even with me setting good boundaries, I know I want an experience. I want holiday music. I want crafts on the table. Those things matter to me. And so I am the implementer of those things. Yeah, sometimes I get exhausted from that, but at least I’ve set that intention and I know what those expectations are.

The Key to Receiving More

Because one of the things we have to do in order to receive help and receive love is know what we want things to look like.

Look, it’s really important for us to know what we want and how we want things to go. It’s really important for us to ask for help. But we’ve gotta know where we get resentful so we know where we can start asking for help.

One of the biggest challenges? We don’t know how to ask for what we need.

Sometimes I want to be the one that cooks, and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I don’t mind cleaning because it’s a form of procrastination for me, and sometimes I absolutely don’t want to. The challenge is me knowing myself enough to know when those times are, and having the people around me know me enough to understand that I’m not just a one-dimensional person.

Different situations call for different types of help. I want to step up for them at different times, and I want them to step up for me at different times.

It’s Not All or Nothing

I’ve learned over the last several years that it’s not all or nothing. It’s not either “I’m pampered and I receive love and I never have to do anything” (and then I feel completely useless), or “I do everything until I become just the doer.”

Here’s what I want for us:

Number one: I want us to receive more. Accept love, accept support, accept giving, accept compliments, all of those things. Because I think that’s where boundaries begin to happen. When you receive those things, you start to hold the standard of what you believe you are worth. And that’s when the boundaries are able to happen.

Boundaries we always talk about, the ones us moms should have without guilt and shame, can’t happen until we begin to allow people to step up for us and we see what joy it brings them.

Teaching Your Kids How to Show Love

Even having your kids help around the house or do their chores, when you share with them how nice it is to share the burden, so that it’s not just you, and you tell them how much love you feel when they’re helping? You’ll see your kids go, “Well then yeah, I want to help. Because I love you, mom.”

Your kids don’t give a crap if the dishes are done. They don’t care if the floor is vacuumed. But they love you so deeply, and they don’t even know how to show that love besides hugging you, telling you they love you, and running off to do their own thing.

You have to tell them how you feel loved. Tell them how you feel less weight of the world, which means you have to actually be honest with them about the weight when the weight of the world is on you.

Not because it’s a burden for them to bear, but because there are ways they can be helpful. Maybe it’s their hugs. Maybe it’s their kisses. Maybe it’s asking them not to complain or, in my case with a brother and sister two years apart, asking them to not be so mean to each other just for one afternoon. Or if they are, to take it out of earshot from me.

Your Homework for 2026

So here’s your homework going into 2026:

Know what you want your experience to look like. What do you want the future to look like? What do you want to be different, what you want to be the same? The start, stop, continue of 2026.

Know where you get resentful. Because that’s where you need help. You need help where you do something and then you’re resentful that you’re the only one doing it.

When I really think about not getting a stocking, I don’t actually get resentful about that. I like watching people open gifts. I like that experience. But where I get resentful? If I have to do all the cooking and cleaning. That’s where I need to ask for help.

People Who Love You Want to Step Up

For example, every year when I was growing up, we went to the movies on Christmas Day. We haven’t been doing it lately because I would give that up so the kids could play games or do other things. And I realized, I want to bring that back. So I told the person I’m spending Christmas with: “That’s what I want to do. I would love for you to come with me. If not, that’s what I’m going to do.”

And you know what happened? That person stepped up. “Okay, let’s look at movies. How can we figure out where we’re going?”

Because people that love you want to step up. They think they’re showing you they love you by telling you that, by hugging you, by kissing you, by saying you’re amazing, by bringing you gifts from school. But you have to show them how you feel love, by looking at what you want an experience to look like, what you want the future to look like, where you get resentful when those things don’t happen.

Where can it not just be your doing?

Your Problems Aren’t Special (And That’s Good News)

If you’re not sure where to start with this, this is exactly why we have the Boss Mom Community. Go to bossmom.com/community, you can join for free. Ask questions. Connect and mastermind with other women. Hear from their experiences and their stories.

Don’t do this in silence. The guilt, the shame, the feelings, the overwhelm, the loneliness that happens when we do it in silence, I can guarantee that no matter what you think you’re dealing with right now, somebody in our community has dealt with it.

We’ve had over 30,000 people go through our courses. We’ve had over 80,000 people in our communities. I’ve personally coached thousands of women. There’s always crossover in our stories. Somebody can always give you insight into what they dealt with, but also recognition that you’re not the only one.

Why This Matters

Your problems are not actually special. And I mean that in the best way possible.

If we believe that what’s wrong with our lives or wrong with us is special to us, that we’re the only one, then it becomes part of our identity. But if you recognize it’s not special, that everybody has some recipe of things that aren’t right or messed up or wish were different in their lives? If you start meeting people who’ve had similar experiences to you in different ways?

Then you start to realize it’s not part of your identity. It’s just life happening.

Your identity is how you deal with it. Your identity is who you are in spite of it or because of it. Your identity is who you choose to be going forward.

Letting all the things that are happening that you don’t like define you because you think they’re special to you, that’s where guilt, shame, loneliness, and overwhelm start to happen.

Mom guilt is not something that has to happen. But it sure as heck happens in silence, and I don’t want that for you.

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So if we’re going to decide what intentions we want, what future we want, where we get resentful so we can ask for help, come into the community so we can do it together. Head to bossmom.com/community and let’s figure this out. Because you deserve to receive as much as you give. You just have to start asking for it.