My Wish For You, Mama

Life is full of seasons. New people, places, responsibilities, priorities, routines and jobs...you get the picture. What I’m learning as a mother is that as each of my kids grow older and enter a new stage of “humanhood”, I also transition into a new season of life. Personally, it always shakes me; it’s life altering as far as what I do day to day, dictates how I interact with my kids, and forces me to ponder my own future as the girls continue to grow. 

I am realizing now, that this is so difficult because since I became a mother, I have made it a habit of neglecting myself. This neglect is not what we usually hear about as mothers, though. I’m not talking about the lack of alone time, hair appointments, or the outdated closet (though I do believe every mama should get a chance to pay attention to those things too). I’m talking about the absolute disregard to honor myself intellectually, to remember the person I was and want(ed) to become, to give myself the freedom to dream of what I will become outside my role as a mother. I neglected to honestly and openly BE my own individual self. 

And Mama, as you’re reading this, you may feel like you’ve done the same. You’ve forgotten who you are, and maybe feel like you’ve lost a big part of who you are. You may feel like you don’t really even know who you are anymore. I know, because I feel it too. 

It is so easy to shed the things that make us us, in order to be able to fill the roles we must be able to carry out every single day. It is not optional for us to care for our families, be a wife, be an employee, etc. It’s TOO easy to just become those roles rather than being ourselves while carrying out those responsibilities. 

My wish for you, though, Mama...is that you work ever so hard to remember yourself. My hope for you is that you are true to yourself, even if a big part of you is not “typically” what society wants to see in a mother. I want for you, the peace that will come with being able to honor aspects of yourself that used to be so important, but fell to the side when a little human became your everything. 

I want you to start knowing the real you again. And I absolutely, positively can’t wait to meet that person.