Gratitude Will Save Your Motherhood
Gratitude will save your motherhood - it saved mine.
Inside each of these blog posts, I hope you find something that resonates with you and helps you feel like a GoodAF mom - because you are! Maybe it’s gratitude, maybe it’s help with caregiver burnout, or maybe it’s mindfulness, I know you will find what works for you.
No matter the method, I know that checking in with ourselves is the simplest way to start any amount of healing.
So if you are unsure what to do next - I would start with self-reflection. And if you are looking for the next step after that, I would try offering a small piece of self-compassion - like “Wow, that is hard” or “Yeah, that’s unfair.”
But if you are looking for a system or a step-by-step path to follow, day after day, you can give gratitude a try.
I like to call that system parenting with gratitude. Why does gratitude matter to parenting? Well, I have been parenting for 14 years. And in the past 14 years, I have felt Mom Guilt, shame, isolation, resentment, burnout, self-doubt, and the list goes on.
And underneath it all lived another issue - right? It was a self-worth issue. A not-good-enough issue. It was rooted in the idea that I was a bad mom. And that issue clouded over everything I did - it was a mindset.
Every time I walked into a room, I brought that mindset with me - the mess on the floor = somehow my fault, the leaky faucet = should have dealt with it this weekend, the breakfast no one ate = I should have listened to what they wanted. I was looking through a cloud.
But as soon as I deliberately started practicing gratitude, there was no argument that I was a good mom because I started to notice all the good things I did every day. I hadn’t been noticing them – I was just focused on all the mistakes and failures that I was making. Because of that low self-worth cloud.
Parenting with gratitude is not only about looking at the good and being complacent; it’s about realigning your mindset to focus on the good so that you can clear out all that negative self-worth talk, and you can say, “Ok, I am starting from a place of good parenting. I am a good mom who makes mistakes” and then you can go from there.
Gratitude builds upon itself from one day to the next –That’s why I like it so much. Using a daily system, I notice the effects of my effort more quickly - and when I do, I want to do more! I want to notice more good things, and I want to do more good things for my kids and for others! I notice that I am a good mom, and I have great kids!!
I hope it works for you too! - Stef
