A few weeks ago, I was watching Moms Night Out and in the beginning she spends a good 10 minutes talking about how awful of a mom she thinks she is. Meanwhile her kids are happy, she looks great, and her house is clean. So I think to myself, most moms I know are like this, they are in competition with themselves, myself included. We have healthy kids, clean (or at least decent looking) homes, and manage to look pretty cute but that worry seems to always be there. Am I a good mom? Am I doing a good job?Are the kids going to make it?
I know that I do it myself sometimes, by which I mean often, but why? My kids are happy. I am happily married, most days. Everyone is good and growing, way faster than what I want. So why am I so hard on myself? My kids laugh most of the day, excel in their school work, and grow like weeds! Something must be wrong, right? And what is crazy is that I am not the only mom that does this.
I love watching old movies and those moms always seemed to be put together. Like Donna Reed or my fave Harriet Osborne. Fast forward 60 years and now we helicopter parent, make every excuse to not discipline, we post about how we aren’t sure of which parenting method is best. We fight each other on working or staying home, breast feeding, organic vs non, etc. We have become so hard on ourselves and each other that we don’t even have enough time left to be proud of ourselves and the things that we accomplish daily. And when I look around on Instagram or even at the women that surround me, moms are doing pretty awesome things. Juggling so much and still managing to make it look easy.
Women, PLEASE STOP putting yourselves down. You are all doing so super awesome in our own ways. And we should all be learning from each other instead of comparing or judging.
We need to focus more on saying wow my kids are safe and happy. My marriage is good. I have great friends. And I accomplish more than someone should in a day. I can do this and I’m petty darn good at it. Props to me!
We should support our friend who has to work so that she can feed her kids instead of telling her she is a bad mom for working. We should care enough about our kids to take responsibility when our kids misbehave or fail in school instead of trying to blame the teacher or the “parenting method”. And mostly we should give ourselves credit for all we do.
I love that I get to hug my children everyday. I love praying with them and reading the bible as a family before dinner. Instilling good values in our children is our priority. It’s important that they learn to respect others and that starts with us not making every excuse in the book to let them get away with something. We expect them to comply with rules in and out of the house and we expect them to obey always.
Being home and teaching my children is a blessing. In fact it is a dream come true! This is the life that I wanted and God blessed me with it. Now, everyday is not Instagram perfect but we do the best that we can and the majority of our time together is pretty awesome. It is a happy life! My guess is that yours is too.
We spend the day looking for things to do. We make do random science experiments. Currently I’m allowing an apple to rot on my kitchen counter, a real shock to visitors, but it’s fun to see an apple decompose just because we can. We have fun! So therefore, I should be happy and thankful and so should you. Look around and don’t focus on the messy house, find all of those wonderful hidden things your kids do that make you smile.
Guess what, my kids misbehave. And bite and hit and refuse to do things, they are just kids, learning and making mistakes as they go along. But, we don’t make excuses we teach them and redirect them. I dance with them I play with them and I give them cookies. And I feel pretty good when they smile back.
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