Being a True Modern Woman

   When you're young and thinking about growing up, motherhood, and being married, it seems like it could be easy....when I was young I wasn't even actually sure I wanted to be a Mom. For real. I pretty much hated baby-sitting (with a few exceptions), and being a Mom seemed so abstract that I wasn't sure I could imagine myself doing it.
   Then I got pregnant when I had just turned 20, got hitched, and life was craa-zy!  
   Fast forward 10 years, and man, what a wild ride this has been! 
   There are so, soooo many things most books don't tell you about parenting and being a wife, mother and a "modern woman" today that I am left feeling just a little uninformed, to say the very least! Seriously, how can lice and pin worms NOT be mentioned in every single parenting book out there!!! What the heck?!?   

The time I was making Peanut Butter Pie for my sister and my hand mixer attachments broke and tangled into each other! Doink!

   Almost every time I get together with other Moms, things like our parenting, our husbands (or significant others), and our bodies come up in conversation. I'm coming to realize that we all feel the same about what we're doing, and we all feel like we're not quite making the grade. Whether it's feeling like our kids aren't minding their manners in public, or we don't feel we're doing our best for our husbands, or that they understand how hard our stay-at-home days are. Then there's how we feel about our post-baby bodies....yikes, Moms are full of self-doubt and second guessing!  
   We get these ideas from somewhere in us, some voice that tells us we're not good enough. Not strict enough, not nice enough, not tidy enough, not good enough cooks, and not quite thin/curvy/sexy enough. Some Moms feel this less than others, but we all feel it, I know we do.
   The thing is, our life is a real life. We're not celebrities with nanny's and cooks, and personal trainers. We're roughing it every day; cleaning, cooking, changing bums, breaking up fights, or driving our kids everywhere, working a job, or being a single Mom. In the midst of that a lot of us are also trying to get our "pre-baby body" back. That's a lot to do! 
   I started doing yoga lately, I'm not into the spiritual side of it (I also don't like the super slow yoga...I get bored!), I just enjoy the deep stretching, how (even though it's crazy hard to do) it's relaxing, makes me remember to breath deeply (anger management skills people!!), and, as one (YouTube) instructor said, you need to come to a place where you have compassion for yourself. She's referring mostly to the bodies abilities regarding being flexible, etc., but I really took what she said for a lot of different aspects of my life.
   We stand in the line at the grocery store, with our noisy kids in tow, and see magazine covers showing us how fit, and happy some new celebrity mom is with her new baby in his designer shoes, and with her svelte post-baby body just a few weeks after giving birth. We can't stack up to that, but I think we subconsciously feel we should. Why is a stranger, who is living a life so completely distant from ours controlling us and making us feel inadequate?
   I've started to take a look around me and my own life lately. I've started to look at the Moms I know in my circle of friends, that I meet at get-togethers, that I know from church, or even in my own family. I see their great parenting skills, their ability to keep their house clean (or not), and be o.k. with how it is. I see them being gracious and loving to husbands I think aren't so super, or doing an amazing job as a single parent, and I see them trying to accept their bodies, no matter where it is in it's journey!
   My non-celebrity life is a normal, real one (I think). I am trying to be compassionate with myself. I struggle everyday with keeping up with how I want my house to look (fyi-I like it to be tidy, but I don't necessarily care about it being super-clean!), not how I think it should look. I give my kids lots of fruits and veggies, and try to teach them about healthy living, but I also give them chocolate, and chips, and even bribe them with jelly beans to not bug me after they've gone to bed at night! It's true! I try to love my husband the best I can, and be someone he can really count on, and truly consider a best friend, but I also get very angry and fight, and say things I regret. I am learning to be compassionate to my body, and love it (or at least stop thinking bad things about it!), and accept it where it's at, and how it is.
   I am who I am. I am who God made me. I can always be working hard to improve on something that I don't think is right, but not because a celebrity made me think it, or because I've imposed some sort of none-sense guilt on myself, but because I want to be bettering myself. That means different things to different people, but it's about accepting who you are, but also knowing that something that isn't changing is dying. Change for your own sake, change for who you hope to be. Change for the legacy you want to leave behind you. Are you a yeller? Decide to stop yelling! In bad shape, hop onto YouTube and find a workout that fits into your busy life! Hate your messy house? Decide to start small and get the house looking the way you imagine it could. Take small steps, ask for help, be honest with the people in your life who love you, and be a modern woman who is the real deal. No airbrushing, no lying about what life is like, no designer shoes for your baby...well...unless they're hand-me-downs! 
   Being a "modern woman" isn't likely to be what Chatelaine tells us it'll be. It will be something real, messy, crazy-hard work, but it will also be fun and rewarding. Just own your version of the modern woman!  

Some funny things I found on the internet. That sign is from the website: www.treehousegiftandhome.com.