Happiness...

Four years ago, I was a brand new stay-at-home-mom with an extremely fussy 2-month old. I spent all of my waking hours (which were many, seeing as how he hardly slept) trying to figure out how to keep him content (aka: not screaming). Over time, this morphed into me spending all of my time trying to be a "good" mother: feed him the right food, read him the right books, teach him the right things. I spent so much of my time trying to figure out if I was a good or a bad mother that I forgot one very important thing. No, not just important, but crucial. This motherhood business is supposed to be FUN! When I stop trying so hard to be a "good" mom to my kids, and I step back and breathe it in and bask in everything unique about them, I realize something that I forgot along the way: this is FUN! This is MY chance at a second childhood, my time to be home with them and have fun and relax and enjoy just BEING. I don't have to spend every second of the day planning activities, teaching them colors and numbers and writing and reading. I don't have to stress about them not eating their vegetables or using perfect manners or being potty trained. But somewhere along the line I convinced myself that I did need to do all of those things, and being a mom stopped being fun and really felt like a job that I was terrible at.

Until now.

I feel like this move has woken me up. Maybe it's the onset of summer--that feeling deep in my bones that calls me out of bed in the morning and screams, "Come and play!" Maybe it's knowing that I get a fresh start here, in a new place, in a new home, with new people to meet along the way. Maybe it's because my babies are finally NOT babies at all anymore, but growing children who can converse and laugh and make me laugh like I've never laughed before.I don't know. But I do know that I've had more fun in these past few weeks than I've probably had in the past few years. And while part of me feels sad about that, the other part is jumping up and down, throwing my arms out to the wind, holding my head up high, ready to dive in headfirst.

I'm not perfect. I make mistakes, a lot of them, in fact. There are important people in my life who I love that I'm not speaking to right now and it feels ridiculous. But this morning at the lake, I looked at my kids and saw them, I mean really saw them, and I was happy. I've spent the past 4 years trying so hard to be happy and to be good at this mom business, and this morning I sat back and let it all go. And like a butterfly I've been chasing, it floated ever so quietly down and settled right onto my shoulders, and that happiness lit me up from the inside out. I promise you, I am not going to let it go.

"Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." ~Nathaniel Hawthorne