I used to feel like I wasn’t a good mum if I wasn’t busy. It feels silly to say that now, but it’s true: when my older kids were little, I really felt like my worth was how productive I was. How much I did for them. How many activities I had them in, how many loaves of bread I could bake and oh, all the cupcakes.
I really did bake so many cupcakes. If life was measured in cupcakes, I was winning for sure. Outwardly, I was always moving, tackling a house project or cooking everything from scratch, I felt like in order to offer my kids the very best of me that’s what I had to do. That was all that mattered. Inwardly though, I had an abundance of stress and a lack of creativity, and honestly, looking back, so did they.
Studies now show that a mother’s happiness significantly impacts her child’s future, mental health and overall success later in life. I was so deep in my delulu era that I didn’t even realize I wasn’t happy. I was keeping myself busy and them overstimulated to convince myself that this was fulfillment.
The only thing fulfilled was my planner.
Sometimes I feel like I missed everything, racing to nowhere, and deep down I knew it too. Except now, I’m in an era of abandoning mom guilt and running straight for my shit to process, heal and grow.
Our lives changed when we wiped the schedule clean and started doing less. In place of running late, from activity to activity, we have Saturday movie nights on the living room couch, lazy Sunday afternoons and family dinners with conversation. My kids now have the space to deep dive into things they’re interested in, to find out what they love and what works for them, it’s so fun watching the 5 year old teach herself to speak German and learn about marine life just because she’s curious and I’ve had the space to start working on my first novel. The stress has melted away, just from doing less, I’m in love with this life and I think they are happier too.
Allow yourself the space to do nothing, or at the very least: to do less. This is the space where your creativity is born! If you are stuck in the cue for school pick up, don’t just mindlessly pick up your phone to doom scroll to fill in that gap of time. Take that moment to just be, allow life to come in to surprise and delight you. Maybe you’ll see something beautiful, maybe inspiration will strike and you’ll get an idea to create something amazing, or maybe this gap of time doing nothing is exactly what your nervous system needed.
Stop filling in the gaps.
Love Mel
XX
Photo by Kinga Howard