After a few months of writing three blog posts a week for the Guilt Free Mom blog, my friend and colleague, Kim from Escape Adultitis (www.KimandJason.com) asked me, “What are you giving up to make time for all this writing? You have to be giving up something!” I never thought of it that way prior to her questioning. Then today I saw a quote that reminded me of her question…
“The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he is yet alive” – Bishop Eddie Long
And I wonder…what dies inside a woman, when she becomes a Mom? We all know that once we become a Mother, any and everything gets dropped/pushed aside to meet the needs of our son(s)/daughter(s)…so to make room for the time/energy and work it takes to meet those needs, we give something/s up. Something dies inside us, right?
I think the disgrace in this is that some societal messaging tells us that we are being “good moms” when we push our own desires to the background to take care of everyone else around us. However, if we do this long enough, we find that the self sacrificing leads to the demise of something important inside us.
Last night I was thinking about why I let 5 days go without posting an article on Guilt Free Mom blog (the first time in 4 months that this happened). One might say I felt some guilt about this! J And I realize that the last 5 days, I just was not thinking much about it. I had so many distractions, to do items, and other responsibilities, that I was not feeding my thoughts, feelings and beliefs that relate to Guilt Free Mom blog.
Then it hit me….and I thought, “What I feed, grows.” (Please note…I did not say, “Who I feed grows”…believe me, with my “hungry hungry hippo” 2 year old son…I am currently witnessing that notion!) But I realized that I was feeding other things and those things got bigger in my focus. And by doing that, there was not a lot of room for Guilt Free Mom thoughts. Hence, no post for 5 days!
My point? What are you feeding today? Are you feeding positive or negative thoughts? Are you feeding your passions? Or are you feeding self defeating thoughts? Are you feeding work thoughts more than you want to? Are you obsessing on the little things that are really not that important? The beautiful thing is that you can change your negative thoughts, on a dime. Start today…start now. Decide to feed whatever thoughts help you to be, (as Matthew Kelly, best selling author would say…) the best version of yourself.
Choose what you want to feed today!
