Beyond Amazing: The Excruciatingly Slow Steps of a Mother's Labour of Love

The journey of a thousand miles may start with a single step, but when you are a mother of small children each of those steps can feel excruciatingly slow. Whether the journey you take is studying, starting a business, building a career, commencing therapy, renovating, or a community project, the process may feel interminable, eternal, never ending.

You finally sign up for the thing, dedicating an hour a day to the cause, and your toddler drops their nap. The routine of daycare or school finally feels like it’s getting easier, and illness or lockdown strike. Space looks like it’s opening for you and then closes as your partner presents their new roster, promotion or redundancy. You plot a trajectory and then a surprise baby makes themselves known, your relationship breaks down, fires and floods rage, a diagnosis smacks you in the face, your landlord decides they want the house back.

And through it all, you are mothering. Night, day, and night again, perpetually on call.

There will be dreams and aspirations shelved and unmissable opportunities turned down because no one else can have the kids but you, or simply because no one else IS you. And while you are just holding on, under-supported, overwhelmed and questioning what you were thinking, the motivational speakers of the world and their disciples will tell time and time again that your self-confidence, money blocks, mindset and motivation is all that’s holding you back, that everyone has the same number of hours in the day, to just try harder.

But I know you are already trying, already working hard, already extending yourself in every direction and dimension as this season of life demands, and that sometimes choosing rest over action is the only way to make it through. I know that as you walk the slowest and most disjointed of stop-start paths, tiny feet are making footprints alongside yours, hand held all the while. I know that big, innocent eyes watch you chipping away, perhaps not comprehending with the mind, but knowing somewhere deep within that you are doing what needs to be done for you all to live a life that is truly alive.

And just like your children do, I know you’re beyond amazing.

Apr 21, 2022 12:36pm

By Anna Cusack

Under Parenting, Motherhood & Post-partum

2 min read

Beyond Amazing: The Excruciatingly Slow Steps of a Mother's Labour of Love

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