Another Mother's Day

This was my third mothers day of acknowledging the truth surrounding this holiday and though I can look back and see how far I have come I still have to say that I still have mixed feelings about this day. A day I still find myself trying to avoid Facebook and social feeds and the plasters of mother/daughter pictures and long praise filled notes. It's a day most celebrate someone special that nurtured, supported, and stood by them as they grew. Someone who listened to their heart cries and applauded their passions. Someone who spoke truth into them, who set an example to them of what a strong, loving, passionate, brave, beautiful, independent, imperfectly perfect woman should be. Someone who taught them how to start to learn and think, feel and thrive. Someone who loved them unconditionally and unmanipulatively. Someone who protected them and fought for them. 

This mothers day I went into it with a new outlook on the day. It was always a just another holiday of fake for me. Of trying to please and trying to make myself feel something inside that wasn't there. Then it became a day of looking at myself as a mother to not only my boys but to myself. Celebrating nurturing that little girl inside me. Last year someone told me to sit down and write a mothers day note to myself and it started a whole new path of painful discovery, healing and freedom.

This year I'm still in that place of acknowledging the loving mom that I have become to that lost girl that is deep inside and celebrating the mother I have become to me in my own life. Because that mother I have become from healing myself and digging through the pain inside is the mother that my boys need the most.

The last thing I want for them is what I knew. The last thing I want for them is for this day to be surrounded by expectations of them celebrating a woman in their life that isn't even a real mother to them. Instead of this day being about me I want to make it about them in my head. Instead of them growing up thinking this day must be a day to sing me praises I want them to know how incredibly irreplacbly special they are to me...to this world. As they grow up I want them to know that without them this "holiday" the world has come up with wouldn't even exist for me.

I want to face this day not thinking about the incredible toughness being a parent sometimes is, and about how exhausted and stressed I can get and about all the crazy I face everyday and how I should be celebrated for all the things I do. NO. I want to face this day thinking about the amazing humans that are here in my life that I get the honor of loving on, standing by, nurturing, messing up with and fixing it and messing up again. I want to face the day taking a deep look into these two beautiful souls, so alive, longing, yearning, passionate and innocent and shed tears over their amazingness and marvel that they get to be in MY life! That I get to be THEIR mom!