Maybe I'm Not Cut Out for This: Letter from a Weary Mom
Like many of us, my cousin Olivia is a weary mom. Though she lives across the Atlantic in Cairo, my newsfeed is full of courageous musings on the greater questions of life and motherhood. It was only natural then that I approach her for a guest post. Have you ever felt this way? Read on...
Olivia is the mother of two boys under two, a devoted wife, a talented singer, and a beloved friend and cousin, who pens the most brilliant and honest Facebook statuses on motherhood.
[This post was penned just ahead of Mother's Day in the Middle East - March 21.]Mother's Day is only ten days away, and it's my second as a mommy in general and first as a mommy of two... Which gives you an idea about the spacing between my two kids: one year and two months.Now that I have been a mother for some time, I am starting to think that motherhood is not for everybody. It's harder than anything I've ever been through. I am having feelings that I shouldn't be having, if I was meant to be a mother.I feel like I am a machine, a housemaid, whose whole life is about feeding, changing, bathing, cleaning up, putting them to sleep, and I hardly get to do anything for myself. Eating anything has become mission impossible, having a shower is a dream, going out is science fiction.I'm hating this. I spend so much time crying over my past life, when it was filled with nice things, friends, outings, travel, singing, dancing and many more things. I watch everyone around me living life to the fullest, and it just feels like I am in another dimension.The worst thing is that I feel guilty that I am having these feelings. I read about a lot of the heroic things all other mommies do, whether being a single mother, or caring for a sick child, or having twins/triplets, or something as simple as being a working mother. All this makes me feel so small and so incompetent.I feel trapped in a loop and every day is harder than the last, and, from what I am hearing, it gets even more challenging. I am getting help from so many people, but it's not enough. I never seem to get any time off.I am not expecting a solution because I know there is none. I just want someone to tell me how to give in to this new life, and how not to wait for any happiness for myself. How to accept that the time when it was about me is gone and never coming back. How to forget that I too deserve to live like a woman, how to remember that everything I am has been reduced to just a maid.I look at my mother, and I simply cannot conceive how she does it, with so much love and so little selfishness. How does she find true joy in such hard work? How come she always says that having children was the purpose of her life, and that it's the one thing giving her life a meaning?I bet there are some women who are naturally born mothers--my mom is certainly one of them. I look at her and see the true meaning of unconditional love and devotion, as if by having us she doesn't want anything else.I pray, with all my heart, for God to pour in my heart this kind of love. I pray I can enjoy my kids in the midst of all the exhaustion. I pray to be a mother who will not take her children for granted, a mother who sees anything else in the world but her children useless and meaningless, because my children deserve a mother like that.
Laura, here. I'm sure many of you are feeling like Olivia or remember the time when you did. What would you like to say to encourage Olivia and other young mothers? Comment in the box below (with or without your name). Motherhood. People think they're joking when they say it's the hardest job in the world. They don't know.