I watch mommies on a daily basis trying to keep their cool, breath, be calm and have things under control. Some of them manage well, some of them fake it well, some of them are in great denial and others slip up at times, without having planned to have had witnesses their to tell the story.
The truth is though that ALL mothers (yes you read correctly) have some sort of struggle, challenge or chaos that they have to deal with and NONE (you read correctly again) of us have it under control 100% of the time.
Can I tell you a secret?
You are not perfect. You are not supposed to be perfect. You are human and you are teaching your little humans that it is okay to be human. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes.
They also have bad days. They also have days where they feel emotional, frustrated, down, impatient, despondent and just not as great. By you allowing yourself to have human moments in front of them and having open discussions about it, makes them feel better about those times when they feel out of control. It is a learning and teaching process.
It is one of the greatest things you can teach your children: SELF-LOVE and it starts with you.
You are a woman who has to deal with hormones, stress, a lot of balls in the air (excuse the pun) and you have to look after yourself throughout all of that as well.
ANYONE will crack!
I will share my morning briefly with you:
My 4 year old son (Xander) is the most amazing boy and I love his strong will, stubbornness and determination.
(You do know there is a "but" coming right?)
But... sometimes it can challenge me more than I would like to admit. Sometimes it challenges me at the wrong time of the month. Sometimes it challenges me at the wrong time of the week and mostly it challenges me at the wrong time of the morning (before school).
He was so cute this morning, as daddy was away on business and he and his older brother (Zian, 6) could sleep with mommy in her bed. They massaged me last night and treated me like a queen. This was so sweet.
This morning we lie in just a little bit to break the daily routine. Epic fail!
We had some coffee and rusks together and they told me how nice it was with just the 3 of us. Not that they enjoy me more than my husband. He is way more fun, but I still took the compliment and thought to myself: "Wow, I got this."
This beautiful romantic morning then went a bit pear-shaped somehow. Whether it was the hormones or that I took a call from daddy quickly or whatever, I am not sure.
I then found myself rushing Zian to brush his teeth, put suntan lotion on, get dressed, etc, etc, etc (you know the drill). While this is going on, I am telling Xander to also get ready and do all of these things, but he had his own ideas.
In hindsight it was such cute ideas and if I allowed myself to be in the moment, I would have appreciated it, but at that point in time I did not.
You see, we are camping at their school tonight and it is great excitement, so instead of him focusing to get ready for school, he was getting his skateboard, helmet and bag ready for camping.
It escalated from me asking him to leave his bag like that, as we will have time to pack all our stuff this afternoon to me eventually raising my voice and sounding a bit like a crazy woman.
The crazy woman did not come out right at the beginning with the camping bag. Does she ever? She took a while to surface, but once she decided to show her face, she ripped at an incredible speed and turned it into a full-on dance.
Now some of you will say that you don't know what I am talking about and you have never done it before, but I KNOW that EVERY SINGLE MOM has lost her cool at some point in time.
After the bag got left alone, I asked him to put his lunchbox in his bag. He did. Then I put Suntan lotion all over my hands to apply to his body, but he already had his mind set on filling his water bottle for school and then getting irritated, because he could not manage to open it and wanted me to help. The more I tried to explain to him that I could do it after we apply Suntan lotion, due to the fact that my hands were slippery, the more he started to get impatient, frustrated and determined. Eventually I raised my voice quite a bit, hoping that I will snap him out of it, but thinking back now - I was probably the one that needed someone to snap me out of it.
It ended up with me applying Suntan lotion, whether he was crying or not, because you see... I had to get rid of the Suntan lotion on my hands that was inconveniencing me. It makes total sense right? Sometimes I think we act like kids, because we are around them too much (ha-ha).
After the Suntan lotion and a very unimpressed Xander, he filled his bottle at our water dispenser and wet his shirt, which them sent him into a frustrated frenzy.
It is not like my behavior helped at all to change his state and I should know better. I am a life coach after all. I know everything about break states.
After me trying to calm down and deal with the situation accordingly, I then had to try and get his teeth brushed through the tears, because you see there was no time to properly console him... (can you believe that we think like that at times)
I used my hairdryer to dry his shirt and thank goodness the sound of that and I guess the sensation of that calmed him down since he was a baby, so that worked a bit.
He then said that he needed his shoes, so I told him to go and put it on, while I brushed my teeth and grab a jacket.
You guessed correctly: I then get to his room and he still has no shoes on, but he is playing with his car.
Anyway, it landed up with us rushing to school with his shoes in his hands and at least getting his brother to school on time.
What did I do next?
I played with Xander for 30min at their playground, as their preschool only starts later than his brother's primary school. I know right? Now you can maybe understand why all of this was almost irrelevant, unnecessary, could have been avoided, handled better and so forth.
Still, we do what we do and then we try and make up for it by listening to our guilt feelings or our conscious.
Moral of the story:
I have NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) techniques that I can at least do now on my subconscious mind, in order to make sure I do not beat myself up about daily incidences of motherhood, but rather take the lesson and learn from it. It is all about feedback. I cannot go back and change it, but I can learn from it and grow.
Will I loose my cool again? I can probably bet money on it. Will I get impatient again and allow society and time to affect how I actually believe and preach about how children should be allowed to be who they are? Probably.
I am human.
I am enough.
I am a mother.
I am a woman.
I am a friend.
I am a daughter.
I am a sister.
I am a lover.
I am a listener.
I am a speaker.
I am a dreamer.
I can carry on with the list, but the point is that we have so many roles as women that we have to play and we actually have such little time to fulfill all of those roles to our best ability. Then we still spend some of that time beating ourselves up, overanalyzing, playing scenes in our head and trying to make sense of it all.
This is exactly why I believe so much in what I do and why I have such a passion for NLP techniques. It did not teach me how to be perfect, but it did equip me to bounce back quicker, with self-love.
Breath mommy... Breath... but if all else fails...
LOVE