LETTING GO OF RESENTMENT WHEN PARENTING TEENS FEELS THANKLESS | EP. 263
Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest Podcast, where we moms of teens and college kids reframe what letting go really means to feel more connected, confident, and at peace. I'm your host, Master Coach Jennifer Collins.
Do you ever look around at your life and wonder, why am I so angry? Maybe you don't feel angry all the time, but you notice a simmering frustration that comes from being the one who does everything for everyone, and yet you still somehow feel unseen and unsupported. Today, I'm talking about resentment, the emotion that so many moms feel but almost never admit out loud. I'll show you why resentment can become such a powerful force in this stage of motherhood, and how it's quietly affecting your relationships and your happiness. And I'll also talk about what it takes to finally let it go, so that you can experience more peace and connection with the people you love most. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend.
I've been talking to quite a few of my clients lately about resentment, and when I went back, I was actually surprised to realize I haven't addressed this topic directly on this podcast in a while. So I thought it was a perfect time to pull back the covers on this emotion, because here's what I find so fascinating about resentment. It's one of those feelings we experience deeply and intimately, and yet it's one of the hardest to admit, even to ourselves.
I think part of the reason for that is that resentment has a quality to it that almost feels shameful. Resentment has an edge. It's hot and gritty, like it simmers, like a grudge you can't quite let go of.
And wrapped up in it can be these retaliatory feelings, this desire to get back at whoever it is you feel wronged you. Those feelings really bring out parts of ourselves that we don't really want to admit are there. The part that keeps score, the part that feels a little petty, also the part that wants to be seen and validated.
And for us as moms, I think that shame can feel even heavier, because so many of the things we feel resentful about, we also tell ourselves are just our job. So what does it say about us that we resent doing what we're supposed to be doing? What kind of mom feels that way? I think this is exactly why resentment comes up so often in my coaching conversations, because we can't really say it out loud to just anyone. Maybe you have that one close friend you can really go there with.
But I know for me, when I've felt resentful, I haven't wanted to admit it to anyone. Even saying it out loud to my own coach, I remember thinking, this sounds so selfish, so petty. Who do I think I am? And yet it was an emotion I remember I had a really hard time letting go of.
So today, I want to get real about resentment. But before I do, I want to be really clear that resentment is a normal human emotion. And like every other emotion I talk about on this podcast, when we judge ourselves for feeling it, when we pile shame on top of it and decide something's wrong with us for experiencing it, we shut down all of the curiosity that could help us understand what that feeling is actually trying to tell us.
So let's get curious. What is your resentment trying to teach you? I think one of the reasons resentment can feel like such an inevitable part of motherhood, especially at this stage as we're raising and launching big kids, is because we have given so selflessly for so long. I mean, we gave up our bodies to be pregnant, and many of our bodies have never returned to what they were before we had kids.
We also gave up our freedom and our flexibility when we raised infants and toddlers. We have spent years, decades at this point in this experience of motherhood, raising our kids, being selfless, doing a staggering amount of laundry, making sure everyone is fed every single day, holding down the schedules and the logistics and the emotional weight of the whole family. And we do this with very little fanfare.
And Mother's Day doesn't quite cut it as repayment. And look, we do all of this because we would do anything for our kids. I'll be honest with you, I have never really considered myself particularly maternal.
I mean, I hated babysitting growing up. And to this day, I don't feel a strong pull towards other people's children outside of the ones I've gotten to know really well. So at the beginning, the selflessness that motherhood required didn't come naturally to me.
I was exhausted all of the time. And there were so many things about being a mom that were frustrating to me. There were times when I felt trapped, trapped in this endless Groundhog Day experience where every day was feeding, diapers, brief naps, laundry, and repeat.
And yet the minute my oldest son smiled at me, at eight weeks old, he had my heart. Through the sleepless nights and the tantrums and all of it, there were these glimmers of awe. And those only compounded as he got older and my second son came into the world.
And that second time around, I was so much more confident. And so he just felt easier to me. And all of those compounding magical moments made everything worth it.
So over the course of those early years, you develop this unconditional love, the sense that you would do absolutely anything to support and protect your children. It's a love that gets actively built and deepened through the daily work of mothering. And for those of us lucky enough to have really bonded with our kids, to have experienced what that love actually feels like, there is nothing better.
Even before our kids become teens and they stop giving us all of that positive feedback, we can still feel resentful about how much of our lives get absorbed by the day-to-day work of raising a family. But then you add the teenage layer, and suddenly now you've got a kid who has attitude, who takes you for granted, who rolls their eyes at you, or makes you feel like an inconvenience whenever you're near them. And at some point, you start to feel like you deserve to be treated better than this, like you've earned a little more respect than you're getting.
And that feeling is often resentment. Let me give you a simple definition of resentment. It's the feeling that something outside of you, something you can't control, has treated you unfairly.
And here's what makes resentment different from anger. Anger tends to be immediate and hot. It lights up, but then it passes.
But resentment is slower. It simmers. It lives under the surface, often unspoken, even unacknowledged.
And it can tend to come out sideways. We become passive-aggressive. We might make biting remarks.
Or we do things for our kids, but we make sure they know we're not happy about it. And the reason we let it simmer instead of addressing it directly is usually because the problem feels unsolvable. Like if you have a kid who's dismissing you or disrespecting you, I'll be willing to bet you've already tried to address it.
You've already said something to them. But then they don't change. So now you're sitting with this feeling of discomfort that you're being treated unfairly or that your kid is disrespecting you, but you don't know how to resolve it because they're still acting the way they're acting.
And you're still feeling the way you're feeling. Resentful. But then on top of all of that, we feel shame around our resentment.
It's almost like we don't even want to recognize that that's what we're feeling. I mean, with all the blessings in our lives, who are we to feel like anything's unfair? And on top of that, we might say to ourselves, well, it's just a stage. This is just how teenagers act.
So we start to discount our own feelings, telling ourselves we shouldn't feel this way. And so we just push it down. Except suppressing your resentment doesn't really make it go away.
It actually just builds. And the more you resist it, the bigger it gets. So today, I want to explore two flavors of resentment.
And the first is the resentment we feel towards other people. Now, this is the most obvious kind of resentment. And for moms of teens and adult kids, it has a very specific texture.
It's the resentment of loving someone more than life itself and then being treated like you're nobody. It's doing their laundry, buying their groceries, rearranging your schedule around theirs, and then getting a shrug in return. It's waiting at home just in case they want dinner and then wondering how you ended up in a position where you're waiting around like a concierge for your kid.
You feel it in those moments when you do more than your fair share around the house, and you watch other people walk past the pile of dishes. They leave their stuff all over the house, walk by the laundry basket at the bottom of the stairs, never bringing it up. It's never getting credit, never getting thanked, having to ask, and then having to ask again.
I have so many clients who have reflected this experience back to me, and I know I've experienced it in my own life. And something I hear time and again, and I know I've thought myself is, how is it possible that I have poured everything I have into raising this person, and this is how they treat me? Here's the hard truth I've had to sit with in my own life. We cannot control other people.
We can't make our kids appreciate us. We can't make our partner see what needs to be done. But holding on to the resentment towards someone who isn't going to change, it's like drinking poison and waiting for them to get sick.
The resentment doesn't change them. It just keeps hurting you. Now, I want to be clear because addressing something that isn't working in your relationship is entirely appropriate.
You can and absolutely should set boundaries and enforce consequences when necessary. But the key here is the consequences have to be in your power. For example, if my kid speaks to me disrespectfully, I get to decide I'm going to leave the room every single time that happens.
That is in my power to do. Unfortunately, I can't force them to stop speaking to me the way they're going to speak. Here's something really important to understand about boundaries.
A boundary is a decision about what you will or will not do. It is not a mechanism for changing the other person. We set boundaries thinking, if I just make the consequence clear enough, they'll finally get it, that they'll change.
And sometimes people change, but often they don't. Or at least we can't control the speed at which that happens, especially when we're talking about our kids. And so if your peace depends on that other person changing, you could be waiting for a really long time.
So yes, say your peace, set the limit, enforce the consequence, do all of that. But once you've done that, it's really powerful to consider the cost to you of holding on to that resentment. So that's the first flavor of resentment, the kind we feel toward other people because of their behavior.
The second flavor of resentment is a little more sneaky. It's the resentment we can feel in response to our own choices. And honestly, this is one that you might not even recognize you're feeling.
Here's an example. I'm not a person who loves to cook, but sometimes I make dinner and there are nights when I actually enjoy it. In fact, I actually cooked a lot during COVID, honestly, because there wasn't much else to do.
And so there have definitely been times when I choose to cook and I feel really good about it. Maybe because I'm in the spirit of bringing my family together. And it's usually when I don't feel like I have 100 other things I need to be doing.
It's like I create the emotional space to want to cook and it feels like a gift I want to give my family. In other words, I feel zero resentment. But then there have been weeknights where I'm cooking and I'm thinking to myself, I cannot believe I am still working.
I've already had a long day of working and shuttling the kids around. I wish I could just sit down. And often my husband would be watching TV.
My kids would be doing whatever they were doing. And it felt like I was carrying this burden. Instead of feeling like it was a gift I was giving to my family, it felt like an obligation that was being put on me.
And heaven forbid someone would say they weren't hungry or didn't like what I cooked. Or eventually when they started asking to eat in their room, it just lit me up. I felt angry.
But honestly, the real emotion I was feeling was resentment. Notice it's the same task I was doing, just cooking dinner. But my emotional experience was completely different depending on how I was thinking about it.
But here's what I want to invite you to hear. On those weeknights, when I was feeling resentful, I was telling myself I had to cook dinner, that I had no choice. And that story that I had no choice is actually the thing that created my resentment, because it stripped me of my own agency.
I mean, the truth is, I never have to cook dinner again. Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, Jennifer, I have to cook dinner for my family. It's not a choice.
My family needs to eat. And I hear you. But stay with me for a second.
You don't have to cook. You could order in. You could tell everyone to fend for themselves for a night.
Or you could tell your partner to handle it. Now, these options might feel unrealistic or uncomfortable, or like they'd create a whole other problem. But they are options.
The fact that you're not choosing to take them doesn't mean you have no choice. It just means you've decided, for your own reasons, that cooking is the better option. Maybe it saves you money.
Maybe you actually like knowing your kids ate a real meal. Or maybe the alternative creates more conflict than it's worth. And all of that is valid.
But that's still a choice that you're making, not an obligation that's being handed to you. And that distinction matters more than it might seem. Because the moment you go from I have to cook to I'm choosing to cook and here's why, the resentment has nowhere to go.
Because you are in control of your choice. But just notice how this challenge shows up everywhere for us as moms. It's the yes you say when every part of you really means no.
Running back to the grocery store to get that thing your kid wanted. Or cleaning up the dishes, again, because no one else did it. It's putting away the laundry because you see the clean basket of clothes underneath a new pile of dirty laundry.
It's the carpool you've been doing for years that you really don't want to be doing anymore. It's even the mental load of the logistics you carry, keeping track of appointments and deadlines, managing everyone's emotional well-being. At some point, these tasks and responsibilities became yours, and you don't even really remember the moment when you agreed to taking them on.
They're just yours now. Then there's the partner who comes home and genuinely doesn't see what needs to be done, who has to be asked. Maybe they do it when you ask them, but they never just see it and take that initiative.
And you're supposed to be grateful for that. And you could love this person, but feel the resentment that comes from being the one who always has to ask, who has to be the one to think of it in the first place. And if you're navigating a co-parenting situation with an ex who's difficult or combative or just not reliable, that resentment can feel almost unbearable, because now you're not just carrying the load, you're carrying it while also managing conflict with someone who's supposed to be your partner in raising these kids and just isn't.
Now you're negotiating and defending and compensating for what they're not doing, all while showing up as the stable, present parent. Notice in all of these cases we can feel really justified in our resentment, when we feel like we have to do things, or when we feel angry and resentful that other people aren't carrying their weight or helping us out in the way that we want or treating us the way we deserve to be treated. The problem is that feeling justified about this emotion also doesn't make it feel any better, because now it's not just this hot, simmering emotion, it's something you feel like you have to experience every time you interact with this other person.
Resentment can show up everywhere. It comes up in those everyday moments when you do those things that you do for your kids. Honestly, even those things that you know you don't have to do.
You drop everything to drive them somewhere, or you go out of your way to get them that thing that they needed, and your kid barely acknowledges the effort, or they complain that it's not what they wanted, or they just take you completely for granted, as if it's your job to rearrange your entire afternoon for them. You can't help but think, after everything I do for you, this is the thanks I get? This is the way that you treat me? And the thing is, you're not wrong. You do deserve the appreciation.
The work of motherhood is constant, and it largely goes unseen, and the desire to be seen or thanked, this is a completely human response and need. The problem isn't that you want a bit more acknowledgment for everything you do. The problem comes when we make our peace contingent on getting that recognition.
Because if the only way you can stop feeling resentful is for your teen or big kid to spontaneously become grateful, or for your partner or your ex to finally show up in the way he should have years ago, you are handing the keys to your emotional well-being to someone who has shown you repeatedly that they're not going to do what you need them to do. And here's the thing, across all of these situations, we have a story running in our minds that says, I have no choice. I have to keep the house clean.
I have to cook dinner. I have to allow my adult child to be living in my home. I have to manage my ex, or do that thing that I really don't want to do.
And as long as you hold on to these stories without ever questioning them, resentment is the only possible outcome, because you've made yourself powerless in your own life. Now, that doesn't mean the solution is simple. Some of these situations are genuinely hard, and I'm not going to insult you by pretending that just deciding to think differently will make a different co-parenting situation go away, or that the right answer is to just kick your kid out of the house, or let them get away with disrespecting you, or taking you for granted.
But what I want to invite you to see is that there is always more agency available to you than the story in your mind is letting you be open to. And the work of finding it starts with being honest with yourself about what you're actually choosing and why. So here's the question I want to invite you to sit with.
Where in your life are you doing things you don't actually want to be doing and convincing yourself you have no choice? Because here's the thing, if you're able to answer that question honestly, you discover something that feels a little uncomfortable at first, but is actually incredibly freeing. That a lot of the resentment you've been carrying isn't something that's being done to you, it's something you've been, at least in part, creating. Not on purpose, not because anything's wrong with you, but because you've been abdicating responsibility for your own choices and calling it selflessness.
And I say this with so much love, because I don't think we do this intentionally. I think we actually slide into it gradually over years of putting everyone else first and telling ourselves we have no choice. And at some point we look up and we realize we don't actually know what we want anymore.
We don't trust our own instincts. We're not sure how to make a decision about how to parent or how to show up in our relationships, about what we really want and need, without immediately second-guessing ourselves or worrying about what it's going to cost us. And this is what chronic resentment does over time.
It doesn't just make you angry, it steals your sense of self and self-trust. So the real work here is taking responsibility for your choices, all of them. Because the moment you stop saying I have no choice and start saying I am choosing this and here's why, or I'm choosing not to do this anymore and here's why, everything changes.
And this, my friend, is how you take your power back. That means learning how to set real boundaries, not in a way that's focused on controlling what someone else does, but rather as a decision about what you will do. It's saying if this happens, here's how I'm going to respond, and then actually following through without overexplaining it or negotiating with yourself, even without waiting for the other person to agree that you're being reasonable.
And building the muscle to actually do this takes real practice. But what this empowers you to do is stop needing the other person to change in order for you to feel okay, because you have your own back. In fact, self-trust is one of those skills that I think we don't give enough attention to as moms.
We spend so many years making decisions around our kids, focusing on their needs and calibrating to their reactions. But the skill of actually trusting yourself, well, honestly, it can be hard to even know what that looks like. You're so much more practiced at second-guessing yourself.
You're so worried about getting it wrong. We're more focused on external validation of what we do, looking for evidence of whether or not it's working, than on looking inside of ourselves for the truth. But building that self-trust back is some of the most important work you can do, and not just for you, but for your kids as well.
Because a mom who knows her own mind, who makes decisions from a grounded place rather than from guilt or fear or resentment, that is a version of you your family actually needs, not the one who's holding it all together while simmering in resentment. And learning how to create that self-trust, to make decisions about who you want to be and live into that version of yourself, this is the work I do in Mom 2.0. You've given so much for so long, and something is changing, and you're trying to figure out who you are in this chapter of motherhood, and how to show up in a way that actually feels good. We work on all of it, the resentment, the boundaries, building self-trust, how we approach our relationships.
My friends, you don't have to carry this alone, and you don't have to stay stuck in resentment. There is a way through it, and it starts with deciding that you are worth the work. There's a link to learn more about the program in the show notes.
My friend, you are not wrong for feeling resentment. It doesn't make you ungrateful or a bad mom, and it doesn't mean you love your kids any less. It simply makes you human.
What makes resentment painful isn't actually the feeling itself. It's carrying it silently while pretending it isn't there, and meanwhile judging yourself for it. But recognizing it and getting curious about what it's telling you is truly the path to letting it go.
Imagine getting to a place where your teen rolls their eyes at you, and you don't ruminate about it for the rest of the day. Where your partner or your ex does that thing he always does, and instead of spiraling, you make a decision about what you're going to do, and you move on. Where you cook the dinner, or you don't.
And either way, it's actually your choice, and you know it. My friend, this is freedom. It's the freedom that comes from knowing that your peace doesn't depend on other people finally doing what you need them to do.
That you can want things to be different and still be okay when they're not. This is what letting go of resentment actually looks like, and it is so much more available to you than it might feel right now. You have more power here than you know, my friend.
Until next time.
If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to check out my next free masterclass. There's a link in the show notes. You have more power than you think, my friend.
