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I am going to be completely open and honest with you.
I am going to throw caution to the wind and trust that I am (for the most part) among friends here and I won't feel judged for what I am going to share with you...
Sometimes I think being a mum is one of the toughest most confidence destroying things I have ever done in my life to date.
Some days... quite frankly...
being a mum can suck!
There.
I said it.
I said it and the sky didn't fall in and the planets didn't collide and there are no mother's groups throwing rotten eggs at my window... yet.
I simply said how I am feeling right now.
I didn't feel like this when I woke up yesterday morning and I probably won't feel like it tomorrow, but right
now... in this very moment... it is what it is and I am speaking my truth.
In a world where far too often - perfection ranks higher than sanity on the want list, is it any wonder we sometimes find ourselves feeling alone and drowning in what we perceive to be our own inadequacies?
I for one had my vision of what being a parent looked like looooong before puberty hit.
I watched enough episodes of The Brady Bunch and Seventh Heaven to know that the love a mum or a dad has for their child is enough to conquer
anything, and that children misbehave sometimes and parents make mistakes, but
all can be resolved with a glass of milk, a freshly baked cookie and a cuddle by the fire.
I
knew that a perfectly kept home means perfectly behaved children, a home cooked meal eaten at a shared table would ensure laughter and a closeness that would carry you through the tough times and that if you insisted your children brushed their teeth with Colgate fluoride twice a day they would live to be 100
with perfect teeth.
In cased you missed the sarcasm dripping from my chin... I don't
really think like that.
Not
now anyway, although I hate to admit it - I kinda did once upon a time.
Last night, two of my kids broke me.
They argued with each other and they fought over the most ridiculous things to the point that one of them was so angry with his brother he
accidentally kicked a hole in his bedroom wall. Please note - I say
'accidentally' VERY loosely because I still can't quite get my head around HOW you accidentally put your foot through a wall.
Anyway... they literally broke me and reduced me to a blubbering mess.
Big heavy heaving hide in my wardrobe kind of tears.
To say
this is
not exactly the image I had when my pee on a stick turned up positive - would be the understatement of the century.
This is not how the previews played out in my head when I lovingly rubbed my first swollen belly.
This sobbing wreck of a mother who can't figure out why her children insist on fighting each other and yet would take on the world to protect each other?
Why getting one of her kids to do his homework is damn near impossible when plenty of other people I know have kids who happily sit down to complete it without even being asked?
Why one child is wound so tight with anxiety and frustration whilst another lives without a care in the world?
Everywhere I look, perfection plays out in front of me. Smiling families in magazines, perfectly behaved kids on TV commercials and cute little people doing cute little things in my feed on instagram.
Am I feeling inferior?
Duhhh yeah!
Whilst externally I laugh and make jokes about my many epic parenting fails, inside it stings because God Damn it... WHAT AM I DOING WRONG???
Why does
my picture not look as perfect as all the ones I see elsewhere?
BECAUSE THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PERFECT WHEN IT COMES TO BEING A MUM!
I need to remind myself that we (me totally included in that we)
usually only ever put the good stuff on show. I mean come on - why would we want to share our dirty laundry with the world? Who in their right mind would write a blog post about their kid putting their foot through a wall?
wait...
ummmm...
Look, today is a bad day, and for every bad day that I feel like a big fat failure of a parent, there are heartwarming days where dare I say it... I get things right.
By the time this post is published, I have no doubt the tears have been forgotten and the kids have returned to their normal acceptable selves and we are all bouncing about as happy as a pup with two tails again.
But the thing is, I am sharing because I want it to be known that not every day is instagram worthy. Not every day is sunshine and lollipops, and if reading about my crappier than thou day makes just one person feel better about
their crappier than thou day then yay, job done!
On any given day I generally teeter somewhere between breezing through a 24 hour period with no hiccups, punch ups or injuries or... tipping over to the other end of the scale and completely losing my shit when everything goes wrong.
When things are good I go to bed at night with a smile on my face and a quiet confidence that tells me "You've got this"... but then other days I berate myself for stuffing everything up and I start wishing I could go back to the beginning and start all over again.
But... then I beat myself up with guilt knowing that there are others who have not yet been blessed with the gift of being a mum... or worse yet, have loved and lost and would give their life to do it all over again... just knowing that they would happily take all of the bad if it meant just one more day KILLS me.
And so the guilt (more often than not) stops me from sharing how I feel.
I don't want to upset anyone who is doing it tougher than I by complaining about my less than perfectly behaved kids, nor do I want to brag on a good day and make someone who is having their crap day feel worse than they already do.
And so generally I just waft along doing my thing, quietly glowing in the highs and sobbing to myself through the lows.
But motherhood is not one dimensional.
There is no right or wrong way to feel about it.
There is good and there is bad, there are wins and defeats, gains and losses and there are layers upon layers upon layers.
Perfection does not exist when it comes to being a parent. Those TV shows
are all lies.
I guess it is all we can do to avoid perpetuating the perfection by being honest with each other about how we feel from day to day. I kid you not - when someone tells me their parenting day sucks - I WANT TO HUG THEM and not just because I feel sorry for them but because I want to say THANK YOU! Thank you for making me feel normal!
Sharing a bad day or talking about the lows does not mean that we are ungrateful for the opportunity to be a mum. Nor does celebrating the successes make us boastful twats.
There are many layers when it comes to motherhood, and just like trifle and many other great things in life, it is highly likely you are going to love some of the layers more than the others... and that's OK you know...
That's OK.
How are you doing?
Any parenting highs or lows you feel like sharing with us?