Ok. I can’t take the mom guilt anymore. You need to know this.
The other day is was checking in with my friend who is 2 weeks postpartum, and she just kept sounding like she felt like she sucked at this whole mom thing. She doesn’t. She has a beautiful healthy baby. She is giving him so much love, has help from her wonderful family, has all of his best needs in the forefront of her mind, and she’s still running her business. While on a “maternity leave” that basically just means she is working from home.
The pressure is out of control.
She isn’t the first one of my mom friends to say to me, “I’m just not a super mom.” And it never ends there. They always follow it up with “so and so might be a super mom, but I can’t do it.” Memo. You created a human, you are already a super mom. That shit is hard. And for the record, no one has all of their shit together all of the time. We all cry. We all hide in the bathroom for an extra minute or two. We all deeply rely on our mom friends. We contemplate wine around 9am. We all text each other saying “I might die if I don’t get some sleep.” We all sit there looking at our husbands thinking about how he will never understand what it feels like to nurse all night long. Or not be able to nurse. We worry about every ingredient for months and then just hand the kid a cup of Cheerios. And we all feel the guilt of having wonderful lives, and still feeling like we aren’t doing enough.
We never feel grateful enough. We never feel like we are this enough. Or that enough. We all wonder if we should throw our phones away, and just stare at the baby all the time. We all wonder if it’s kosher to take a picture during mommy & me class or if that’s not ‘in the moment’ enough. We all wonder if formula is better for our situation or if we will have to breastfeed until they go to college. And we all think they might die at any given second. We all snapchat our babies with puppy filters. We are all just trying to make it through any given day. And we all wonder how other women do it. Especially our moms. How did our moms do it?! Or the women in the wild west?! I mean, HOW?!
I will tell you what I told her. When it comes to something like nursing. Or sleep training. Or anything. We have to ask our parents what they did. “Hey Mom, did you nurse me? How long? Was I sleep trained?” Why do we have to ask? Because we don’t remember. You know what we remember? Feeling loved. Feeling safe.
So, instead of beating yourself up on whatever topic the tens of thousands of mom groups on Facebook are panicking about that day, CHILL OUT. Turn on some 90’s music and teach your kid who the Hansons are. Because THAT is what they will remember. I don’t remember being formula fed. I remember Billy Joel lyrics.
Do whatever you need to do to give yourself the happiest and healthiest situation for everyone involved.
You are doing an awesome job.
You are super mom, and I love you.
**This is as much for me to read to myself as it is for all of my friends, whether we have met yet or not.
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