Category: Fulfillment

Motherhood shouldn’t just be a drudgery. Find fulfillment in your most important calling–mother.

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Kids/Parenting Fulfillment

Getting into the groove of gratitude

Almost a year ago, I attended a parenting class. Basically, the takeaway was to actually apply consequences to your children’s actions instead of just talking about them. (Which is a big old DUH—and an awful lot of work.) But the thing that’s really made a difference in our home was the teacher’s other point.

Last week, I came across the statistics backing this up again and I thought I’d share.

They say that children get a lot more negative messages than positive ones. Some of these are understandably necessary: no, you can’t have candy three meals a day; no, you can’t touch the hot stove; no, you can’t run into traffic. But can you imagine if you were told “no” as often as a four-year-old does?

(Yes, yes I can. “No, you can’t do what you want right now. No, everything anyone has ever told you won’t work to help this child. No, you can’t get the amount of rest that is physically necessary to your mental health and wellbeing.”)

Those feelings of negativity lead to frustration. Kids (and moms!) need more positive messages—research suggests as many as four to five positive messages per negative message. The positive messages can also serve as positive reinforcement to get your kids to do what you want (woot!).

So I’ve been working on giving my kids lots of positive reinforcement and messages for almost a year. I can’t say it’s been an amazing transformation and now they’re perfect angels—but I know that it’s making a difference to my kids.

I know because the simplest little things that I do for my kids sometimes prompt some familiar-sounding responses:

“Mom! You made me a sanwich! I never been so happy!”

“Mom! I so p’oud o’ you for getting my paper!”

But most importantly, I get to hear things like this:

“Dankoo for zip me up!”

“Thanks for picking that up!”

“Oh, thank you!”

And that’s a positive message every Mom could use.

What nice things do you recognize in your kids’ mouths?

Photo by Michele Truex

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Fulfillment

Baking it till you make it

Sometimes it’s hard to love any minute of motherhood. I realized that my problem with this lately basically comes down to being burnt out, despite trying to make time for myself.

Which means it’s time to pull out the “big guns”: those almost fail-safe activities that we all enjoy. Working together usually helps to decrease contention and bickering

A few of ours:

  • Getting out of the house
  • Television (or turning it off)
  • Art projects
  • Tickling
  • Reading
  • Baking

Guess which one we did today.

What are your “big guns”?

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Fulfillment

Loving any minute of it

If you’re in Utah, don’t forget to enter the Thanksgiving Point Giveaway! Today is the last day!

It seems like, if we’re happy, we’re supposed to love every minute of our lives. If we enjoy motherhood, we should love every minute of it. And some people really do love every minute of being a mom—so if we don’t, there must be something wrong with us.

I don’t believe that’s true (and I sincerely hope it’s not!).

I say this because sometimes I struggle to love any minute of motherhood, for weeks at a time. Sure, there’s the occasional 30 seconds of bliss as I snuggle a finally-asleep-again-baby, and the flush of pride when Rachel starts crawling at six months or Rebecca successfully counts to 12(!) at <two and a half, and the smiles at Hayden’s first realistic full-body drawing:

Hayden has drawn Rachel. The spots on her tummy show where her diaper leaked.

But those tiny pleasures are so easily forgotten after hours of diapers, whining, crying, screaming, bickering, punishments, refereeing, and motherhood in general—hours where it feels like these tiny tyrants need everything you have to give and more.

When I dare to admit that feeling, I often get comments telling me I should go back to work. Give up, essentially. Focus on what will make you happiest (“giddy with delight”) immediately.

I do still think that what I’m doing as a stay-at-home mom is important. But sometimes, I’m so unhappy on a daily basis that I struggle to feel that what I’m doing is best for me and for the kids.

I do still think that what I said a year ago is true:

Choosing to be happy does not mean that we will automatically be happy all the time. It doesn’t mean we always choose whatever might make us happy right this second.

Choosing happiness means we choose the things we know are most important for our long term happiness.

But I think I need to put more effort into making better choices on a day-to-day basis. I don’t believe we’ll be “giddy with delight” every minute, no matter what we’re doing, but we can try to focus on the things that do make us feel good about motherhood. And it’s about time I recommit to doing that.

When I was good about working on Feeling Fulfilled Fridays, that’s what I was trying to do: focus on those things that I can do to affect the way I feel and we all function. Maybe it’s about time I work on those things again.

I stopped posting about it for several reasons: struggling with these feelings, being too busy, and the deafening lack of response and enthusiasm from 99% of my readership. However, I think that focusing on fulfillment again—refocusing—can help with the first two, since I think they’re really symptoms of the problem instead of side-effects.

The last one . . . well, that one’s up to you. Is there anything I can do to help encourage you to participate in Feeling Fulfilled Fridays?

As a reminder, for FFF we create a list of things that help us feel accomplished, work on a few of those things during the week, and report on Fridays.

What can you do to enjoy your time as a mother more?

And oh yeah, Rachel really is crawling:

Manic smiley photo by Astrid Phillips

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Fulfillment Contests

Final week for GWP!

It’s the last week to enter the Group Writing Project!

Remember, to enter, all you have to do is blog or post about Feeling Fulfilled Fridays by doing any one of these things:

  • A blog post on things that make you feel accomplished (especially as a mother)
  • Your full “feeling accomplished” list
  • A Feeling Fulfilled Friday report
  • Spread the word about FFF or the GWP on Twitter, Facebook or another social network (your privacy settings must be such that I can see the post so I can count it!)

Each post is an entry into the random drawing for the prize—but you must use the form to submit each entry (it’s too easy for me to miss them otherwise!).

That’s right, you can have multiple entries!

The Prize
A $30 Amazon gift card.

(If we get a lot of entries, I’ll give away more than one gift card!)

So hurry and enter!

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Fulfillment

Feeling Fulfilled Fridays 11

It’s feeling fulfilled Friday on MamaBlogga! Here’s how it works:

  1. Make a list of things that make you feel accomplished (but aren’t so huge that they take more than a day or a week)
  2. During the week, try to focus on those things that help us feel accomplished
  3. Report on feeling fulfilled Friday and enter the GWP to win an Amazon gift card!

Ugh. I’m flattened by a rough cold.

But we’ve had some good days this week. I’ve done pretty well on making healthy dinners (until tonight), and when my in-laws were here, we watched almost no TV (and they made me take a nap because I was sick, woot!). And I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Catching Fire this week—two good books. AND I worked on school stuff with the kids at least a little.

AND I need to go lay back down.

How has your week been? How is your list coming?

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Fulfillment

Feeling Fulfilled Fridays 10

Woot! It’s feeling fulfilled Friday on MamaBlogga, part of the October Group Writing Project! Here’s how it works:

  1. Make a list of things that make you feel accomplished (but aren’t so huge that they take more than a day or a week)
  2. During the week, try to focus on those things that help us feel accomplished
  3. Report on feeling fulfilled Friday
  4. Post on your blog and submit on the form for a chance to win an Amazon gift card in the GWP this month!

My week: this week we started a home-preschool co-op with a couple other families in our neighborhood. Rebecca’s still a little young for the class, but we’ve been working on the lessons at home. In fact, there’s even a curriculum for Rachel (who turned four months on Tuesday!). Her curriculum involves reading her a story, scriptures and a poem, listening to Mozart, playing games (this week, little piggies) and nursery rhymes.

For Rebecca and Hayden, they learn letters, numbers, shapes, colors and a little vocabulary. Hayden is excelling so far—for the first time, he’s really eager to write the letter A all by himself. Rebecca, on the other hand, enjoys spending time together, but of course a lot of the lessons don’t “stick.” She’s only two, though; I don’t expect her to learn everything.

Teaching the kids something new is on my accomplishment list—but, notably, their learning something is not. When I made my list, I thought of a lot more things than what I put on there. It’s hard not to feel accomplished when the kids are angels, do whatever I want, and prove that they are the geniuses I’m convinced they are. And of course it’s okay to have those things on your list—it’s your list. For me, though,those things are out of my control, and feeling accomplished—and fulfilled—is too important to leave up to the mercy of my children’s whims.

What do you think? Would/did you include things that are out of your control on your accomplishment list?

And don’t forget: Post about your FFF and enter to win!