I have come a long way in motherhood compared to my early years. Early on, I was overwhelmed with work, laundry, trying to be a perfect Pinterest mom (that so many others seemed to be) and I felt like I was failing miserably. Cooking was one of my most dreaded tasks, I was drowning in laundry, all the little everyday messes were driving me insane and I was so busy looking at the “greener grass” to realize I could make my own yard pretty nice if I would focus on it instead of trying to keep up with everyone else.
Now, when I look at how far I have come, I am proud of the mom and wife I am.
I think in the early years of motherhood I was still trying to find who I was, but now I am finally comfortable just being me. I am still not super fond of cooking and I would much rather bake. My laundry is perpetually dirty, but with six of us in the house all it takes is finishing a load of laundry, then everyone takes showers and I have another load to do. So I know what you are thinking: if so much seems to be the same, how exactly is it better? Well, the answer is kind of simple: I found myself. Somewhere between getting married, having four babies and making a life, I finally found myself.
Yes, it took losing myself in those crazy years to finally figure out who I really was.
In middle school, I was busy finding where I fit in (news flash: I never figured it out). In high school, I was busy figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. And college was spent trying to figure out how life was supposed to go. Then I got married and we had kids; somewhere along the way, instead of finding myself, I was just trying to make myself fit into a mold I had made for myself. Then, I finally stopped trying to be what I thought I should be and instead started to become who I really was all along.
So who am I?
Well, I am a planner that always has good intentions, but usually ends up procrastinating for part of my grand plans, and then panics and rushes to make things happen, but I get it done.
I am the mom that makes 90% of everything we eat from scratch, but I also value my sanity and know that getting up at 5am to fix five different breakfasts isn’t going to happen, so I make large batches of muffins, biscuits, pancakes, and breakfast casseroles then freeze them so my family can have fresh home cooked breakfast every day without it being too time consuming daily on me. It’s a win-win in my book.
I have found ways to organize the chaos so that the daily messes that used to drive me insane, are now simple clean up jobs that the kids can do on their own when they are done with their activity.
I make lists. Lots of lists. We write out a weekly menu for the kids’ lunches and family dinner so that way I don’t have to think of a meal off the top of my head (remember, cooking isn’t my most favorite thing to do). This makes meal planning much easier on me and we get variety in.
I leaned into my quirks instead of shying away from them. I figured out my brain works differently than other peoples’ and I made it work for me, but most importantly, I quit trying to hide who I really was and instead I embraced it.
