Perfectionism and motherhood!

Perfectionism is a beast to deal with during adolescence and early 20s, but I personally feel it peaks during motherhood. that was certainly the case for me. Just when I felt like I had conquered my inner perfectionist, I became a mother and a new voice in my head showed up. And this voice was mean.

Before having Perla, I had accepted that it was okay for me to make mistakes in my own life. but when I became a mother, I found it much harder to be lenient in myself when it came to making mistakes in her life. 

The "Shoulds" came flooding back (you should be doing this; you shouldn’t be doing that" my inner bitch demanded) and I began living for external validation and praise from others. I was no longer able to make a decision for myself and began asking my family, my friends, google, and ... if I was doing things right. 

Early in motherhood journey, I had a wonderful advice. Maria, your kids don't need a perfect mother, they need a real one! Those words blew my damn mind. I knew them to be truer than true. that's when I began to see that I was using my perfectionism as a coping tool to minimize my fears. my perfectionism was pushing me back into busy-mode, and I was letting it, and was a strategy of control I was developing in an attempt to keep me feeling accepted and to keep my family safe. A lack of self-confidence, busyness, and perfectionism all hold us back from living our greatest life and have one thing in common: the fear of failure. 

The fear of not being good enough. the fear of going against the crowd. fear of being judged. it can feel unnatural to stop doing and start listening to our intuition, especially after ignoring it for so long. it takes courage to slow down, go inward, and rest. it takes confidence to trust ourselves and trust life enough to release the control and the business. but it is only from that place of stillness and trust that we can begin to find our balance, and in turn, discover who truly are and what we want for ourselves and our family.