Why it’s Important to Celebrate YOU as a Stay-at-Home Mom
How often do you celebrate yourself? The answer is probably that it never even crosses your mind!
You spend plenty of time thinking about all the tasks you still haven’t managed to cross off your to-do list (and how on earth you’ll get it all done tomorrow), yet never take a moment to celebrate the amazing person that you are, or all the ways you showed up as your powerful self today. From the courage you found to introduce yourself to that new mom in the playground, to the new skill you learned to make life easier for the whole family, to finding time to read that book you’ve been wanting to start for so long, to getting yourself to bed at a decent time - they all add up to you being the person you want to be and creating the life you want to live.
And when we focus on that rather than the moment we lost our temper with the kids or missed the deadline for the urgent school forms for the second time, we get to enjoy - and celebrate! - exactly who we are right now, every single day.
Who you are right now is who you’re meant to be
Do you feel like you’re always waiting for that magical “someday” when you’ll finally have everything running exactly as planned? What if you decided instead to celebrate all the ways you’re exactly who you’re meant to be right now? Just imagine how much more fun that would be than focusing solely on all the things that go wrong!
We’re constantly thinking about how we can do better and increase the good in our lives, and we assume that the bad just shouldn’t be there at all. But life is always going to be a 50/50 balance, and we’re always going to experience a mix of both positive and negative emotions, no matter what our circumstances may be.
For the first seven years as a stay-at-home mom, I was always striving for my idea of perfection and became incredibly self-critical in the process. I would constantly berate myself for doing the wrong thing, being disorganized, handling a situation badly, or being late (again). “I’m such a mess!” I’d say to my three daughters, often in a light-hearted way. But this became the label I assigned myself, and I spent a good few years not liking myself very much at all.
Until I came across the book “Mirror Work” by Louise Hay - a 21-day program that introduced me to the concept of affirmations, which are positive statements spoken out loud while looking in the mirror (for example “I am a wonderful, capable being”). This program showed me how to really like and love myself again and made me realize that I have the power to choose to truly enjoy myself and my life, even when things are difficult.
Stop people pleasing
A huge part of truly liking yourself is learning to listen to exactly what you want and knowing what your dreams and desires actually are. And a big part of this is being able to say no to other people when they ask you to do something you know you don’t want to do! Because if we’re always doing what other people require of us, and ultimately becoming dependent on their approval to feel good about ourselves, we’ll never be able to show up as our true authentic selves.
Putting ourselves and our desires dead last usually ends only in resentment and frustration and can be seen as a strong indication that we believe we simply don’t matter. If you allow this to continue for a longer period of time, you start to lose all sense of self - to the point where you may no longer have any understanding of the little things you might enjoy, let alone what sort of life you actually want to lead.
So what should we do instead of blindly saying yes to everything that's asked of us? The answer is to start paying close attention to what we’re thinking and doing the things we actually want to do! Don’t worry at all that your focus will suddenly now be all on you or that you’ll become selfish. Because by doing this for yourself and starting to fill yourself up with the things you genuinely enjoy, you’ll only have that much more to give to those around you. You can show up for them with an energy and joy and excitement you didn’t have before, rather than the resentment and obligation and heavy feeling of self-sacrifice you may have been carrying around with you for years.
Make play a part of every single day
If you are feeling like you’ve lost yourself after a longer period of giving everything you have to your kids and others, the one thing that will always bring you back to who you are is play - doing something that lights you up every single day. Because when you’re truly playing, you lose all sense of time passing, you’re not remotely self-conscious, and you feel fully alive and filled with joy. When you stop, you can’t wait to do it again!
And if you’ve no idea what it is that might make you feel this way, look back at what you loved to play as a child. What was that thing you used to do over and over again that gave you the same sense of joy and excitement every single time? Try that and see how you feel!
By giving yourself permission to try the things you might enjoy in this way, you get to receive signals about how you’re feeling as you do them. You get to really listen and hear that guidance as it nudges you towards exactly what you want for your life, and you get to know and enjoy yourself as you truly are! As a result, you become more and more curious and find yourself wanting to explore more and more of exactly what’s possible for you!
Go for what you want
But what if you’re reading this and thinking that you don’t actually believe anything is possible for you?
Start by looking at something you never thought you’d be able to do, but is now a part of your everyday life because YOU accomplished it!
It can be something small that you may be telling yourself is no big deal because everyone else has been doing all along anyway. But it’s absolutely worth celebrating right now because at some point in your life you were entirely convinced you’d never be able to do it!
I was afraid to drive in Chicago for so many years - the cars were on the other side of the road, the drivers seemed to constantly be honking their horns, and it all felt like far too much pressure for me. Plus I’d always believed I was a terrible driver after failing my driving test three times in the UK before finally getting my license. But this was just a thought I had about myself.
What’s so important here is to notice how we talk to ourselves when there’s something that we want to start doing - because we so often tell ourselves that we’re simply not good at things. It’s not useful at all to think this way because then we’re always allowing the past (like failing three driving tests!) to dictate who we should be. To get the result we want, we have to first be in the identity of our future selves. So for me that meant no longer getting frustrated and saying things like “why can’t I drive in the city?” or even “I want to get better at driving in the city,” but instead asking myself exactly how I was already successful at driving. And then I celebrated it all - my first short trip to the store, the first time I reverse parked, and my first long-distance drive were all worth celebrating to me!
Whether it’s by throwing yourself a dance party (my favorite), sharing a win with your partner, or standing in front of the mirror in the superhero pose with your fists on your hips and your chin held high, decide today that you’re going to celebrate yourself just as you are right now. It’s also fun to keep a nightly journal of all the ways you've made yourself proud, because as you begin to fill up those pages, you’ll start to see exactly what’s possible for you when you truly delight in yourself every single day.
If you’d like help on seeing yourself as the amazingly capable person that you are, or are curious about all the possibilities that are available to you, send me an email at
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