When mom's collide

I have been really struggling to juggle all the pressures of motherhood this new school year. I have been sick, there has been huge financial upheaval as my work contract ends in March and I am battling to find other work, I have one child starting BIG school and the other starting a new school and having to leave her friends behind. My dad is in hospital facing bypass surgery and I feel as if I am being torn in ten different directions, trying to be a good mom, wife ,daughter,employee.

So often I look at other moms and think that they have it so together or I judge them for choices that they make that are so foreign to my own. Today I came across an advert about the Sisterhood of Motherhood that shows so clearly what it means to be a mom and why, despite our differences we are all just trying to do the best we know how as parents for the most precious people in our lives. Please take a few minutes to watch and share this video.

A year of living dangerously

Danger means many different things to different people. For some it is the adrenaline rush you get from leaping out of a plane. Others get a rush from chemicals or alcohol or even new relationship. For others it is their career. My dangerous looks a little different.

Relection

I have a whole box full of patterns I want to try, cookbooks I would love to experiment with, a bag of polymer clay with a head full of ideas of what I would love to create, two easels and a drawer full of art materials. My dangerous is picking up the paintbrush, opening a new Word document, adding the first stitch to needle or material, buying the ingredients for a new recipe. The blank canvas, in whichever form it comes terrifies me, yet I have this desperate desire to create. It fills me to the point where I cannot not create.

Perfectionism and creativity are not happy bed companions. The very nature of creativity is wrought with failure. I am so scared of this. Ruining a canvas, writing a post no-one will read terrifies me to the point of immobility. So this year I have promised myself I WILL create, regardless of the outcome. I have given myself permission to fail because I realise that without this permission I will stagnate and die a little more inside each day.

Letting go

My God did not create me for this. He is the first creator and has made me in His image, which means that my creativity is given as a gift from my Father, to enjoy and to give pleasure to others.

So here is to a year (... and a future) of leaping off cliffs and living dangerously.