Who Says Being a Working Mom Has To Be Hard?
Let’s pretend for a minute that you’d never had ice cream before.
Let’s also pretend that you’re in line at [insert your favorite ice cream shop here] waiting for your first ever cone and the person in line before you says, “Oh my goodness this is terrible. You better brace yourself because this is awful.”
Would you believe them?
Would their comments about your first ice cream cone diminish the experience for you? Would you hesitate before taking the first bite expecting the worst?
Heck no!!!! It’s ice cream!?! And that person is crazy if they think ice cream is terrible. (Please tell me you love ice cream as much as I do!)
Hopefully, you’re chuckling right now at my absurd story but stay with me because I have a point here...
What if instead, you’re expecting your second child.
This is your first, second child. You’ve never been a mom to two before.
And someone who already has two kids says to you, “Oh my goodness, two is so much harder than one. You better brace yourself because life is going to get so much harder.”
Would you believe them?
Well, I did.
I believed any parent who had already made the transition from one kid to two and I prepared for the worst.
I was excited to not be pregnant anymore, but I was nervous about being able to handle two kids.
I assumed that everyone else was right and that this would be hard.
And you know what I did in those early months after my second was born? I looked for proof.
I looked around and kept a tally of all the ways that things were harder with two kids. And I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I let all of those other parents influence my experience.
I took their stories, a story that as a society we ALL just believe without question, and I embodied it. I made it my own.
Flip The Script
But what if it didn’t have to be HARD? What if it was just different?
After all, I’d never been a mom to two kids before. It was all new to me. I had to learn…
How to entertain a toddler, while nursing a baby.
How to function the next day after being up all night with the baby while my toddler slept through.
How to give attention and love to both and create a sibling relationship.
Were there hard moments? Absolutely! (I distinctly remember thinking I had ruined my firstborn forever by giving him a sibling. Spoiler alert - he turned out ok!)
But I wonder if there might have been fewer hard moments if I hadn’t constantly been looking for them.
What if I expected that time to just be different and new?
Would I have seen everything as a challenge or could I have seen it as a learning curve?
Write your own Story
I’m still amazed sometimes at how quick we are to believe and internalize other people’s stories. Society’s stories. Maybe you don’t even recognize them as anything but truth/fact:
“I don’t have time to take care of myself now that I’m a mom. But I guess that’s just how it is when you have young kids.”
Or “as a mom of young kids, by the time bedtime rolls around you’re obviously tapped out.”
Or “the after-school and dinnertime hours are the worst.”
They’re spoken as if they’re just a universal truth, but look closely and you’ll see that it’s just one person’s experience. One person’s belief.
It might be your experience and belief too, and that’s totally fine if it is.
But make sure it’s true for you before you just accept it as the way things are.
Make sure you’re not taking on someone else’s experience as your own without challenging it first.
What if having another kid isn’t hard for you?
What if the dinnertime hours are a time of true connection for your family?
What if you’re able to take care of yourself even when your kids are young?
Don’t miss out on a different experience because you’re stuck believing someone else’s story.
Challenge the belief. Then write your own story.
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