A "Revelation" in Mothering

For as long as I can remember I wanted to be a mother. My opportunity for motherhood came much later than I anticipated. I always figured it would come naturally to me. I have always been great with children and had an instinct about the needs of children. That instinct has made me very successful in my profession as a speech-language pathologist, so much so that I sought specialized training to work with children with multiple and severe disabilities. I worked with the infants and toddlers that no one else knew how to treat, the ones that intimidated even the really good therapists. My typical clients were hearing and visually impaired and had cerebral palsy, or were visually impaired and had cerebral palsy, or had feeding difficulties along with any combination of the above. I thought that this would serve to make me a better mother once I had the opportunity to be a mother.

While my instincts about children and the specialized training have been helpful to me, my own child has presented me with challenges that I could never have anticipated. No one warned me that mommy hormones mixed with sleep deprivation could cloud my judgment and make me doubt my own ability to give my child what he needed. No one told me that my child would have needs that even a seasoned mother would have difficulty meeting. No one told me that those initial feelings that shook my confidence in the first few months of my son's life would still be with me two years later. I find myself struggling almost daily. I am hard on myself. I feel like I should be better at this, that I should be better able to meet my own child's needs, that I should be a better mother to him, that I should have more patience, and the list of negative thoughts goes on.

I've learned that being a therapist is a lot easier than being a mother, even with the most challenging of patients. When I went back to work when my son was 5-months-old, I realized just how much harder it was to be a mother than it was to go to work and see my patients. It was shocking to me. I never consciously compared those two parts of me before going back to work. Of course being a therapist is easier than being a mother, but I never thought about it before. Nothing in my experiences has led me to believe that anything is harder than being a mother.

So why, oh why, did I think that mothering would just come so naturally to me? I have no idea. Naivety, the essence of youth when I started that thought process so many years ago (naivety), or just plain cluelessness?

My "revelation"? I realized that it is OK for me to struggle with being a mother. I realized that I am way too hard on myself. I didn't have any specialized training in motherhood prior to becoming one so how could I have expected that I would just know how to do this?

With my "revelation", I have made a conscious decision to stop being so hard on myself, to stop my negativity. I know that this is not something that I can just turn off and that it is going to be a process, but I feel relieved already.