The days seem long. Much like winter. Cold. Dark. Lonely. Overwhelming. It all just seems to drag on. The kids are constantly whining. Someone is always sick. You’re trying to keep up with the house, but when you get one room clean you turn around to see another left in ruins. The to-do list is stacking up. The demands are never ending. You’re exhausted. You’re lost. Mama, you feel like you are barely surviving motherhood. This wasn’t at all what you expected. You anticipated hard days. In fact, you anticipated hard seasons. You just didn’t think so much of it would be this hard. You didn’t expect to have days…weeks…months of barely surviving. Yet, here you are with your head just above water and you’re trying not to drown. You find yourself barely surviving motherhood and you feel like you just can’t get anything right.

I’ve been there sweet friend. I have been in that season where I felt like I was barely surviving. I have been in that season where it seemed like everything I tried, failed. I couldn’t find anything that worked for my current season. I was drowning in trying to figure it all out, trying to be the perfect mom. I had all these standards and expectations of what would make me a good mom, yet I didn’t realize it was those very things that were making me drown. I dangled these expectations in front of me just out of my reach never realizing that they were unattainable to begin with. My desire to be the perfect mother was drowning out the good mom that I already was. I focused so much on what I wasn’t accomplishing that I missed the things right in front of me that I was doing well.

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You see, that’s where it gets messy. Sometimes we feel like we are barely surviving because we are placing unrealistic expectations on who we are as a mom. We expect ourselves to be this standard of perfection that is impossible to reach. We fill our minds with all these things we need to do to feel like we are succeeding as mom. But really, we weren’t ever supposed to reach those items we put on the pedestal in the first place. We were only meant to do what we were called to do. We were only meant to mother the way that we were called to mother. We can’t discover what that is when we are placing the expectations of the world on our shoulders. We can’t come up for air when we are carrying weight we were never meant to take on.

Mama, you’re barely surviving motherhood because you weren’t meant to carry the expectations of every other person around you.

All you need to carry is what the Lord has placed in your hands to hold. That’s it. Nothing else. It’s when we embrace only what we are called to carry that we can flourish. Even on the hard days, the days that we find ourselves in survival mode, we know how to come up for air because we aren’t weighed down by all that’s unnecessary. You really can flourish as a mom.

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When you let go of the expectations of the world and discover what it is you’re called to do as a mom, you’ll see yourself growing healthy and strong. You will find a confidence you didn’t know you held within. You’ll find that even on days that are rough, you have the strength to get through. When you’re feeling buried by the demands of motherhood, you’ll be able to see the bigger picture. When you’re feeling inadequate, you’ll remember the one who called you to do this.

You can flourish mama, it’s what you were meant to do.