I read this on a blog and I love it! It drives me crazy that working moms make life so hard!! I hate it when they put that stress on you, and they ask you if "the stay at home mom" can watch there kids too, for no money!! Oh my gosh!!!!
.memoriesoncloverlane.blogspot.com/
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
I say, let your affairs be as two or three,
and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen,
and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.
~Henry David Thoreau
What if you gave up your obligations to school, to church, to just about anything else, especially when they just made you feel stressed and frantic?
What if you cut to the core everything but just the bare essentials of time commitments?What if you woke up in the morning to see an almost blank calendar staring at you in the face everyday? What if you were able to fill that calendar only with what you felt was best for your family?
What if you never felt torn in a million directions, but could "keep your accounts on your thumb-nail"?
What if you felt calm almost all the time?What if you said no to playgroups, no to toddler activities, no to endless play dates, no to so much running around?
What if you refused to feel pressured, guilty, or weird for living a life that looked quite the opposite of the way everyone at the time was living theirs?
What if you could say 'no' without following it with an apology or an excuse?
What if you were able to stand strong with constant endurance against the daily onslaught of the frantic pace of society and find a different quiet, child-friendly path of mothering?
What if, in spite of what society is telling you, you decided that the role of mother is enough work to warrant all of your time, attention and talents and never needed to be shared with less important man-made things?
I've asked myself all these questions over the course of my 16 years of parenting, and I still continue asking. What if? We have the power to change so much about our lives! I hear a lot of excuses out there, (in my own brain too!), but more than at any other time in the history of the world, we have the power of choice. We mothers are not spending time gathering clean water from the only town well miles away, or making fires to bake bread with the wheat we grew and tended ourselves. Where do we spend our time? When we complain about how much we must do, or how there is no time left in the day for the important stuff, are the mothers who have gone before us (or living in another part of the world!) rolling their eyes and laughing hysterically at us? I think they might be.
We have the power to decide what kind of mother we want to be to our children. How will your children remember you when they are older? What kind of mother do you want to be described as one day? I know, it's a question that sends a little fear into the heart of all of us. Will they say I was too stressed, too busy, impatient and angry? Will they say I seemed to spend time on everything else but them? Will they say, "I needed you then, but you were never really listening?"
Of course, we mothers are human, learning as we go, making plenty of mistakes on the way. I'd like to live though, with a little bit of contentment in my heart, that I gave this mothering thing the best shot I had. Asking and answering those hard questions reminds me of that contentment I wish for.
As I get older I've gotten braver...sometimes in great bursts of choices to say no as I wiped my calendar cleaned and vowed to keep it that way, sometimes with the regret of learning the hard way with stressful years as I split my time among too many obligations, or wishing time would move faster instead of slower ("as soon as spring is over, things will slow down and I can enjoy more..."). I have been inspired to be courageous by studying others whom I admire, who exude a peace and contenment in their mothering spirit. I have been falsely misled by my own self, quick to buy into the "how does she do it all so well?" comparison, only to find out once again, it's an illusion. (Because it is every time! Doing it all and doing the important things well does NOT exist, please know..and the price is almost always paid by the little ones that don't have a voice.) I have been way too quick to jump on a bandwagon, only to fall off and hit the ground hard, with a few bruises but a little relief in my heart.
But now more than ever, when I look around the see us all struggling with the juggling, the part that can make me pretty darn angry, is that, more than ever, we moms are supposed to, expected to, told to, demanded to, fit SO MUCH into our lives in addition to doing the most important thing in the world...raising our children.
It's enough to be a mother. Just a mother. I might be the only person that tells you that ever in your lifetime. And I might be wrong. I might be crazy. I might have been born a couple generations too late. But I think it's a darn big job that takes an incredible amount of energy, endurance, spiritual and physical strength and if we are not in the thick of it almost every minute, we should be recharging our batteries with a quiet moment to ourselves so we can jump right back in. Our children deserve a mother who is unstressed, happy, content, and PRESENT. We deserve to feel unstressed, happy, content and PRESENT....we are doing the most important job on earth.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.
-E. F. Schumacker
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