The Irish Mummy Podcast | Work Life Balance · LaunchPod Media

Embracing Your Emotions as a Mum | Helping Your Kids Develop Empathy

·22 min·2 clips

Rosie started crying at laundry detergent, unleashing grief stored for years.

The host of The Irish Mummy Podcast, who is a mother and entrepreneur, shares a personal story about a sudden emotional release while her family recovers from illness. This episode explores processing grief as a parent and modeling emotional vulnerability for children. The host's husband, Adam, also contributes to the conversation from his perspective. The host describes a severe "zombie flu" that swept through her household, leaving everyone sick and sleep-deprived. After recording a podcast while ill, she completely lost her voice and treated a chest infection with high-dose vitamin C sachets. An unexpected wave of crying began for her on Sunday, triggered by a sentimental speaker and seemingly mundane objects like laundry detergent. She interprets this as a release of suppressed grief for her mother, who passed away ten years ago, feeling emotions she believes she stored during her mother's terminal illness and her own early motherhood. The crying continued uncontrollably for three days, with her children initially asking what was wrong. Her children responded by hugging her when she cried and later creating a surprise of paper hearts and handprint art covering her bedroom door with loving notes. The host observes that her visible grief did not make her children anxious but gave them space to practice empathy and comfort her. She notes her youngest child remained happy and unaffected, while the older ones helped with chores and played creatively, making Star Wars weapons from cardboard boxes. The host listened to emotional music from artists like Celine Dion and Whitney Houston while cleaning and crying, which felt like a necessary physical and emotional detox. She reflects on the metaphor of grief as a ball in a box that shrinks over time but never disappears, yet her current feelings are as intense as a fresh loss. The host speculates that being stuck at home sick created a safe, uninterrupted environment for this stored grief to finally surface. A key insight is that sharing appropriate sadness from loss with children differs from sharing panic or fear about life decisions. The experience demonstrated that children can feel secure even when a parent is emotionally vulnerable, and it provided them a real opportunity to develop emotional resilience. The tone is deeply personal, raw, and conversational, featuring an intimate dialogue between a married couple about a challenging family week. The style is narrative and reflective, focusing on a specific emotional journey rather than offering broad, abstract advice. This episode would resonate with parents interested in emotional health, grief processing, and conscious parenting, especially those who have experienced loss. Listeners seeking lighthearted content or structured parenting tips might find the intensely personal and somber narrative less engaging.

As heard by us

A plainspoken episode about children learning empathy by watching a parent feel loss.

An episode built around a mother who has almost no voice after a zombie flu moves through the house, it keeps the focus on feeling things plainly and on how children learn empathy by watching that happen. The tone is conversational rather than theory-heavy, which helps.

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Why you'd press play

When you want a gentle conversation about embracing emotions as a mum and helping children develop empathy.

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