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The other day I was sitting in my room, long after my babe had gone to sleep and I could NOT stop thinking about what I had done wrong that day. It was literally consuming my mind. I was thinking about what I could’ve done differently, how me working so much is affecting my Mothering and my sweet girl and how much I sucked at being a Mom that day. Then I couldn’t help but let my mind wander to the fact that I was so tired. How was I supposed to do it all running on basically no sleep? I mean there literally are not enough hours in the day and heck, I need a friggin’ spa day.
But I can’t go get a massage because that’s time I could be spending just being a Mom, so that would make me a bad Mom.
Literally – these are real thoughts that consume my mind basically on the daily. I have the outside world giving me mixed signals — you know, you own that working Mom thing, be independent, but then I also hear, stop working so much, enjoy the now, spend every single second you can with your babe. I mean no wonder my mind is confused and I feel guilty about basically everything I do.
We have constant pressures, all day, everyday telling us one way or the other to go, what we are doing wrong and rarely what we are doing right. So here I am, hitting it head on.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
Mom guilt is stupid. There I said it. It shouldn’t even be a thing, in fact the phrase “Mom guilt” should just be banned from existence as far as I am concerned. As Moms, as women, we are hard enough on ourselves, then you get other women telling other women what to do or what they’re doing wrong and well, it just gets even worse. It’s exactly what Mean Girls says – “Looks like we’ve had some girl on girl crime”. Mom guilt stems from that, I mean where else would it have come from? It’s because of what other people have said is wrong, so it’s in our brain and well — who is to say it’s actually wrong? This guilt we feel as Mothers would NOT even be a thing if it wasn’t for every little thing that’s posted on social media, in the news, around our community, in churches, wherever that is telling us one way or another to do things.
So kiss it goodbye. Set your own rules, your own “what works for you” and make that happen and DON’T feel bad about it.
If you need five minutes to yourself, just take it without overthinking it. I’ll be real with you for a minute, five minutes of clearing my head makes me a way better Mother than the moments before when I felt like I was going to pull all my hair out. If you work — own that crap. If you stay home — own it too. You do what you have to do with your circumstances and guess what, we choose the way that we respond to it.
So just choose to be positive and choose to not let guilt get in your way of doing the very best you can. That’s what we’re all doing anyways — the very best that we can and at the end of the day, that’s what matters. That’s what our little ones see, they see us trying, they see us loving them harder than anyone else and they see our kindness and our attempt to doing our best.
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