Give Me a Break

Two days ago, I received a very long email from my sister.  She spent 4 years of mothering, working as a civil engineer, and has now chosen to be a SAHM (stay at home mom).  The email was not only long, it was sad.  The jist was that my sister after years of being an incredible engineer, and doting mother, felt that she was doing this SAHM thing wrong.  You see, she had all these expectations. She didn't put it this way, but I picture kids making snowflakes, while listening to Bach, learning about precipitation, and mom with an apron on in the kitchen baking healthy, sugarless, organic treats.

Instead, most days it looks like a preschooler throwing a tantrum while ripping the snowflake, a toddler climbing up and falling off of the table, while mom cleans up the dog vomit.  (Just today we were FaceTimeing, and we ended the conversation when the baby started crying, the preschooler started yelling, and the dog was barking).  Her reality was not matching her expectations, which made her feel like she was failing.

I replied to her long and depressing email, with a long tough love message, that was basically, "give yourself a break".  I meant that literally and figuratively.  Literally she is in a position where her partner works long hours, and because she recently moved to a new city, she does not have her tribe, and has not yet established the village that she needs for support, she needs to find a way to have time for herself.  Figuratively, I felt that she needed to be kinder to herself.  To throw out her expectations, and enjoy the reality.

Much like my sister, I've had multiple mothering experiences where I felt like a failure, and now that I'm thinking about it, my failure status is not confined to mothering... I've failed as a student, friend, spouse, employee, employer ect. ect.   And I've just come to realize that just like my sister, I need to give myself a break.  I have to throw out my expectations of any given situation, and enjoy the reality.

Where do these lofty expectations come from?  Why do I expect myself to excel at everything? And, why do I feel like a failure if I don't?  I'd love to blame the brag culture of pinterest and facebook, and the mommy blogs,  but the truth is, I think that this feeling of failure has been going on for generations.  Whenever our expectations don't meet our reality, even when the reality is good and real in and of itself, we can feel like failures.

So, I've decided that I'm going to give myself a break.  Sure, I'll still try hard, sure I'll probably still have expectations, but when I don't meet them, I'm going to step back and realize that sometimes I need to give myself a break.