They do not warn you of this part in parental books – the part where your toddler arises in front of the middle of the alley of the grocery store, howling Because you don’t let them eat a bag of family size cheetos for dinner.
People pass, some sympathetic, others judge. And you? You stand there, exhausted, carrying the same sweatshirt in which you slept, trying to remember if you even brushed your teeth that morning.
Maternity is relentless. The work never ends. There is no blockage, no power, and certainly no days of illness. It’s 24/7, with very few moments of silence and even less solitude. You spend years spending your day half dormant, putting Everyone’s needs Before yours, trying to balance meals, milestones, collapses and mental health.
In these moments, like the incident of the grocery store, it can be easy to spiral. It is easy to feel like you fail, as if you were drowning in laundry and cheerios and noise. I know, because I lived in this spiral more than once. And yet something has changed for me recently. I stopped trying to escape chaos and started looking for the silver lining. It has changed everything for me.
I recommend difficult times
Now, instead of leaving a tantrum Ruin my day, I chose to see it differently. My daughter was not difficult, she sank, expressed her needs and tests the limits. Of course, her timing was terrible, but perhaps this strong desire is a glimpse of the daring and confident woman that she will one day become. Maybe I don’t raise a queen of the drama, maybe I’m lifting a future CEO of a fortune company 500.
It was not just anger attacks. Some days it was like the laundry Multipored just to play with me, and even the fabric softener could not soften the blow. But one day, when I tried another charge, I stopped and I looked at the tiny socks and the stained frogs and the jeans separated by the grass. This laundry mountain? It meant my children had a lot of clothes. It meant that they had spent the day outside playing. It meant that I had a family to take care of, and that’s something I never want to take for granted.
I’m not in denial, I take things in hand
My new mentality is not on toxic positivity. It is not a question of ignoring difficult things or pretending that everything is fine when it is not the case. Maternity is difficult. It is lonely at times. It stretches you in all directions and requires pieces of you that you did not know that you should give. But what I learned is as follows: how you see these moments can change what you feel in them.
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Instead of drowning in the waste, I started to move my perspective. I found humor in absurdity. I found gratitude in the banal. I started to deal with each challenge as a reminder of what I have, rather than what I miss. It did not make work disappear, but it made lighter.
I still have difficult days. I am exceeded, forget the appointments and I lose my patience. But now when I find myself wavering on the edge of professional exhaustionI’m looking for the silver lining. I remember that noise means life, the waste means memories. And these anger attacks mean growth – for both of us.
Maternity is perhaps the most difficult work in the world, but it is also the one that taught me the most about resilience, presence and grace. And when I remember changing my goal, even just a little, I can see it for what it really is. This is not an endless list of tasks, but a chance to attend something extraordinary takes place right in front of me.
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