This past winter, I went through a period of time where I felt completely lonely & like I had lost who I am as a woman. I started to compare myself to other mama's who do all these other cool things like run a trendy business, look beautiful & thin all the time & just overall seem to fit in their role as mom, wife & woman wonderfully. All the while, I was thinking: "What is God's purpose in my life? What is He calling me to specifically? Sure, I'm good at this & that, but there's nothing really that special about me. I love my babies & being mama, but that's all there is to me. I still haven't lost all the baby weight & none of my clothes fit. My hair is falling out & my eye brows are hardly there anymore. Some of my closest friends live so close, but I hardly see them. I feel so alone in this."
For many, if not for most moms, there comes a time in these early years of raising our babies when we feel completely alone & like we've lost ourselves. I'm sure for many moms this feeling can last years or even for the rest of their life. While we love being a mom & raising our babies we feel like there's a piece of the puzzle missing. Like we're never good enough & that there's more we should be doing. Of course I know the most important job for me right now is to love my kids & to raise them well. And that should be enough, but it feels like it isn't. We get lost! Perhaps it has to do with the fact that our human interaction all day, everyday (and especially for those single mama's out there - mad props to you!) is with littles. Our days are filled with a fluctuation of temper tantrums to cuteness overload to reminding them for the twentieth time to be patient or say thank you. We go out of site for a moment & the baby is crying. We're wiping bums & potty training, playing & reading the same books over again & if we dare skip a page, we're in trouble. We're nursing, trying to workout to lose the weight, comforting the kid who got an owie, making food & getting to 3pm only to realize we've basically only had toast & a cold coffee all day. And that toast that we had this morning has to be shared because mom's food is always better. We try to do everything right like feeding our kids healthy food, not letting them watch too much TV, etc. only to get burnt out because our kid wanted nothing to do with the food we made & a bit of TV means we can get a shower for the first time in a week or just 5 minutes to ourselves but we feel guilty for it. As I write this my infant is up for the umpteenth time last night/this morning, so we add very little sleep in the mix too & you wind up feeling extremely, extremely burnt out.
THIS is the everyday of a mama with littles. I was reminded of this a few months back when trying to process my inward struggle of "who am I?" I was reminded by a friend that this is the reason women need each other, especially in these years as young moms. We need to let ourselves go out for a coffee with a girlfriend or two. We need to make the time. Our husbands make the time to go out for beers with the guys, we need to do the same. And often! We need to make the time to meet up with our friends for a walk. For a run even! We need to make a little bit of time for ourselves to go shopping or some time at Winners with a friend on a Thursday night to browse around uninterrupted for an hour.
If we don't do this, we get to the place I was at a few months back. Mom of a 2 year old & 4 month old. Tired, feeling broken & unimportant to society & friends. Feeling like we're doing something wrong. And it's not that we're not grateful or that we don't thank the Lord everyday for our sweet blessings, because believe me, we all do. It's a matter of ensuring we also don't get lost in it over these tough years. We need that community & those friendships to build us up again. And we need this, especially at this juncture in life. We can't do this thing alone & so I guess, all this to say: be there. Be there for your friends. Even when you're at different places in life. Call them up, don't text... call! Even if you're struggling, make an effort & you'll be rewarded in return with love & understanding. We all need each other, even those mama's who seem like they have it all together.
So please, be there.
Be all there & present.
xo
-Liz Lemon