Mommy and Me Matching Dresses: Here and Here
Happy Sunday friends!
I genuinely hope you are all enjoying these beautiful days while it is not too hot and still not quite cold! My favorite time of the year is early fall just because the weather is perfect and you can smell change in the air. Random, but throughout most of my life something BIG has always happened in the fall. I love it, I love change and I always have. Keeps life interesting and exciting!
We have spent most of the weekend just getting things done around the house, running errands, and cleaning. Lately weekends have been our time to catch up. Since my blog has started to keep me busy full time and hubby works from home too, the weeks get crazy and it gets harder and harder to stay caught up on everything around the house. Thus, the weekends have been our bounce back time!
I totally plan to try to kick back and relax for most of today though. This morning I have a shoot and some prep for this weeks blog posts, but I am promising myself that after 1pm I am going to just chill. I would like to take Aria to the park and push her in one of those swings that babies can go it without having to hold on. She has never been in a swing so I am excited to see her reaction! If you follow me on Instagram you can see this in live action on my stories today!
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Anyhoo, today I am hitting a hard topic. This is something that has been weighing heavy on my heart, and I am so looking forward to opening up to you all about it.
Before I had Aria and actually before I ever became pregnant, I would feel guilt every once in a while. I would feel fear or scared of danger occasionally. I would sometimes worry about my actions. But generally I went about my days free as free can be, never stopping to think about the umpteen consequences of my actions or the actions of those around me….
Now that I am a mother I am crippled with constant guilt, constant fear (of almost everything!), and constant worry and awareness of my actions and the actions of others. I cannot express the amazing amount of time I am in my head reprimanding myself. This is all because of the deep love I have for my daughter, and how careful I am to make sure she is surrounded by nothing but the best circumstances, moods, and safety.
Most mornings I wake up with the intention of conquering everything on my to-do list and then some, only to end the day feeling like a failure and defeated.
If I raise my voice at the dog because I am annoyed I see the look on my daughters face, confused and concerned, and I immediately want to cry. How could I show such lack of self control? What am I teaching her? …
When I get caught up cleaning or working and I look over at my daughter playing on the floor with her toys all by herself, I could literally collapse with amount of sadness I feel, how could I let her sit there all alone? Will she be a loner? Will she feel sad or depressed down the road because she didn’t get enough attention? What about driving on the freeway, or what if I look away for too long and Aria falls down the stairs…. Is she getting enough time outside? Am I spending enough time helping her to learn? If I play with her all day then I fail because the house is a mess. I could go on and on…
All these thoughts, and all these feelings can completely take over my happiness. Leaving me feeling depleted and depressed. Often I think I will never be good enough, and I will never succeed at being a good mother. I want only the best for my daughter and I simply cannot give that to her. I am not strong enough…
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This is the ever common, mommy guilt. I know we all have it, and I know I am not the only one. But being a new mom, it is definitely something that has knocked me right off my feet this first year.
The thing is you cannot get rid of mom guilt.
Unless you are actually perfect or you just stop caring all together, mommy guilt is inevitable. But dealing with it IS a solution, and one that I am slowly coming around to.
Here is how I see it. There is not way that I will never raise my voice, or cry in-front of my children, or just completely lose it. There is no way I will always have the house in order, or always spend the right amount of time playing and teaching my children. I will get tired, I will have off days, I will forget things, and finally as much as I hate this one the most, at some point my children will fall and get hurt or scrap a knee or maybe even break an arm.
And as much as all these things even now as I type it up make my stomach churn, I know that how I handle the downs, the mistakes, the outbursts, the oweys, and the mess is some of the best lessons I can teach my children.
Life is not perfect for me and it will not be perfect for my kids either, if I can show my babies how to handle upset, how to pick themselves back up when they fall down, how to make amends when they make a mistake, and how to control their anger and frustration, than I am teaching them something absolutely priceless. And that is a lesson I could not teach if everything was perfect all the time!
I want my babies to be safe, smart, secure, loved – not just by me and their father but also by themselves! If I do not love myself how will they ever learn to love themselves?
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With all that said, I have decided to take the things that really nag on me and give me guilt every single day, and conquer it in a way that I do have control of. And that is prioritizing bonding time with my babies above and beyond anything else, but still allowing myself to take that me time as well.
There is a saying that goes, “You cannot take the sliver of wood out of your friends eye, if you have a log sticking out of your own”.
I remember this when I feel myself approaching the end of my rope. Mommy cannot do her best job if mommy doesn’t take care of mommy first.
Therefore I have actually schedule play time and learning time into each and everyday of the week. So I stop whatever I am doing and for those hours I sit and give my daughter my full attention. AS WELL AS when those hours are up I go ahead and let my focus go to other things I need to do for my own sanity like cleaning or working, and not allow myself to feel guilt because I have given my committed time to my daughter and now I am committing my time to my other duties. I simply cannot play with my daughter all day everyday and not go starving! I find that scheduling these time blocks helps to ease my guilt as well as makes me feel accomplished!
I know every mother is different and each and every mother will have their own beliefs and preferences. I am not one to shame another mother and her ways! But if I can give some peace of mind to one other mother out there struggling with guilt just as I have, than I will have accomplished what I set out to accomplish with this post. The guilt is real and it is not an easy thing to overcome, but I truly believe that embracing it and knowing that how you handle the hurtles that come your way will only give yourself strength, but also show your children how to have that strength too.
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