Today we celebrated my son's fifth birthday. He is such an intelligent little boy, so friendly, confident and chatty, he is creative, funny and full of energy, I am proud to be his mama, he inspires me and makes me want to be a better person. As well as celebrating the birth of my beautiful boy, I also had a little glass of wine to celebrate my own anniversary of five years of motherhood. It's strange how we don't acknowledge our own achievements as mothers in this way isn't it?
Having a baby is like a re-birth, we become a different person, a new person, we are born ourselves. We become a mother. And we will never not be a mother every again. After having a child we can never ever go back to being the person we were before. And I am not talking about stretch marks here, I am talking about our hearts and souls. We are permanently changed. So I am marking this anniversary as well.
But what am I celebrating? I am celebrating that I survived! Because being a mother is HARD!
I used to be a secondary school art teacher and I would say that for me, being a mother is like my most stressful day of teaching, only the children don't leave at 3.00, there are no half terms, it's ALL THE TIME! And that, my friends, is hard. But I survived, I am surviving. And I am a richer person for it too. I feel like now, at the age of 33 and 5 years a mother, I know my self better that I ever did the the preceding 28 years. I know more about myself and I know myself more deeply than ever before. I am able to pinpoint my feelings, desires, stresses more accurately that I have ever been able to before. I am much more mindful of how I am feeling. I am more inspired to be creative and have more ideas than ever before (and ironically less time than ever to birth them!) But it's so wonderful to learn about yourself and develop this relationship with ourselves, getting to know the person we were born to be.
I really want us mothers to acknowledge and honour all our achievements as parents, but also to acknowledge and honor our souls, our mother souls. We so often forget how amazing we are as mothers, how important what we do is, and how we need to care for ourselves and give ourselves time to rest and recover along this incredible journey.
Here's to you mamas, we don't always acknowledge how powerful we are as mothers or as women, lets start.
A recent commission I did with the title "It Takes a Village to Rise a Child"
