I am a perfect mom. It’s true. It may shock and even disgust some of you that I would dare make such a claim, but it’s true. Read on and I will share with you how I do it.

It’s quite simple actually. It doesn’t require your home to be tidy or children to be bathed. You don’t have to be a certain size or weight. You don’t even have to be showered or wearing a bra. Heaven knows I’m not 80% of the time. I have a four week old baby and a two year old. . .those things dropped off my priority list long ago.

I am a perfect mom because I care. I am a perfect mom because I am trying and I give my 100% everyday. Somedays my 100% looks like this: It’s 7 pm and I’m still in my pjs. I haven’t fed my two year old anything more than milk and goldfish all day long, he’s watching his 8th (or sometimes 15th) episode of Curious George and I’m literally “airing out” my cracked and bleeding nipples by recommendation of my lactation consultant. Oh, and I’m crying because I’m so so tired and everything feels incredibly and impossibly hard right now. It doesn’t sound pretty, does it? Well, it’s not. In fact, it straight up sucks some days but, even still, I’m a perfect mom. Why? Because, even on days like this, I’m still giving it my 100% and that is enough.

My 100% will always look different than someone else’s 100% and so will yours. AND THAT’S OKAY. Somedays, I’m a freaking rockstar! I put on a bra before noon and my kid actually eats some vegetables. Regardless of what kind of day I’m having though, I’m still a perfect mom.

Guess what?!? You’re a perfect mom too! Don’t believe me? Well, are you trying? Are you doing your absolute best right now to love and provide for your children? Are you giving your 100%, whatever that looks like? I know you are! So, you too, are a perfect mom.

Some of us make the mistake of thinking that we have to be a perfect human in order to be a perfect mom. Flawless body, spotless home, perfectly behaved children, etc. Well, that’s a lie and you don’t have to believe it anymore. In fact, stop believing it! You don’t have to be a perfect human in order to be a perfect mom. You just have to be doing your best and own it. It’s as simple as that. You already are a perfect mom, all you have to do now is believe it.

I have a perfect life. No, really I do. I am honestly and truly married to the best man on earth who treats me like a queen, I have two beautiful healthy children, we are financially secure, and there are no crisis’ going on in my life right now, big or small. Isn’t that wonderful?? It is! But this perfect, beautiful life of mine used to terrify me. Crazy, right?!? My life was just too good. . .too good last. Something terrible was right around the corner, I just knew it! Something tragic and life altering was going to happen any day now and my perfect world was going to come crashing down around me.

Have you experienced moments like these? Where everything in your life is going so perfectly that your chest suddenly swells up with the fear of “what must be coming”? Or maybe you’ve found yourself staring at your sleeping child in wonderment and love and in an instant that joy was ripped from your chest and replaced with an overwhelming fear of a long list of unbearable tragedies could take them away from you. That, my friend, is called foreboding joy and it is robbing you. Foreboding joy is when you don’t allow yourself to fully enjoy the good moments in fear of what bad thing could happen to take it all away from you in an instant. And I used to be a pro at it. It was a defense mechanism for me. Anytime I was experiencing a beautiful heart-swelling moment, I was quick to catch myself. It was like I was trying to keep myself in check, slapping myself on the wrist for letting my guard down. It sounds crazy, but I thought that if I truly felt overwhelmed with joy in those moments, I was inviting something terrible to happen. I was tempting fate. So instead, I imagined every worse possible scenario. As Brene Brown puts it, I was “trying to beat vulnerability to the punch. We don’t want to be blindsided by hurt. We don’t want to be caught off-guard, so we literally practice being devastated or never move from self-elected disappointment.” I was so sure that if I was expecting it, then somehow that terrible tragedy I had imagined, would be more bearable.

I can tell you from personal experience that foreboding joy doesn’t work. It doesn’t help soften the blow or make it any easier when that terrible event you “prepared” yourself for actually happens. In just 2 days, it will have been a year since I found out about my ectopic pregnancy. And it was incredibly hard. It was crushing. So much more so than I ever could have rehearsed in my mind. And trust me, rehearse I did. I was only about 7 weeks along but that gave me plenty of time to 1) stop myself from getting too excited about my pregnancy before I was out of the danger zone aka the first trimester and 2) to imagine how hard and devastating it would be if I did lose the baby. I was foreboding joy. When my worst fears became a reality, not for a second did it feel easier, nor did I thank myself or feel like I had saved myself any amount of pain because “I was expecting it”. It still hurt. It was still an unbearable feeling of loss and sadness. It wasn’t easier. It didn’t feel more bearable in the least. In fact, it just robbed me of the joy I could have had in the few short weeks I did have with my baby. And that’s what foreboding joy does! It robs you of the joy in the good moments with a false sense security that it will make it easier when tragedy does strike. That’s not how it works. In fact, we need to let ourselves fully enjoy those moments because it’s that joy that helps carry us through the hard times when they do hit.

Those of you who did the opportunity assignment from my Ordinary Does Not Equal Meaningless post, did you find yourself foreboding joy? You are not alone, in fact you are far from! In “Daring Greatly”, Brene Brown shares that 80% of all parents she has interviewed have experienced the same thing. So, what do we do about it? The best way to combat foreboding joy is to practice gratitude! Brown specifically uses the word “practice” because actively showing gratitude is much more powerful than having an “attitude of gratitude”. I make an effort to practice gratitude in two different ways.

The first is by having a gratitude journal. This week, make a special effort to take just a few minutes each day and write down five things you’re grateful for. You can go out and buy a special gratitude journal if you want or just write it on a sticky note, it doesn’t matter. What makes the difference is if you actually do it or not 😉  This is a super simple technique that has helped me a lot. I found that, as I was doing this, throughout my day I was constantly on the lookout for things I could write in my gratitude journal. Your brain finds what you tell it to go looking for. If you’re looking for the bad or the negative in your life, it will find just that. If you’re looking for things to be grateful for, it will find them. So you decide. What do you want to focus on? What do you want to find? I want to find joy so I practice gratitude.

The second way I practice gratitude is to make an effort to replace my fear with gratitude. When I find myself foreboding joy, I do three things. First, I stop myself by saying in my head, “No. This is not helping” and literally stopping that train of thought. I just don’t let it go on. I then recall the joy and love I was feeling and let it sweep over me once again and this time, I don’t let my fear stop it. Finally, as I let myself soak up and enjoy that wonderful moment I practice gratitude. I say in my head or out loud, what it is exactly that I am grateful for in that moment. Whether it be my warm cozy home that provides a safe haven for my family or my two year old doing his best to sing twinkle twinkle little star with me as I’m putting him to bed. I let myself just soak it up. This takes some practice, so don’t feel like you’re doing it wrong if it’s not super easy to switch from the place of fear to a place of gratitude. Keep at it though. The joy I feel on a daily basis has grown so much now that I practice gratitude and have learned how to better control my fear instead of letting it control me.

I am by no means perfect or all knowing in this subject nor am I happy go lucky all of the time now but doing these things has most definitely helped me find more joy in my life. I hope it does the same for you 🙂

Much Love,

Robyn

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Today was a great day! Though to be quite honest, it didn’t start out all that great. I now have a 4 day old baby girl that I love so much it often overwhelms me. Well, apparently this little girl loves me just as much because last night she did not want to sleep unless she was being held. Come 2 a.m., I gave in and just got her out of her bassinet. My master plan was to use my boba wrap to strap her to me so I could fall asleep holding her without dropping her and FINALLY get some much needed rest. After spending a good 15-20 minutes trying to figure out how to put the stupid thing on, Navy (my baby girl) decided she was ravenous and had to eat NOW. I finally had the boba wrap on and there was no way I was taking it off and starting on square one so I just left it on and worked my way around it to feed her. In the process of changing her diaper afterwards, my night took a definite unwanted and unexpected turn for the worst. At this point it was 3 a.m. and I made three very big mistakes. One, I changed her on my chair with no changing pad, two I was sitting on the footrest right in the potential line of fire and three, I didn’t put a fresh diaper on her IMMEDIATELY after removing the soiled one. I’m a mother of two now, I should know better.

After removing the soiled diaper I turned to grab a fresh diaper and I heard a toot. I only had the hallway light on so it was fairly dark so I leaned in close, praying it was just a fart. At about the same moment I sighed in relief, straight liquid came shooting projectile out of my sweet baby girl. It shot out at least a foot and I was right in the line of fire. It got in my hair, all over my chest, and was quite literally dripping down my arm and my leg. Momma reflexes kicked in (2 seconds later than I would’ve hoped) and I grabbed the clean diaper and kind of just shoved it over the firing hole as my own personal shield. Needless to say, poop was everywhere. All over me, all over my chair, all over Navy, and worst of all, all over my one and only hope of getting any sleep that night. . .My boba wrap. As I went over to grab the diaper wipes, a quote by Marjorie Hinkley popped into my head: “You either have to laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh. Crying gives me a headache.” So, much to my surprise, I laughed. I really wanted to cry but I laughed instead.

As I was in the shower, literally scrubbing my daughters feces out of my hair at four in the morning, I was racking my brain trying to figure out what has made the biggest difference in my ability laugh instead of cry. I REALLY felt like crying! I had every reason in the world to cry and break down. But I chose to laugh. I wasn’t happy by any means, don’t get me wrong. I don’t need anyone to think I enjoyed that experience. But it didn’t break me. It didn’t ruin the whole rest of my day.

Not too long ago, I read a book by Brene Brown titled “The Gifts of Imperfection”. In it she says, “We seem to measure the value of peoples contributions (and sometimes their entire lives) by their level of public recognition. In other words, worth is measured by fame and fortune. Our culture is quick to dismiss quite, ordinary, hardworking men and women. In many instances, we equate ordinary with boring or, even more dangerous, ordinary has become synonymous with meaningless.”

This really struck home for me. It helped me make sense of my “fear” of being just a stay at home mom. I didn’t want my life to be meaningless and unimportant so I felt like I had to reach outside of the home and do something more! We all know there is little to no public recognition, fame or fortune in being a stay at home mom. In fact, I feel like being a stay at home mom is the perfect description of “quite, ordinary, hardworking”. And that was always scary to me. It was scary to me because I had accepted that an ordinary life was a meaningless one as truth. But that is so far from the truth.

Ordinary DOES NOT equal meaningless. Say it with me now: ORDINARY DOES NOT EQUAL MEANINGLESS. Being a mother is chuck full of incredibly ordinary moments! And that’s what I used to find so discouraging. Every day was just like the last. But once I was able to change my definition of ordinary, that all changed. I started to look at the “ordinary” moments differently.

Brown says, “I think I learned the most about the value of ordinary from interviewing men and women who have experienced tremendous loss such as the loss of a child, violence, genocide, and trauma. The memories that they held most sacred were the ordinary, everyday moments. It was clear that their most precious memories were forged from a collection of ordinary moments, and their hope for others is that they would stop long enough to be grateful for those moments and the joy they bring.” And that’s exactly what I’ve done and the results have been amazing. I want to invite you to do the same. “Stop long enough to be grateful for those moments and the joy they bring.” Doing this alone has helped me immensely in finding more joy in every ordinary day as a mother. It’s a big part of why I was able to stay calm and not lose it at 4 this morning despite being covered in a little persons feces and not having had any sleep yet that night.

I like to think of this like it’s filling my “mommy tank”. You guys have heard of Steven Coveys emotional bank account, yes? Or some people know it as keeping the love tank full. Same idea. You are constantly making deposits (good/positive emotions) and withdrawals (bad/negative emotions). If you’re making more withdrawals than deposits then you will have more negative experiences and vice versa.

As I go throughout my beautiful, ordinary days I am constantly on the look out for ordinary moments that bring joy to add to my mommy tank. For example, last night I was gently putting my sweet 4 day old baby in her bassinet and after doing so, I gently slipped her beanie on her tiny little head and just stared at her in wonder. As I did this, I made a conscious effort to stop and be grateful and soak up the joy of that ordinary moment. I let my heart soar over that one simple thing! It was not extraordinary by anyone’s definition but it doesn’t have to to be extraordinary to be meaningful.

I am constantly making deposits (finding joy in ordinary moments) so that when a withdrawal happens (temper tantrum, blowout, etc), my mommy tank doesn’t go into overdraft mode and I lose it. As I do this throughout my day, my “mommy tank” stays full and it makes the unavoidable hard parts or withdrawals of being a mom doable. They don’t turn your world upside down anymore or completely unravel you because when the hard parts come up, you’re mommy tank is already overflowing with all of the wonderful moments you’ve captured throughout the day. You’re mommy tank can afford to make a “withdrawal” when your kids are less than perfect. But you have to make a conscious effort to keep filling it! It’s not going to fill on it’s own. You have to be on the lookout and when you do recognize those moments, let your heart overflow with gratitude and joy.

So, here’s your opportunity assignment: Find gratitude and joy in at least 5 ordinary moments everyday for the next week! This should be easy because remember, our days are chuck full of ordinary 🙂 You’ll be surprised at how quickly things begin to change if you’re diligent with this! Please feel free share your experiences, I’d love to hear how this works out for you and what you guys think! 🙂

Much Love,

Robyn

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It has always been my dream to be a stay at home mom and from the day my first was born I was blessed enough to do just that.

I’ve now been a stay at home mom for just over two years and I love it! People always say being a parent is the hardest and most rewarding thing you will ever do and they’re absolutely right.

What I’ve never heard anyone admit to (and I know I can’t be the only one) is that it can also be the most mundane, nothing to look forward to on a day to day basis, thankless thing you will ever do.

It gets hard to look forward to each new day when every day feels just like the last, minus a blow out or two.

And it’s hard!

It’s really hard to feel enthusiastic and excited about the next twenty years when you already know exactly what they look like: feed, clean, feed, clean, bathe, feed, clean, put in bed, put back in bed, put back in bed, put back in bed. . .

I’ve only been doing this for two years and there are a lot of days I feel burnt out by 10 am and am literally counting down the hours till nap time, today being one of them.

It’s incredibly discouraging!

I want SO badly to love every second of being a stay at home mom, heck even every other second would be great! But I don’t.

Well, as I’m sure you can imagine, I found myself not feeling super fulfilled with mom life.

Anyone else been here?

I felt like what I was doing wasn’t enough. I wasn’t contributing enough to society, I wasn’t contributing enough to my family.

Yes, the laundry was getting done and the fridge was stocked with food but there was more I could be giving!

But what??

There had to be more. Please oh please, there had to be more.

I started exploring the other hobbies I could try out on the side, and heck, extra bonus if I could even make a little money doing it. All from home of course, because I didn’t want it to take away from my time as a stay at home mom. . .Logic my friends!

Let’s see. . I could do photography. . .except I’m terrible at it. What about crafting? I enjoy that. A distributor of sorts, maybe?

So, I started on this journey. Let’s call it my “I’m a stay at home mom and a _________” journey.

My new goal was to fill in that blank!

This journey took place over a period of about six months and it was incredibly discouraging. I was so sure there was something else I was supposed to be doing to contribute to the world but I couldn’t find my niche. Nothing was coming.

After months of searching, pondering and praying I was given my answer through two incredibly simple questions:

Why do I feel like I’m not enough as “just” a stay at home mom?

Why does there have to be more?

These questions made me, for the first time in months, turn my intense search from looking for something bigger and better out there to looking for something bigger and better in myself.

I hadn’t even realized it but these little minions, these negative voices in my head had me convinced that being a stay at home mom wasn’t good enough. The adversary had me convinced that motherhood wasn’t worthy of me.

That motherhood wasn’t worth dumping all of my heart, all of my soul and all of my efforts into. I have been taught and I honestly and truly believe that the work you do within the walls of your own home is the most important work you will ever do.

I know this, I’ve always known this. It’s just so freaking hard to remember when you’re picking squished grapes out of your carpet for the third time that day and watching Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas for the 20th time.

Literally.

So, even after having this wonderful ah ha moment, there still begged the question: how do I find love being a mother as much as I want to then? How do I find more joy in motherhood?

I want to wake up excited about each new day even if it is does look exactly the same as yesterday and the next 7,300 days.

I want to love everyone of them.

So my new journey began, my journey to find as much joy in motherhood as I could. I’ve learned a lot already and I want to share with you what I’m learning as I’m learning it. The simple changes I’ve made in just the last few months have made a huge difference already and I’m excited to share with you and I hope they can help you as much as they’ve helped me. Thanks for reading and be sure to check out my next post, Ordinary Does Not Equal Meaningless! Love you all and here’s to empowering mothers everywhere!!

Much Love,

Robyn