Yesterday I shared some of the ways in which I’m similar to and different from the mother I’d hoped I’d become and told you I’d be back today to share what I’m doing with the things I learned about from my reflection.
These are the things I’m asking myself.
1. Who cares?
So you’re different than you expected. So what? Does it really matter?
It’s a little bit of a strange question with which to start, but as I examined my list, some of the things that mattered to me at 24 just don’t matter to me anymore. I don’t have to live up to prior expectations, especially when they were based on inexperienced assumptions of how things were going to be.
There are some things (cough…housekeeping…cough) I’m okay with releasing. There are some things I need to release that are hard for me to let go of. For example, my husband frequently travels in his job, and there are weeks when we have all we can do to complete the basics. Survival is the name of the game. I sometimes find myself feeling guilty about the things I’m not doing – the playdates I’m not attending, the crafts I’m not making, the delicious meals I’m not baking – but I need to be okay letting go of expectations that are proving to be unrealistic under current circumstances. In this area, I need to remind myself that it’s okay to be a different mother than you expected to be.
2. Remember your why
Why did you want to be the mother you imagined becoming?
In looking back at the expectations I had of motherhood, I had a lot of whys. Partly, I wanted to build strong relationships with my children. I also wanted to mother in such a way that I equipped my children to be thriving, competent adults. Partly, I wanted the approval of my peers, imagining that mothering well would earn me acceptance. Partly, I admired my own mother and wanted to do things similarly. Partly, I knew my personality and knew I function best under certain conditions.
Motivations are complicated, multi-layered things, not all of them healthy. Remembering my why helps me reconnect with what’s most important to me and stay motivated, but it also helps me identify unhealthy beliefs I need to reassess and eliminate.
3. Eat the elephant
When I look at my list, I see a handful of things I’d love to change – I’d love to have a more regular schedule of creative activities with Isla. I’d love to get more housework done during the day so evenings and weekends are more relaxing. I’d love to be more spontaneous and take more trips to the park and let my kids try more classes. I could keep going, but I’m sure you get the point.
In personal growth projects, I tend to be all-or-nothing. If I can’t fix everything, I get discouraged and quit working on anything. I forget the lesson from the classic proverb:
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Motherhood doesn’t run on idealism and perfection. I’m not fixing all my deficiencies in one fell swoop. I only need to handle the next thing on the horizon with my whole heart and let each moment take care of itself.
4. Experiment
When faced with weakness or unmet expectations, I think we all have a tendency to do one of two things – either lean into them and try harder or pull away from them and avoid them. I tend toward the latter. If there’s a problem, I’d rather find a workaround than power through with sheer force. This isn’t necessarily bad; in fact, it can foster creative solutions to problems that might not otherwise be found. Sometimes, though, I just need to pony up and do the hard thing.
Perhaps you’re like me, or maybe you’re a person who, when faced with a challenge, runs yourself ragged while you work and work and work, even though you’re efforts aren’t getting much traction. Maybe looking for alternate solutions makes you uncomfortable because you prefer to follow the path you intended to follow, not wanting to face the unknown. For you, letting go might be a difficult but necessary skill to employ.
When you’re thinking about how you’d like to grow as a mother, it’s worth thinking about which side of the spectrum you tend toward. Neither is wrong and both can be useful. In fact, if you’re faced with a particularly tough area, you may experience a breakthrough if you completely alter your approach and switch sides.
Let me give a practical example. In the spring before Gabe was to start kindergarten, I had a painful later miscarriage that followed many years of infertility and left me in a grief-stricken depression. I’d wanted to spend his last summer before school started soaking him up and enjoying all sorts of fun adventures with him. Instead, I felt like I was reeling through my days, and simply staying present in the moment was often an insurmountable hurdle.
I had two choices at that point – to use my limited emotional resources to force certain behaviors of myself, or to allow myself to find a way to pull inward without missing out on Gabe. I tried to do the first, but found myself failing every day. Along the way, a friend encouraged me to make a daily plan involving one fun thing Gabe and I would do together each day. That was it – just one fun thing. It didn’t matter so much what happened the rest of the day, but committing to one fun thing would keep us positively connected without exhausting my fragile mental state.
I’m so thankful for that friend, because she gave me a meaningful work-around that carved an accessible path through difficult terrain. Sometimes, the most difficult struggles can be made easier if we take the opposite approach.
Putting It All Together
I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and be the mother who keeps an astounding house and spends all day doing arts and crafts with her little people while a giant, healthy, homecooked dinner bakes in the oven and we run off for a spontaneous adventure to the beachfront park. But I can work on one area, and right now, I’ve been working on the area of how I feed my family. I’d grown much more reliant on convenient, processed, indulgent options and realized this wasn’t who I wanted to be as a mom.
(If your food convictions are not the same as mine, please don’t feel judged. It’s all good. 
I have an awfully soft spot in my heart for food from boxes, cans, and refrigerator packs. Especially if it involves Velveeta Shells & Cheese or Doritos. Or bakery Death By Chocolate cake. Or Buitoni. So apparently processed dairy is a real weakness of mine…)
So I’ve picked that area, and I’m trying to make little changes – just a few at a time – to make a difference. I believe it’s never too late to make a change that’s important to me, and this is an expectation that actually matters to me, and I think I can be truer to myself by taking action.
This post is part of a 31-day series called 31 Days to Loving Motherhood More. You can read the other posts in the series by clicking here.
