Enough - Episode 41

My word for 2025 is “enough.” Here are some things that help me remember that I'm enough, and so are my kids. There is enough time, enough room, enough love for whatever comes my way. 

• Doctrine and Covenants 104:17, “there is enough and to spare”
• Doctrine and Covenants 104:15, “it is my purpose to provide for my saints.”
• Good Inside: Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr. Becky Kennedy
• “Am I Enough” Love Like You by Emma Nissen 
• “When Paths Diverge - Parenting Through Faith Shifts” Coach Tina Gosney and Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife on Conversations with Dr. Jennifer podcast feed from January 1, 2025 
• Tina’s podcast Coaching Your Family Relationships

Remember, you are enough and you always have been.

Remember, there are no empty chairs.

You found me! If what you heard on the No Empty Chairs podcast gives you hope for more help, please schedule a free Conversation with Candice. You can also visit candiceclarkcoaching.com for more information about how coaching tools can help you keep your relationship with your children and your faith. While you're there, be sure to pull up a chair and sign up with your email to be the first to know about news and events for moms whose kids don't come to church.

It's going to be okay, and even better!

Transcript

Hello, my lovely parents of kids who don’t come to church! Happy New Year! I hope this week you have had a chance to reflect on your past year and also to look forward and make some decisions about what you want your life in the coming year to look like.

As I look back on the past year, I can see some really hard experiences that I am still working through emotionally. And I can see some significant growth, both in myself and in people around me. It’s worth noting that the two things are not unrelated. 

For No Empty Chairs, one of the things I want to focus on in the coming year is including more parent interviews, as my schedule allows. Our stories matter and can be so helpful, so I hope to bring you more of those.

I have a tile mat in my kitchen that my sister gave me for Christmas a few years ago. Every year I choose a word for my mat. 2024 was “FEEL.” I was trying to be less in my head and cognitive intellect, more in my body and my emotions. I think I imagined that if I got better at feeling, then feelings wouldn’t be a problem. Well, feelings aren’t a problem, and they never were, but I am slowly learning that feeling my emotions is an uncomfortable and unavoidable part of the human experience. Does it feel better not to tighten against them and try to talk myself out of them? I don’t know that it’s more comfortable than that, but I am finding it looser and freer to feel my feelings more. My body is slowly releasing years of tension that, again, is not a comfortable process, but feels right and good and also hard and something I try to avoid sometimes. I do think I have become a little more accepting of my emotions, especially my emotions about my relationships. There’s more clean pain and less dirty pain.

My word for 2025 is “enough.” I think about enough from a number of perspectives. Sometimes when I think about “enough,” I think of the phrase from LDS scripture in the Doctrine and Covenants 104:17, “there is enough and to spare.” a bit earlier, in verse 15, the Lord says, “it is my purpose to provide for my saints.” I encountered this scripture a lot in my work with the self-reliance initiative in my local stake. The belief that there are solutions to problems and that agency matters is fundamental to a willingness to engage in the work of self-reliance. This year I am feeding my belief that there is enough and that I can trust God that’s true. There is enough time, enough room, enough love for whatever comes my way.

One of my goals for this year is to improve my relationship with food. Lately I have found myself eating past enjoyment to discomfort and, above noted emotional progress notwithstanding, I’ve been trying to escape my emotions. Both things are true: the progress and the difficulty. So I am starting to pay attention to what “enough” feels like in my body so I can learn to stop at enough. I am also working on believing that my body has enough capacity to experience unpleasant emotion when that’s appropriate.

One of the best books I read in 2024 was Good Inside: Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr. Becky Kennedy. It helped me think about how I spent much of my children’s childhoods believing I wasn’t good enough and trying to become the parent I thought I should be based on some external standard that was largely made up, where the measure of my worth was the things my children did or did not do or become. That was a distraction from authentically becoming the parent I really wanted to be, and was unfair to my children as well as myself. I’m doing better at this now, becoming the parent I want to be. Dr. Becky helped me articulate that my kids are already enough, and so am I. I don’t need to judge myself or wallow in regret. I have always been good inside, and so have my kids. And starting from that premise is a much better foundation for building a relationship. If my kids are enough, whether or not they come to church, I can stop judging and fixing and get busy loving. The same goes for me. If I’m enough, I can stop judging myself and acting like I’m broken and get busy loving and growing.

This year I want to dig into my relationship with myself even more. I spent much of my younger adulthood disregarding myself as a person who matters as much as anyone else does. I don’t matter more than anyone else, but I spent a lot of my life imagining that what made me worthwhile was my capacity for deferring to others’ desires and preferences, and I lost myself in an unhealthy way. I subconsciously believed that my desires and preferences mattered less than anyone else’s. That’s not a place where generosity can live. It’s a place of “never enough.” And if I made all that supposed sacrifice and then my kids didn’t follow the script? Oof. That’s a real blow. Over the past several years I’ve been growing into a better relationship with myself, taking better care of myself, loving myself as Jesus loves me. When I do that, I am in a much better position to love the other people in my life wholeheartedly. 

Back in September I attended the Restore Conference put on by Faith Matters. I loved so much about it. What stuck with me most was Emma Nissen. Her music pierced my soul. Since hearing her perform, I have listened to the opening track of her Love Like You album more than any other song. It’s called “Am I Enough.” And the answer is unequivocally, “yes.” You are enough. This year I’ll be strengthening my belief that I AM enough. I’m going to keep listening to the line “you are enough and you always have been.” I believe that’s true in my head. I want to feel deeply that it’s true in my body and in my heart.

These are some of my thoughts as we enter this new year. 

As I was preparing to record this podcast I listened to a wonderful conversation that Coach Tina Gosney had with Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife on Tina’s podcast Coaching Your Family Relationships. I ran across it in my Conversations with Dr. Jennifer podcast feed from January 1, 2025. It’s called “When Paths Diverge - Parenting Through Faith Shifts.” It’s a beautiful conversation about the human tendency to do one of three things in the face of difference: control and manipulate, yield and acquiesce, or withdraw. In the case of parenting adult children, the first and the last are the most likely to occur. When our children present us with something we weren’t expecting, our first impulse might be to fix them, to tell them how it should be; and if we can’t do that, it’s very tempting to withdraw from interaction. Differentiation is having the ability to stay in relationship with difference: to belong to ourselves, our own ideas and feelings without yielding our integrity, and at the same time to belong with others, allowing them the space to be themselves without needing either to change them or cut them off. I recommend the whole episode as worth your time.

There was a moment that made me think of a recent conversation I had with one of my kids. They had made a decision and I was second-guessing them, only I didn’t notice I was doing that at the time. I thought I was being helpful and offering suggestions they should consider that may change their decision. Well, that didn’t go well. I got called out and the phone call ended. And when I reflected on it, I could see that what I had really been doing was trying to escape my own anxiety about the situation, my own lack of faith that things would work out and that my child could actually work them out in the best way for themselves. Sometimes I have grace for everyone in the situation except the person in front of me and I view them as a problem to solve. This is a terrible way to treat someone. It is not loving. I apologized. 

And I will probably do this again. There’s grace for that, too. That’s the point that came home to me as I listened to Jennifer talk with Tina. It’s okay that I’m not getting it right. I will learn and grow, and there will be moments that catch me in anxiety again and my reaction will misfire. There’s grace for that, too. That’s the process. We can have as much faith in our own development as we ought to have for our adult children, whether or not they come to church.

Remember, you are enough and you always have been.

Remember, there are no empty chairs.