Are you making your life harder than it has to be? Are you trying to live up to some perfect ideal mother image that no one, in the history of the world has been able to maintain? Some women make it look like they have the world at their feet, their kids are never bratty, their house is never messy, their hair is always perfect and they bake for the neighborhood. It’s a farce, no one is perfect all the time.
As a single mother I was determined to be everything to Hailey. I would be the best mom, so good that it wouldn’t matter that her dad wasn’t around. I would be her dad, I would fix things, and throw a softball and mow the yard. I would be her provider and protector. That wasn’t enough though, I wanted to be able to do it all while wearing heels, pearls and a smile with perfectly done hair holding a plate of homemade brownies.
Who can live with that kind of pressure? I was constantly letting myself down, I made brownies out a of box, my hair was in a pony tail and when company dropped by the dishes were shoved in the oven.
I wanted everyone to see that I had it all together, this single mom thing was a piece of cake. Plenty of people offered to help, but no, that would be admitting I couldn’t do it all, so instead I ran until I was ragged and still fell short of my goal of perfection.
Moms of the world, give it up! We are not perfect, we will mess up, sometimes we will yell, the dishes won’t always be done, the laundry will pile up and our kid may be the bratty one on the playground today.
It’s OK, stop being so hard on yourself. The worst part about being so hard on ourselves is all the negative self talk we do when we fall short of the perfection goal we’ve set for ourselves. Would you talk to your children that way? Would you criticize them every time they didn’t achieve perfection? Of course not so don’t let them see you doing it to yourself.
One of the most important things we can teach our children is that no one is perfect, as long as you do your very best then you have done all you can. In order to teach that to our children, first we have to learn it ourselves.