As March gains momentum and the daffodils are beginning to adorn the landscape, the theme is \u2018celebrating mother\u2019s day\u2019 as proclaimed in a shop window I passed this morning. It has given me pause to reflect on how I can celebrate myself as a mother this month and the high standards that often prevent me from joining the party.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.\u201d Leo Tolstoy\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n When I became a new Mum I put pressure on myself to be the \u2018perfect mother\u2019 and to \u2018get it right\u2019.\u00a0 Sound familiar?\u00a0 There was a lot of \u2018should be able to do this\u2019 and \u2018ought to do it like this\u2019 running around in my head and a littering of failure as I strived to live up to the image of the perfect mother – a trap that I had inadvertently set up for myself.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I wanted to be good at breastfeeding, I wanted to be the only one who could soothe my baby to sleep and I wanted to be perfect at it all without fail.\u00a0 I set some very high standards, and at all costs I was going to magnificently cope in my new role.\u00a0 As the pressure grew, and standards slipped, I became overwhelmed, angry and more disillusioned as I could not live up to the image I had set.\u00a0 I viewed myself as a complete failure and slowly but surely spiralled down into feelings of helplessness which resulted in post-natal depression.<\/p>\n Over time I realised that I was unconsciously putting pressure on myself to be perfect and that this resulted in feelings of extreme anxiety that fuelled a need for acceptance within me.\u00a0 As I gained more insight, I learnt to challenge my belief that \u2018I should be perfect\u2019 and I have learnt that I may shoot for the moon but it\u2019s also okay to be good enough and just reach the sky.\u00a0 Learning to question my high standards, to evaluate what is realistic, what really matters and what is humanely possible has often helped me to relax my tight grip on wanting everything to be perfect and has still enabled me to get the job done to a standard that is adequate and acceptable, even to me.\u00a0 As Rebecca Wells so eloquently writes \u201cGood enough is good enough. Perfect will make you a big fat mess every time<\/em>.\u201d So today I\u2019m in celebration of the good enough mother, a role that I will proudly embody on mother\u2019s day and beyond, what about you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As March gains momentum and the daffodils are beginning to adorn the landscape, the theme is \u2018celebrating mother\u2019s day\u2019 as proclaimed in a shop window I passed this morning. It has given me pause to reflect on how I can celebrate myself as a mother this month and the high standards that often prevent me … Continue reading “In celebration of the \u2018good enough\u2019 Mother”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sueholdsworth.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sueholdsworth.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sueholdsworth.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sueholdsworth.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sueholdsworth.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/sueholdsworth.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49,"href":"http:\/\/sueholdsworth.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/49"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sueholdsworth.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sueholdsworth.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sueholdsworth.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Being \u2018Good Enough\u2019<\/h3>\n