How to Find Your Way as a Stay at Home Mom (A Series)
Mom life did not turn out to be the blissful picture of reality that I imagined. In all honesty, I have fought and struggled to be at peace with my stay at home mom life. There are times I think I need to just get a job already. But there’s another part of me that really wants to make this work. Slowly, I’m beginning to learning to find my way as a stay at home mom. Here’s how.
Letting Go of a Pinterest Perfect Mom Life
I have an image of what I believe a good mom should look like. And Pinterest certainly hasn’t helped. This mom naturally enjoys the stay at home lifestyle. She loves the slower pace. This perfect mom cuddles and touches her baby for hours. She is patient and crafty. Science experiments and paintings line the walls of her home from countless hours of these activities with her children. Somehow she knows just how to keep those activities from becoming too messy.
As much as I want to, I cannot live up to this ideal. Honestly, I don’t want to. I enjoy a faster, task-oriented pace of life. Being the highly sensitive person that I am, I don’t like to be touched too much. I like a neat and clean environment and feel rather anxious about paint getting on my hands, let alone all over the floor. And while I have given crafts and science projects a try, I usually end up yelling, frustrated, and then exhausted.
Obviously, my reality is not lining up with my ideal image of a mother. So I have begun experimenting and playing to find out who I am as a stay at home mom. Let me tell you, this process is slow, sometimes boring and often frustrating. But gradually my way is emerging.
How to Find Your Way
Since my way probably won’t be your way, this series is not intended to be prescriptive. In the following posts, I describe some principles I am learning that have helped me find my way in embracing my stay at home mom life. I hope they will help you embrace your mom life too. I’ll share processes and principles I’ve discovered and expose some of the roadblocks I stumbled over as well.
The next few posts explore how I:
- owned my story and learned to accept my mom life
- learned to listen to my own voice
- got over unhealthy, false “mom” guilt
- found meaningful and life-giving activities
- found grace-giving mom groups
- created my own unique daily rhythms
I hope that by sharing what I have learned along my journey, you may find inspiration and courage to discover your way as a stay at home mom. What ideals and expectations of motherhood do you need to let go of? Please share in the comments!
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Unstuck: How I learned to accept my life as a mom →
Oh man I am so in it! I juat love reading where you’ve traveled. I’m trying to respond more to the moments and celebrate them because overall days can blend all together. It feels good to celebrate them!
Yes! Those little momentary celebrations can really help keep us going. Thanks for sharing, Susie!
Thanks Kate. I look forward to reading more from this series! I agree that discovering “my way” is important not only in parenting but in most roles we find ourselves in.
One of the best advice I received as a young mom,that I still struggle with is, don’t stress over the small stuff. What is the small stuff when you are going through it? Whether a messy house, paint on the floor or hands, if you can stop and say what will it matter in 6 months or even sooner then you can recent er and hopefully shrug off the irritability or frustrations. Can this be repaired, washed, etc., then this is the small stuff. Losing a child’s respect and attitude for positivity is probably what we need to focus on. Older adults keeping a friend, coworker, neighbor seeing the positive or Jesus in our lives is what we need to focus on. Not the mistakes, the amount of work to be done, but on the big picture. Now with that, I will go and focus on my own day and brightening my corner of my the world ?
Yes, parenthood has a huge lesson for discerning what is really important and what is not. Definitely still learning this … It’s interesting to even see a difference in the way I respond to the little things now with Addy (like her getting food all over the place as she is learning to eat) as compared to how I responded with Jed. I definitely flipped out way more with him. Once again, this life is a journey of learning what truly matters and how to pursue those things.