When it comes to parenting, we all strive to do our best, I think.
We want our children to have the happiest of childhoods, filled with snuggles and cupcake baking and fun days at the park. Fear of them ever being bored, or missing out on anything, we fill afternoons with crafts and playdates, organise, sign them up to activity after activity. Pinterest and Instagram, and Facebook too, all add to this perfection pressure parents now feel, especially us mums, I think, as we are the biggest consumers of this type of social media.
In ways it’s only natural, I suppose, wanting to be a great parent, wanting our children to remember a childhood that only had good days. Where magic happened, where there was always freshly baked cookies, where rooms were tidy and where there was no “hurry-up-we-are-going-to-be-late” mornings, no tired mum who struggled to keep it all together.
Strive as we may for this, the reality is that we are also only human. There will be days when we don’t have it all together. Where the toast is burned and the cornflakes end up on the floor. Where we get no fun activities in but instead have to spend the day scrubbing bathrooms or getting the shopping done. Where we have slept only three hours and consumed far too much coffee and can only barely manage to keep the kids alive and fed, no glitter glue projects or jumping through leaves at the park.
The thing is, how we view our days, how we measure our success at motherhood, this all looks very different when seen through your child’s eyes. Because where we see just a normal, messy, didn’t-quite-live-up-to-my-mum-goals day, our children see something else. Something far more real and important.
This video will put things in perspective, we think. Make you embrace all those ‘normal’ days, and not only that, but feel good about them too:
