I feel like there’s this modern mom thing where we bitch incessantly about our children and our lives…especially those of us that are stay-at-home moms. It’s weird. It feels really freeing sometimes. I love that I have a huge network of friends that I can commiserate with on this motherhood journey. It’s nice to know that I’m not alone in the oft-aggravating daily things that come with being a mom…the whining, the complaining, the missed showers, the leggings and pajamas, the fights over meals, the screen time guilt, all the things! 

I often wonder if my own mother bitched about motherhood in this same way? Were the 80s as accepting of it as the 2010s have been? Or were the 80s just not as fraught with “mommy wars” so there wasn’t as much to bitch about? Or did all our mothers just keep quiet and suffer through? To be honest, I wonder a LOT: how many of our own mothers were suffering from PPD/PPA and it just wasn’t something that was as widely discussed or treated as it is today? I mean, I could talk a person’s ear off about my PPD struggles and I just don’t give a shit what he or she thinks. Mental illness is a very real thing and something that deserves a lot more attention than it gets, even now.

Anyway, it really just makes me wonder. I’ve had several weeks in a row of incredibly awful days with the toddler. Being one thousand weeks pregnant doesn’t at all help the situation. But Godzilla has been absolutely on fire recently and last week, we didn’t have a single good day. It was a garbage week and there is no getting around that. I did so much bitching to and with my mom friends last week. None of us had great weeks. It was one hit after the next. Small things that normally wouldn’t seem so horrible just set us off in all the wrong ways (like when Godzilla tried to bring me my 32oz water bottle only to dump it all over herself, the couch, and the floor).

So when I woke up (way too early) this past Monday, I decided to employ “the secret” (you know, that book from a few years ago that tells us that what we say and think is what we bring upon ourselves blah blah blah). I kept repeating over and over, “Today is a good day. I have a happy toddler. I am a great mom.” And you know what? Every day this week (and yeah, it’s only Wednesday), we’ve had surprisingly good days. Godzilla hasn’t been a complete jerk upon waking up,  she has fought me about getting in her stupid car seat, she’s been pleasant to everyone she sees, meals haven’t been quite as challenging (she still eats like a crazy person, but she’s at least trying a few new things, like the awesome red wine braised shor rib stew I made last night).

The point is, I think we tend to spend a lot more time focusing on and bitching about the awfulness that is motherhood. To be clear, it does have it’s horrifying moments. There are days, weeks, months that make it seem like everything is awful and nothing is ever going to get better. But I wonder if that’s partly our own fault. Are we creating self-fulfilling prophecies by constantly bitching?

For several years, I’ve been a proponent of “positive self talk.” Before I married a sailor and had children, I worked in a pretty high stress job (which is just a strange thing to say because I sold cheese and worked with some of the greatest people on the planet). At the same time, I was going through some incredibly stressful and overwhelming things in my personal life. But every day, I tried to wake up and just decide I was going to have a good day. And on the days I actually remembered to do this? Those were the best days. Sometimes, they were also the most stressful, but I managed my desk and my head with such ease that I ended up falling in love with my job even more, sometimes hoping for a new, insane, cheesy challenge to come across my desk just so I could kick its ass one more time.

But somewhere along the line, probably when I stopped working and naively thought I wouldn’t be stressed anymore, I stopped remembering my positive self talk morning ritual. My life is currently far more stressful than I could have imagined it would be. So I think it’s time I re-introduce my old routine into my new life. It’s time for me to focus more on the good, great, and wonderful things that motherhood has to offer.