On Being A Full Time Mom

Being a full time mother is an amazing occupation. If you have the privilege of being one, give thanks now! Not everyone is so blessed. I am extremely grateful that I was able to stay home with my children and am even more grateful that all of my daughters and my daughter-in-law are also full time moms. But that doesn’t mean I don’t remember or know that like every other career mothering has a down side. There are definitely frustrations, mundane and even tedious aspects to mothering, but one of the things I realize more and more is that as mothers we often make the job more mundane and tedious than it needs to be.
For one thing, too often we define what it means to be a mother by what our mother did or by what the mothers around us do. We think we have to replicate their methods. But as a mother you are in charge and should run your home like a good business executive runs a business. And how is that? You run it according to your strengths.
My mother was very disciplined and loved a spotlessly clean house. She, in large part, defined her role as a mother as that of a housekeeper. That served us kids well in many ways. For example, I was never ashamed to bring friends home. I knew the house would always be clean and inviting. As a matter of fact, our home was always the gathering place for friends (besides being a great housekeeper, Mom was a social person who enjoyed having people around).
When I first had children, I thought I had to keep house like Mom did which meant doing what most people do for Spring cleaning on a monthly basis. Again and again I tried to keep the discipline and schedule that mother maintained, but I hate house work. It didn’t give me the pleasure it gave Mom to see myself reflected in all the kitchen appliances. For years I felt depressed and like a total failure as a mother because my house wasn’t as clean as hers. What I wasn’t taking into account is that I was doing things she hadn’t. When I finally accepted that a certain level of cleanliness is essential and that I could maintain that level but didn’t have to maintain Mother’s level I gained an enormous amount of peace and it allowed me to concentrate on things like taking my children to the library and playing the piano while they sang–things my mother never did.
What I realize now, is that the best mothers are the ones who recognize their strengths, build their family lives around those strengths and enjoy what they are doing without worrying about the mother next door who is putting every tiny thing the children bring home into a scrapbook. If you like scrap booking-fine. If you don’t–then don’t scrap book. You don’t have to. Identify your own strengths and nurture your children through those strengths. That’s all you have to do!