What I Got From My Mother (And What I Chose to Change)

In this Mother’s Day special episode of She Asked: Tools for Practical Hope, Anna McBride shares a personal reflection on her relationship with her mother and the patterns she inherited around money, identity, and self-worth.

Through storytelling, Anna explores how so many of us unknowingly carry the beliefs, behaviors, and emotional patterns of the women who raised us. From financial anxiety to relationship dynamics, she opens up about how she became a “2.0 version” of her mother and the healing work it took to break those patterns and choose something different.

This episode is not about blame, but awareness, ownership, and transformation.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
– How family patterns shape your relationship with money, love, and self
– Why awareness is the first step to real change
– How to identify what you’ve inherited (and what no longer serves you)
– Practical ways to release, transform, and rewrite your story

Whether your relationship with your mother feels loving, complicated, or somewhere in between, this conversation offers a powerful reminder:

Remember: It’s not what you got—it’s what you choose to do with it.

✨ If you’re in NYC:
Anna will be performing at The Moth storytelling event on May 11 in Brooklyn (theme: “I Got It From My Momma”)

✨ If this episode resonates, please like, subscribe, and share it with someone who might need to hear it.

✨ And if you’re ready to go deeper, Anna offers 1:1 coaching to help you move from awareness into real, lasting change.

#MothersDay #SelfGrowth #HealingJourney #FamilyPatterns #PersonalDevelopment #SheAsked #WomensHealing

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Transcript

Why Mother’S Day Feels Complicated

How Money Patterns Get Inherited

Divorce Wake-Up Call And Getting Help

Four Questions To Rewrite Your Story

Invitations And Closing Reflections

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to She Asked: Tools for Practical Hope. I'm your host, Anna McBride, and I am so glad you're with us today. Before we get into today's episode, I want to share two quick things. If you're in New York City area, I am going to be doing an upcoming Moth storytelling event at the Bell House on May 11th. That's next Monday, y'all. So if you're available and you want to join in, please look it up online and come by. We'd love the support. I would love to see you there, and I would love for you to hear the story. The topic is going to be I got it from my mama, which has been very much an inspiration for today's episode. Number two, if this kind of story and episode resonates with you, what you hear today resonates with you, please reach out. Consider coaching because coaches help us move from awareness to action. Through the consistent action in tangent with a coach, we actually get to create change in our life. We get to transform, transmute, become a better version of ourselves. So if any of this resonates, please reach out. There will be information in the show notes about all that. And if you're ready to rewrite your narrative, let's chat. So let's talk about Mother's Day, okay? Because it's coming, it's on Sunday, and for some of us, it's a great thing to celebrate. And for many of us, it's complicated. That's how it's been for me, yeah, for many years. For some people, it's joy, for others, as I said, it's complicated. And it can be a bit of both. Because whether you realize it or not, so much of how we live our life is because what we saw modeled by the women who raised us or whoever raised you, right? And and it shapes the way we move through the world. How we love, how we see ourselves, how we handle money, how we handle conflict, how we ask or don't ask for what we need. It's not just what we got from our mothers, it's what we do with it. So that's what we're going to talk about today. I've gone through my own healing in regards to my mother. I've shared before, our relationship was complicated. We were emeshed, we were codependent, and I was one of her best students. I became a version of her. I call it the uh 2.0 version. I wish I could tell you that it all meant I was better. However, I had to go through a process in order to get better. And it took awareness, it took healing, and it took being willing to hold myself accountable to have a different life because I am a different person and I wanted to live the right life that was right for me. So there are things I got from my mother that were beautiful. I got her strength, I got her resilience, I got her independence. And some of the things I had to work, let's just say it required work for me to be able to heal from and move beyond or transmute or transform. And one of the biggest areas for me when it comes to my mother was in regards to money. Because the way she modeled her relationship with money was not a healthy one. And I can understand now, looking back, why that was. Yet at the time I just saw a person who I loved, who I looked up to, who I attended to, was struggling because of her relationship to money. I think a lot of women in my generation, maybe any generation, but my mother was an immigrant. So anyone who is a daughter of an immigrant may have had a similar experience. Mine was one that my mother was dependent on my father. My father had a job that paid him the money to support the household, and my mother had to live within the means that he decided that she could have. So our house. Or I would say he was the one who had the big career, who made all the money, so to speak, to support our household. Not that I didn't have one, it just wasn't like his. Everything was about him. Just like growing up, everything was around my father from my mother's experience, and particularly when it came to the money. And when it came to financial decisions, my now ex-husband made all those decisions. He made our budget, he paid our bills, he told me what I could or could not do with money. So I was basically reliving my mother's story. And I didn't even know it. Because, as a lot of young women do, we say, I will never be like my mother. I was everything like her. Just I wasn't an immigrant. I decided to understand better what was going on within me to create all this turmoil and unhappiness, discontent with life. And all of that healing journey, which has taken 30 years through my life, has led me to the knowing, the understanding, the appreciation that my belief systems, my nervous system was really set up around what I grew up within. And it's very common. And yet, in order to get better, I had to first see it with clarity and then also be willing to do something about it. Not a reactionary, but really courageous steps that were different. And the truth of the matter is that I deferred a lot to my ex-husband financially throughout our whole marriage. And we were married for 36 years. And every time that I recall that I stood up to him and it led to argument, you know, very much a disruption in our home, I acquiesced because I wanted peace to be in my home. I didn't want my children to have ongoing shouting matches or coldness in the home. So I gave up a lot of what I wanted for the sake of peace. I saw my mother do it, and I just repeated it. Once we got divorced, and even during the negotiation of the divorce settlement, I was doing the same thing. Luckily, I had a very strong-minded attorney who looked out for me and she saw to it that I didn't cave on everything, that I was willing to listen to her for her guidance and her courage and her voice. And she showed up for me and she helped me make sure I would be okay. I've been blessed that way. I've also worked with coaches that have helped me cultivate the ability to want more from me and to cultivate the voice to speak up for me. Because these are things that I didn't grow up with. And these are things that I had to really grow into through coaching and through healing work to make my life be different. So, yeah, a lot of what was going on in my upbringing, I absorbed not consciously, but very deeply. And it showed up in my behavior. And what's interesting is I was very affected by all the anxiety that I saw my mother display. And I can look back with a little bit of guilt, but certainly a little bit of tenderness as well, that I did the same thing for my children. I was anxious about money around them a lot. A lot. And so I lived my mother's life in my children's world. And I can't go back and change that. Yet I can show up differently now, and I can more importantly show up differently now for me in regards to money. So it's again, it's not what you get from your mama, it's what you do with it. And so for a while, what I did with it was I lived it. And then when I was fortunate enough to be aware that wasn't really working for me, I took the courageous step and I did something about it. I got help. And help matters because on this show we talk about, our tagline is tools for practical help. And let me just say, one of the first tools that I had to really cultivate is awareness. And that's no small thing. It's being awareness is cultivated through the willingness to be honest about what's really going on. And I was hearing it from all over, my children, my friends. I just wasn't ready to see it clearly. I was in a very controlling marriage financially, as well as other ways. And yet I was there. I didn't leave. And I had to learn. I had to learn that's not really what love looks like. That's not really what a healthy marriage looks like. And and so at this stage in my life, in this chapter, I'm rewriting my narrative around money. Because money is a part of everything, right? I live in New York City. It's not an inexpensive place to live. And I live a pretty big life, and that all costs something, right? So I have to behave differently towards money. I have to be more mature, I have to be willing to work within a structure. And when I don't know what I'm doing, I have to be willing to ask for help. So tools like coaching, tools like awareness, tools like just talking to someone in order to get more clarity about what's going on. These practices are a way of gaining more awareness. So I'm not rejecting where I came from, I'm accepting it. I'm seeing it with more clarity now, and I'm also holding myself accountable for what do I do with that. Do I keep living the way I did? No. I am choosing to live my life differently. And that is a moment to moment, choice by choice, around everything I do. So there's this phrase I've been sitting with, right? It's not what you got, it's what you do with it. I've mentioned it a couple times already on this episode, and so I want to put that out to you because we all come into our life inheriting things like beliefs, coping mechanisms, emotional patterns, and ways of relating. These are things we can inherit. I did from my mother. Everything I described already, I got from her by watching her, by noticing all these things about her. And when they say children are sponges, I was a big sponge. And some of them, some of these things might serve us, yet a lot of them might not. And that's where we have to be willing to shift and change. And notice I might need to rewrite some of this that I've gotten. It's not all bad. I don't need to throw all of it out. I just need to rewrite it so that it actually works for me. Because I'm not my mother. I'm a lot like her. Yet the part that's mine is what I do with what I got. And the work, the personal work, the healing work is really about asking yourself some really good questions. Like, what do I want to keep of what I've been given? Meaning, these beliefs, these patterns, these relating behaviors. What do I want to keep of that? And what do I want to release if it's not working? Also, what might I want to transform or transmute, right? Because it may not all be bad, but some of it might just not work for you. So give yourself permission to let it go or to change it. Because this is your life. And as far as I know, we only get one. So let's live it the way that's right for you. My mother used to live out a motto that is very common in our culture. It's don't ask for permission, just beg for forgiveness. She never said that out loud, but she lived it out loud. She would take over, move in, jump in, get things done. She was a get-it done kind of gal. However, she rolled over a lot of people, maybe even herself. She didn't consider the consequences of what she was doing ahead of her actions most of the time. She just did them. Because I think she really believed that if she didn't do it, no one would. But there's also a shadow side, right? Because sometimes when we don't slow down long enough to consider what we're going to do before we do it, or talk to anybody about it before we do it, we're also not checking in with ourselves, right? We're just jumping in and doing. It's almost like a reaction to a situation as opposed to a thoughtful response. And for all the good that my mother did, what she also, I imagine, unintentionally did is she didn't understand the impact of her actions. My siblings and myself were subject to a lot of consequences. We witnessed our mother getting in trouble. We witnessed and experienced some of the fallout of the good she was really attempting to do. And I only like to think now that had she slowed down, maybe not all of that harm would have happened. And when we move too quickly, we can easily be become ungrounded. I know that's how I feel when I move too quickly. So yeah. However, I'm gonna slow down, I'm gonna discern, and I'm going to be aware of my impact because there is one, always, with everything we do. So, if you've been listening today and this resonates with you, right? If you had a complicated relationship with your mother, if you inherited some beliefs or some behaviors that might not be working for you, and you want to adjust them or transform them, I want to offer you a few things to reflect on. Number one, what did you inherit? Just let that question resonate with you. And for all of you dutiful daughters out there, like I was one, it may be hard because it may sound kind of judgy. And I'm not asking you to judge your parents. I know and believe our mothers did the best they could with what they knew. I know I did the best I could with my kids with what I knew. Yet, in order for me to heal, I had to first get clarity around what did I inherit? What did what were the obvious things and what were the less obvious things? The patterns, the beliefs, the emotional responses or reactions that I had to situations. What was it? Secondly, what actually serves you? So once you're aware of what you inherited, what you got, does it all serve you still? Or is there some things that you might want to release or transform or heal around? It's important to understand what aligns with you and what no longer works for you. Number three, what are you ready to release? There were a lot of things that I got from my mama that I used to always apologize for. I used to lead with this, oh my god, like I'm broken because of her. Not true. I wasn't broken. I was just repeating a pattern that wasn't working in my life. That process was broken. I have the ability to change that. So I had to release it first. I had to be aware of it and then release it through some healing work. Not I don't want to blame her, I just want to be clear about what is mine to change. And then four, what can you transform? Because transformation is where your real power is. When we change towards a better version of us, which takes a process, it really helps us live the life that we were meant to have. Not the one that our mothers lived out, but the one that we want to own and claim. We don't get to choose where we start, but we do get to choose how we move forward. And I think that the real essence of this conversation is not what did I get from my mom, but what am I choosing to do with it? So wherever you are this Mother's Day, whether it feels full, complicated, tender, or somewhere in between, I hope this gives you a little bit of space to reflect. And maybe a little bit of permission to choose something different. And again, if you're in New York and you want to join us for the moth storytelling event on May 11th at the Bell House in Brooklyn, please go online, get tickets, and show up. I would love to see you there. And if you're ready to go deeper in this work and need some help working on these things that we inherited, you can find more about how to work together with me in our show notes. This has been She Ask Tools for Practical Hope. I'm your host, Anna McBride. And until soon, be well.