Welcome to Mom Motivation Mondays where weekly contributing writers share their motherhood experiences to encourage you to find the joy in being a mom.
{This week: Post by Heather}
Being a mom is serious business.
You’ve not only given your little ones life, but you are now in charge of taking care of their every need at every moment. From the second they place that innocent and helpless newborn in your arms in the hospital to watching them drive away for their first year of college to the years after where you continue to give out advice amid life’s biggest decisions, you are the one they depend on.
The gravity of this hit me after I took my oldest home from the hospital. After staying for 4 days in the very capable hands of the hospital staff they helped me pack up my things and wheeled me to our car. The gentlemen who wheeled me out checked inside to make sure our carseat was properly installed and then vanished back inside the hospital.
I could barely believe they were just letting us go. We were simply allowed to take this brand new, tiny life home with us and raise it however we saw fit.
In those few first weeks I remember thinking so many jumbled thoughts as I fought through the exhaustion of having a screaming and fiesty newborn.
Who entrusted me to take this little one home?
I don’t know anything about taking care of children, let alone a tiny infant that can do nothing for herself.
Don’t they know this is another person’s life?
I was slightly terrified, to say the least.
But then something magical happened, and I slowly started to find my footing as a mom. I read, asked other moms and figured out a lot by trial and error.
But the importance of my job as a mother was never lost on me.
I knew I wanted my child to grow up to be someone that had more good qualities than bad, who others could depend on, who understood the difference between right and wrong, and who had good morals.
Basically, I didn’t want my child to grow up into an entitled and self-serving adult, and I took that seriously, too seriously.
And as I found myself frequently alone, due to my husband’s long work hours and deployments, I took the reigns in raising our first daughter. And the serious business of motherhood became more than what I thought I was to do, it became my way of life.
In some ways, I felt like I had to overcompensate for the fact that my husband wasn’t around…
I was strict.
I was always rationale.
I was focused and driven.
I had to be.
There was only one of me.
I felt this tremendous weight on my shoulders that if my daughter didn’t turn out like the picture in my head then I would ultimately be responsible. I mean who else would I blame? It was just me and her about 95% of the time. The person she became was almost entirely my responsiblity.
It’s a lot, am I right?
I had my second daughter, and seeing as my first daughter was so well behaved I continued on with the serious business of motherhood. I continued taking my job, this most important, once-in-a-lifetime job, as serious as if I were the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And I’m sure you’ve heard how happy those guys typically are.
I’ve been a mom for 8 years and in that time I’ve struggled, I’ve messed up, I’ve made good decisions as well as bad, I’ve yelled, I’ve whispered, I’ve apologized, I’ve laughed and I’ve cried. I’ve also realized a lot about motherhood along the way.
I’ve come to realize that for moms like me when you’re taking motherhood as serious as I was you lose a lot of the joy that comes with it.
When you’re constantly worried about the future and how your kids are going to turn out you’re missing out on the present.
When you’re trying to plan out every moment of motherhood you miss out on the spontaneous moments that make up some of the best memories you’ve ever had.
If you’re too focused on what could go wrong you lose out on all that’s going right.
I’ve found in the last year that the serious business of motherhood can swallow you up if you let it. Being a mom is hard work with tough decisions-decisions that you make to the best of your ability without knowing if they will always turn out the way you expected.
I’ve grown a lot as a mom in the last few years. I’ve learned the importance of self-reflection and taking steps to change things you don’t necessarily like or that don’t work for the life you want to lead.
Motherhood is serious business, but it’s also a business with overwhelming amounts of joy, happiness and love.
And it’s up to us which one we let take control.
Do you focus too much on the serious side of motherhood, or do you feel that you have a balanced approach to being a mom?
Heather lives in Florida with her husband, two girls and two pups. She is a lover of most things in life, too many to name here without scaring you, but a few include working out, learning new recipes, Pinterest, organizing (yes, it’s true!), home decor and learning to lead a more minimal and purposeful life.
She started Just Becoming Me as a venture to better understand herself and what will lead her towards a more fulfilling life. Her motto is: “We only have one life, and I want to learn to live mine in a way that gets me excited to jump out of bed.”
