Stay-at-Home Moms Need to Nurture Their Inner Lives
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Posted by Melissa Chapman Aug 2, 2006 |
I've gotten some pretty interesting responses to my last article, which focused on the importance of Moms nurturing their inner lives, by not taking on more responsibilities and tasks than they can handle for starters.
I made a reference to Andrea Yates being that she's recently been in the news, having had her guilty verdict overturned to NOT guilty. I tried to point out the fact that by home schooling all five of her children she was clearly taking on more responsibility than humanly possible, and with her history of post-partum psychosis and mental illness, she really never should've put herself in a position where she would likely crack under the extreme pressure and in her case drown all five of her young children.
I am in no way agreeing or validating what she did as acceptable behavior. What I was trying to point out is, that- as a stay-at-home Mom, like most of us stay-at-home Moms she was clearly trying to do EVERYTHING. For a stay-at-home Mom who doesn't suffer from mental illness, doing IT ALL is an insurmountable task, which if attempted will only lead to failure and ultimate guilt. The stay-at-home Mom will feel because she cannot do it all that must mean she is a bad mother. If she's home all the time, how could she not do it all?! Right? Well Andrea Yates had to deal with the regular problems of being a stay-at-home Mom trying to do it all and on top of it with an extremely debilitating mental illness.
While her end result was her tragic decision to drown her five children, under the influence of her unrelenting mental illness, for most of us stay-at-home Moms who are attempting to do it all, including those who home school as well, I'm saying it is really a self- defeating goal. There is no way to do it all, unless you have a full-time housekeeper. Someone who can keep everything in the background running smoothly, have the meals prepared, cleaned up, the laundry washed, dried, folded and put away and all the rugs vacuumed and the toilets sparkling clean. WOW, as I'm writing this, I am actually starting to yearn for such a housekeeper, who by doing all the "busy housework" would free me up as a stay-at-home Mom- to really listen to my kids and answers their 1,001 daily questions, read books to them, eat leisurely dinners with them, and actually sit with them at dinner. Gosh there are so many ways I'd be able to improve my role as stay-at-home Mom and really revel in my kids and their lives.
But like 99 percemt of us stay-at-home Moms I don't have a housekeeper and all that busy work falls on me, as well as my daughter's insistence and impatience with me when she asks all these questions and doesn't get her answers as speedily as she'd like to. But I'm like every other stay-at-home Mom, and after five years of being home with my kids, I'm just now starting to try and listen to my inner voice and nurture my inner life.
Of course I feel completely selfish when I sit at the table in the morning and drink my coffee, while my kids are tugging at my legs or running wildly around the living room. But every day that I give myself those twenty minutes in the morning to watch one of the morning shows I'm nurturing myself, by doing something that's just for me. It might sound really simple and not as nurturing as taking a yoga class or curling up with a great book for a few hours, but I'm working on getting there.