{On Mothering}

Join me this week, as we head into Mother's Day, for a little series called {On Mothering}. 

I have asked four bloggers, and mothers, to share a little something from their mothering experience. 

The only information I gave them was the title of the series, the rest I left up to them. 

Today I welcome Emily from Mousy Brown's House

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Good Enough

When Kim asked me to join in with a blog series {On Mothering} on her blog, my initial reaction was one of panic.  What would I be able to say that others would want to read? And perhaps even scarier than that, what if everyone discovered just how lacking in knowledge I am? How imperfect my mothering has been…

Then I sat and reflected on my feelings and decided that these reasons were exactly why I should push myself to do it, no matter how uncomfortable it felt.  Because I think that these are feelings that many of us share…that we are not “good enough” and that everyone else is somehow doing it so much better than we are.

I clearly remember a conversation with a close friend a few years after the birth of my second son.  Although we didn’t know each other at the time, she had been on the same hospital ward as me, as our children were born only a day apart.  She was remembering how she had been sitting nervously with her first newborn baby and she had spotted me at the other end of the room.  I was breast feeding with confidence, my older child sitting next to me with a book and she wished she could be more like me…my memories of that time are completely different!  I was in pain from the caesarean I had just experienced, I was terrified about how I would cope with two children to care for, I felt guilt that my elder child would soon be going home without me and far from feeling confident about breast feeding, I was worrying that it didn’t feel as easy as it should and I was frustrated that having already fed my older child successfully, I was still feeling the need to ask for help.

So often, I think, Mothering is about trusting yourself to do the best you can and about being kind enough to yourself, to forgive the times when what you do falls short of the high expectations you (or others) might have.

Now my sons are older (13 and 17), I wish I could go back to that younger me and reassure her of the good job she is doing.  To show her the lovely young adults her babies have become.

Mothering, for me, has been and still is the biggest learning experience of my life.  It has taken me at times to the lowest of lows and at others (or sometimes even at the same time!) to the highest of highs.  It has required of me the biggest of sacrifices and patience from reserves that I didn’t know I had.  It has gifted me with more moments of exquisite happiness than I ever thought I would experience.  It challenges me on a daily basis and I hold its scars both mentally and physically but much like the pain of childbirth itself, all the harder aspects of Mothering fade to nothing when compared with the intense joy and overwhelming love that our children bring to our home.