It's Okay to Get Lost in Motherhood.
I wrote the instagram post below on my personal page. I scrolled past a post earlier that had said, “Follow me for tips on how to NOT lose yourself in motherhood.”
”Ouch,” I thought. It was a joke, but I felt like this is so NOT the message mothers in the thick of it need. Add homeschooling to the mix and it can feel like you really have allowed motherhood to take over every aspect of your life. But you know what — THAT IS OKAY. There is a beautiful, beautiful rebirth of a woman that happens many times in her life when we grieve who we once were and welcome who we are becoming.
This honor, to love, care, and raise the next generation of children in this world is like a sacred calling. Only we know our children. Only we have the influence of maternal love that no one else can replicate. But in turn, so do our children. Only they have the love of a child that is ours that pushes us to new horizons and forces us out of our old skin to become better, stronger, and wiser women.
Maybe we grieve who we once were because we know who we are becoming means we must become something greater than what we were, because now we have children who depend on it.
It’s okay to lose yourself in motherhood. I mean, are we ever really found?
With or without children, our journey on this earth requires us to become 100k different people in our lifetime to grow, adapt and evolve from each situation and set of circumstances we are given.
You will feel lost and then found 100k different times in your life too.
Some things will anchor you at sea when the chaos feels so thick you feel you could drown from it all, but those anchors do not act as weights to hold us down, drown us or keep us from moving forward, they anchor us so that when the storm finally calms, the chaos has subsided, and the skies begin to clear, we have not drifted from who we once were, but instead, have become who we were always meant to be.
Embrace the chaos, the feeling of being stuck, even trapped at times in a place you thought you would enjoy every second of but might now be feeling is the hardest experience of your life. It is.
But you are not lost. It all counts. Even the mundane parts, the things no one else sees. You are quite literally, holding down the ship mama.
It is okay to “lose yourself,” and let go of what once was, and grieve that while simultaneously embracing the chaos and beauty of motherhood. The duality of both, loving yourself and being terrified of who you might become is the most real thing you will ever have to go through. Because loving ourselves, hyping ourselves up, taking care of ourselves, and embracing ourselves during a time we are becoming and feel the least like ourselves is exactly what we will have to teach our children to do too.
It’s okay to lose yourself in motherhood. Motherhood means unconditional love. It is the best place to be found. So if you’re gonna lose yourself in anything, lose yourself in that. 💛