How self-love, productivity, and finding fun in motherhood work together to help you love your life and live your dreams.
When I decided to start a blog, I knew I wanted to focus on moms. More specifically, I wanted to focus on moms who are struggling to feel like they are doing enough, being enough, inherently enough. Why? Well, probably because it is and always has been something I’ve struggled with. It’s also something I’m passionate about putting an end to.
I believe that motherhood is beautiful! Exhausting, tough, and beyond stressful? Absolutely. But definitely beautiful. It’s just that sometimes that beauty gets lost between the tantrums, to-do lists, and technology. We forget the reason we wanted to become moms in the first place. Life becomes dull, monotonous, and sometimes even joyless. Being a mom and running a household suddenly feels like a chore instead of the beautiful blessing that it can be.
It happened to me and I saw it happening to so many moms around me. Sure, we all had beautiful moments–moments of peace and joy and love–but those moments were outnumbered by the other stuff.
I don’t believe that’s what motherhood is meant to be. I don’t believe that because we are moms we’re meant to be stuck in this cycle of never-ending stress and chaos.I strongly believe that we can and should love our lives and live our dreams each and every day. But the dream life doesn’t just happen. We have to create it.
In my opinion, there are three core pillars to creating our dream life. And these items build on and depend on one another.
1. Self-Love
If you don’t love yourself–truly love yourself–you can’t fully give love to others.
When we lack self-love, a few things happen:
First, we don’t properly take care of ourselves. This can come in many different forms. Maybe we overeat. Maybe we don’t prioritize sleep. Maybe we don’t give ourselves a break. Maybe we lack personal hygiene. Maybe we don’t allow ourselves small joys like buying ourselves new clothes, developing hobbies, or having alone time. And when we don’t take care of ourselves, we run ourselves down. And then we don’t have anything to give.
Next, we lose that light and spark inside of us. We become less patient and quick to anger. We smile less or our smiles become forced. We can put on a show and try to fake it–as women we’re good at that–but our little ones are much smarter than we give them credit for. And they notice.
And finally, we don’t model healthy behaviors for our kids. We might put ourselves down, even jokingly, and our kids notice. They might even start putting themselves down too. And those behaviors above ⬆ that we start in on when we don’t properly take care of ourselves? They pick up on those and start to model those behaviors too.
Do we want our kids to love themselves? Of course! Do we want them to love themselves even though they have imperfections? Absolutely!! But where do we think they’re going to learn this from?
If we want our kids to love themselves and treat themselves with kindness, compassion, and grace, WE have to be the ones to model that.
Self-love matters. In fact, it might matter more than anything at all–and that’s why I’m so passionate about it.
2. Productivity
If we’re not accomplishing things, it can be hard to feel good about ourselves. When we sit on the couch for hours mindlessly watching Netflix or scrolling through Instagram, it leaves us feeling down and makes it hard to feel that self-love we need to feel.
Or if we have a long to-do list and barely make a dent in it, we feel stressed out and overwhelmed, which leads to burn-out. Or we sacrifice sleep and time with our families in order to accomplish the things we need to accomplish, but then we feel unfulfilled, lonely, and guilty.
I believe that we can be highly productive as moms and still have time to play with our kids, go on dates with our spouse, serve others, have hobbies, hang out with friends, and relax! Yes, it IS possible!
As a productivity junkie, I spend lots of time reading books and listening to podcasts that talk about this subject. I love finding ways to tweak my daily routine to provide maximum productivity AND maximum joy. And I love to share what I learn–what I’ve found works and what doesn’t–with other moms.
3. Finding Fun in Motherhood
Yes, productivity can help us feel that self-love we need, but at some point, we can get too focused on productivity that we forget to have fun. I know I’m guilty of this all too often 🤦♀️. But fun is such an important part of our lives! We don’t want to look back at our lives and think, “Well, I accomplished a lot. But I didn’t have any fun.”
The reason behind maximizing our productivity should be so we have plenty of time for fun! And I mean plenty! We should be spending time every single day on fun, and longer chunks of time a few times a week. THIS IS SO IMPORTANT.
We need time to recharge. We need time to connect with those we love. We need the endorphins and energy we get from fun to keep us going through the laundry, the stomach flu, the trials.
We could all use a little more intentional fun in our lives.
Fun comes in several forms–fun with our kids, fun with our spouse, fun as a family, fun by ourselves, fun with our friends, fun with acquaintances or strangers, fun with extended family. We need all of these types of fun! And I want to show you how and why to make it a priority in your life.
Creating Our Dream Life
If we make these three things a priority in our lives, I believe that we can and will love our lives as moms. We can make our everyday life the life of our dreams!
What’s one area above that you struggle with and why? I’d love to hear in the comments below.
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Britney is a wife and mom with a passion for helping other women see the good inside of them. She loves podcasts, polka dots, and dancing around the kitchen with her family.