I had lunch with a friend yesterday and I was inspired by her message: “real G’s move in ALIGNMENT.”
It’s a message about living your purpose through your true self – your inner ‘G.’ It’s about being one with your life.
She told me to keep this mantra in mind while going about life, always checking in with yourself and asking, “Am I in alignment right now? Does this feel right for me?”
As an intuitive and sensitive person, I do love to go with the flow of my inner purpose and true self. Now, I don’t know what either of those two are, but I try to live in a way that feels right in hopes that I am, at the very least, on the right path. Needless to say, the message resonated with me and I left our lunch date feeling light.
The next day, I watched stories on SnapChat celebrating working moms everywhere. Every message rang the same:
“Leaving your child is hard, but keep pushing”
“Working moms still getting it done!”
“You can have ambitions AND have a baby”
They were all very hurrah. It expressed the power of womanhood and revealed all the amazing things women accomplish with a little bit of passion. This time, however, the words left me less than inspired.
Typically I hear these lines and feel energized. I think to myself, “Yes! My life is NOT over. I am going to work hard so I can show my son what a hard working dedicated mother I am. I will be a role model for him, so he knows that he can do ANYTHING he puts his mind to! Yay me!” I quite arrogantly place him at the center of my mission to become mom boss of the year.
My plan was simple:
- Wake up about an hour and a half before Baby, and do work for my real job.
- Shower, do my hair, and bust a dance move as I get ready for my “mom job.”
- Somehow during the day, clean the house, make vegetables, meditate during Baby’s nap, and run errands.
- In the evening, go to the gym, come home, and work for my business and/or write.
- Brush my teeth, floss, and drift off into a well deserved, proud sleep.
Through it all I vowed to drink more water and be positive.
Geeze, I’m tired just writing all that down.
Nonetheless, this was a very serious plan I drew out for myself almost every day. And because it was so ridiculous, I failed every day. And because I failed every day, I felt horrible.
Instead my days looked more like this:
- Wake up at 6am only to put Baby in bed with me, hoping he will go back to sleep so I can get ‘just five more minutes’ to snooze.
- Plead with said baby for 45 minutes to comply with the aforementioned bullet in vain, groan out of bed, and sprint around the house helping Baby do everything because he can’t do much for himself.
- Also provide live entertainment for his 3 minute attention span.
- Maybe I clean a dish or two, or maybe I just look at the dishes and shake my head in shame.
- Curse the rest of the chores for mocking me with their existence.
- Half heartedly participate in some bandaged up version of self care which usually looks like me shoveling a healthy meal down my throat, playing Toon Blast on my phone while nursing, and staying up way past my bedtime just to hear myself think.
- Rinse and repeat until I break down and cry, watch more ‘motivational’ videos, and devise the ridiculous plan again reasoning that I need to be more positive. . . or just work harder.
It’s possible (and probably likely) that I am a certified maniac, but I know I share the same sentiment many moms experience: no matter how much you do, it never feels like enough.
It’s a curious mindset for a person who has this tremendous responsibility of caring for and guiding an entire complex human being (and in some cases, multiple human beings).
So when I watched women celebrated for being something MORE than a mother, the pressure for myself to do the same felt like a nuisance, so I got angry. Motherhood is a journey that requires women to give everything to their young, so why do we have to be more? And why does more always become the holy grail? One woman went back to work, but this woman worked two jobs. That woman worked two jobs but this woman started a business. That woman started a business but this woman volunteered on weekends too! You can do anything, just put your mind to it.
Gag.
The anger wasn’t directed toward the boss moms or the media channels that promoted them. It was directed towards an idea and a purpose that is not in alignment with where I am right now. Anger was my inner G’s siren telling me to stop and turn around – this is not the way.
For the past 7 months, I’ve struggled to blend together who I was pre-motherhood and who I am now. It’s the most intense version of a familiar battle I’ve fought my entire life. Essentially, this battle is my need to move in alignment, crippled by Ideal Leah who always wants to steer me the opposite way; this ideal version only a reflection of societal expectations with an acceptable amount of rebellion . . . just to make it interesting.
After months of determining what kind of mother I want to be, I never considered that I am already everything I need to be. Sure, I can muster up a good pep talk on my bad days – telling myself that I am perfect just the way God made me, but it’s always an illusive perfect. A diamond in the rough perfect. Perfect underneath all the anxiety and stress eating.
If I can stop being this way and be some other way, then I would be just the way God made me.
But if I really am already there, stress eating and all, the challenge isn’t to become, but to return. What if the hard work is letting go?
I faced the horrifying fact that for now, I’m JUST a mom. I winced as this ugly reality reared its head, and I slowly opened my eyes to peek.
There it was
A tiny smile on a tiny face. It was a joyful, somewhat menacing smile that playfully asks for permission. It was a smile that softened me because it was wrapped in the most magnificent love I’ve ever known. The depth of that love seemed endless and it was the kind of love that made every other kind of love even sweeter. Then it hit me.
I’m just a mom and it’s right there in Baby’s eyes. I’m not a bawse, a bodybuilder, a writer, or a cog in the societal machine. I’m not young or old, good or bad, strong or weak. I’m just a mom and that’s what Baby loves most about me. We could even give it a different name – Baby wouldn’t mind – because it’s not the title or how we define that title he recognizes. He just loves me for being. How can I resist such a sweet deal? Everything else I want to be outside of me is just busy work, a way to race around in circles, too dizzy and confused to honor what’s inside. To be honest I could use a break from it all.
I always thought that if I lost myself in motherhood, I would be worthless, so it was massively important to have my own identity. I feared losing all these labels I worked so hard to collect over the years, and I think many women would agree; the loss of identity in motherhood feels devastating. Turns out, motherhood is so raw and consuming, it leaves us with nothing but ourselves anyways, but only if we allow it. It will lead us down a new path if we trust and let go, and I bet that new path is what we wished for all along.
The alternative is to resist, force a different agenda (probably the wrong one) and become frustrated, tired, unhappy and out of alignment, wondering where it all went wrong.
I want to soften and go with the flow. Truth is, I am a mother – it’s one truth I know for sure because no matter what I do I will always exist in this life as Baby’s mother. He’s young now, so everything else slows down and most things come to a complete stop. Yes, I still have goals, but I will explore the origin of these goals; did they come from unattainable expectations, or my inner G? The answer to that question will come from how attaining those goals feels on the inside. Grounded in the truth of my reality, I am facing the right way. Even the act of letting go, if only for a second, feels lighter and more clear. I guess that must be step 1.