The pressure on woman is way too much. The pressure on mum’s is deadset diabolical.
Does a mum really have 5 brains?
Are we super human stress busters?
Are we really rusty robots ready to be beamed up by scotty?
We are expected to a jacked up super hero’s wearing an extra powerful super hero cape, whilst living in a woman’s body with only one brain like everyone else in the human race but yet we have more responsibilities.
Are we really hard wired to combat this adult stuff and parenting palava?
Do we really know how to support ourselves the way society stamps us to support just about everything and everyone including the kitchen sink?
Yes, I get it we are awesome us females but sometimes what we really struggle to do is to support and show gentle love and appreciation for ourselves. We need to support ourselves more kindly and we need to support each other without judgement full stop. Judging others is addictive but society is enough its time to hang up those judgement stilettos and detox your shoe cupboard this summer.
How do we even begin to win at this parenting gig with the extra stressful daily grind stuff to boot?
It all gets a little too stressful for the woman who carry the expectations of having 5 brains inside their very busy head of 1!
Being a busy mum in this scary world sucks balls. Don’t get me wrong, we have the most ‘beautiful’ moments but we also have the most ‘brutal’ moments.
Often a mum thinks to be a successful human you need to be perfect. Perfection is impossible and is an illusion. It’s not obtainable but it has been bestowed upon us in this day and age. Not to mention, your newborn baby won’t sleep more than 3 hours a night and is teething, your toddler has tonsillitis and is so sick he has to be hospitalised and your pre teenager is getting drunk with his teenage friends at the local park causing you great hair stress whilst your husband is out playing golf and drinking cold tap beer with his mates all the while you are there at home left to tend to the ;ice of your children, tend to the home and somehow try and tend to you. The list goes on and on and on. Mental illness is on the up.
We are currently in a transition period in the universe as we speak. Our parenting styles are right in the middle of a big breakthrough. The old and the new style of parenting is all mixed up and confused in a big ball of tangled knots. This has left todays mummies very confused. The old military style with being the boss and using your hands is changing and the new more gentle parenting approach where you are the leader and teacher is evil;ving. No wonder us parents are getting stressed out and confused. Do you go left or right?
The pressure for woman is expanding on the daily but the pressure we put on our own shoulders is the problem. Often we have minimal time to think clear enough thoughts and see clear enough pictures of clarity in our OWN minds let alone try and forge a better way and make the minds of our own children happy and gentle and strive to make them perfect in our eyes.
Mindset plays a huge part. Expectations play such a role. Woman have this beautiful huggies idea of the the way parenting ‘should’ be. Me included. We get stuck in the thick and mash up of it all. We SHOULD be able to give birth the way we planned in our birthing plan and we SHOULD be able to carry out what we discussed with our midwife with full blazing execution and we SHOULD be able to breast feed for 12 months without any complication and we SHOULD be able to have a clean house all the time without any upsets from our growing family and we SHOULD be able to have our babies sleep past the wee hours of the night. We have husbands that sometimes feel like an extra child at times and we SHOULD be better wives to them and pay them more attention, then we SHOULD be better members of our extended family and we SHOULD be better friends to those we cherish and love. The word SHOULD can go eat a dick!
Our belief systems plays a huge part because what we expect our bad ass selves to achieve and what we often achieve falls short, due too NO fault of our own and that’s a hard pill to swallow. The pill often gets stuck and then manifests into shame.
We live in a ‘get your life right society’ and you better get life right or else or there you go again blaming yourself or someone else and that makes you feel even worse because blaming others is never a positive outcome.
Then you go back to your own chaotic and over committed life and look back at your disgusting and dirty house which needs to be bulldozed over rather than cleaned and then there is the kids to bath and their tantrums to deal with and the meals to cook and the mammoth leaning-tower-of-pisa pile of washing to tackle and umpteenth chores to be done and gardens to be manicured and washing to hang out and your real job to complete, not to mention social commitments to attend, because you think you SHOULD attend everything that comes your way or you will let down others and bills to pay and relationships to invest in and money issues to worry about and then there is your sex life - have you had sex with your partner at least two times this week? (because all your other friends can manage to so you SHOULD be able to get a few sessions in too) and not to mention your legs are hairy and you can plait your underarm hairs due to them growing so long in length because you don’t have timed and then you must pick up groceries to cook dinner for a growing family that never eats what you cook. All the while your kids have fed the dog lollies and painted a mural inside the house with their finger paints plus the oldest has hit both his sisters in the face more times than you care to admit. Have you checked your facebook this week in between kids tantrums and trying to say a few sentences to your other half while getting constantly interrupted. The daily grind is bloody hectic. I am sure I have exhausted you with this blog post and this girlfriend is your life.
Initially I hated myself and thought I didn’t deserve to be a parent and I was messing up my kids life. But what I found instead was me hating myself because I couldn’t find immediate solutions. I found myself feeling like a failure as a mum. Failure leads to guilt and guilt leads to shame and shame leads to no man’s land of nothingness and feeling totally stuck.
The reality was that no one else could change the way I felt about my life except me and only I could be my advocate for change.
When we have babies and toddlers in our midst we are often still attached to a picture of how we thought life SHOULD be as a parent.
I thought I would be able to handle those challenges I faced with ease. I would just find solutions to those problems, easy as 1, 2, 3. NOT SO EASY.
Finding your way in the maze of parenting is the hardest challenge us adults will face in our lifetime. The world is full of information overload. We are told too many ways and dont know which road to go down. Trusting yourself isn’t always that easy when you have had five hours sleep in one week and can’t swallow becuase your body is so run down and depleted. But yet us woman always find a way. Maybe we do have 5 brains and no one has discovered just how super human we are.
So when the word SHOULD comes into your mind tell it to go eat one and look in the mirror and say to yourself. I love you. Your beautiful.
