Mom, You Are Enough

Image and Post are Credited to Rachel Marie Martin @findingjoy.net and @TheBraveArtofMotherhood.com

Encouragement Today

Are You A Tired and Discouraged Mom?

Are you a mom who finds herself struggling with the exhaustion of the mundane day to day life of raising your children.

I would like to share with you a powerful and encouraging blog post written by my friend, Rachel Marie Martin from @findingjoy.net. She wrote this to encourage the mom who is struggling to find joy in being a mom today.

Why Being Mom Is Enough.

“Being a mom is enough.

It’s enough, I say.

Sometimes we want to look to those big things and use them as a grade for success. We look at the cool science fair projects where our child got the blue ribbon. But, honestly, we miss the hours of interacting and holding glue sticks and looking up things and laughing side by side. We want the trips to Disney or American Girl Doll and discount the time spent in the backyard. The bar of success and joy and happiness gets pushed so high by culture that the little things, the enough mom moments, are lost.” -Rachel Marie Martin @findingjoy.net and @TheBraveArtofMotherhood.com

This post touched my heart today because, for years, I struggled with measuring the success of being a mother against the success I could have had with the career I gave up when I became a mom.

I think because I didn’t grow up with a realistic image of what motherhood was, (not that my mom was a bad mom, because she was not. She had severe health issues and found herself in an abusive marriage which compromised her ability to invest in us like we think of motherhood today). I believe overall this contributed to my struggle to find my mother identity within the world of motherhood even still today.

Before I got married and had my daughter, I was a career driven person who knew what I wanted and was striving to achieve it (this my mother taught me). Then just as I was finishing up college, I met my husband and my life changed from that point forward. He was on active duty with the United States Army and within a year of being married, we came down on orders to move to Germany. After living in Germany for two and a half years, I became pregnant and within six months of returning back to America, my daughter was born.

This is where I can truly say my life changed forever, even though mentally and emotionally I was not prepared for it, my daughter came along and I knew being a mom was more important to her than any career in Law Enforcement I could have had.

This is why this post resonates with me today. It reminds me that being a mom “is” enough. Our kids do not measure us up to a career we have or could have had. They do not measure us up to our incomes we make. They measure us up to the papers we color, the books we snuggle and read together, or the puzzles we make with them. They measure us up to the hours of hiding and seek games we play, the cookies we bake, or the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we make.

My friend, it does not matter what you do with your kids, the only thing they really want is for us to love them, to share our moments with them, and to invest in them with our hearts and love.