Life Beyond School: Motherhood

As most of you know, my college career is coming to an end on April 26th. And I couldn't be more excited. Nervous. Lost.

I haven't even graduated yet and I have this feeling that I'm forgetting a homework assignment or that I should check my email to make sure I didn't get a last minute announcement from my professor.

I've been really thinking about life after college and transitioning into parenthood. Two very big steps with only a few weeks in between. As you can imagine it is slowly overwhelming me. Up until now my life has been focused on visible, obtainable goals. A life filled with deadlines and expectations clearly outlined in digital and hardcopy. My work has been evaluated in black-and-white fashion based on a rubric, and then I am given a grade based on my performance.

It was so easy to compare my work to the work of other students in my class.
It was so easy to see success and improvement when I was given a raise or was accepted for a better job.

Not only have I been in school for the past 18 years of my life, I have also been working regularly working 1-2 jobs since I was 15 years old. My resume slowly accumulated more and more experience, and my credentials and compensation increased with each job.
Although it was hard work, it was nice how grades, pay, and resumes made it easy to measure my success and compare my work with the work of others.
Grades
Pay.
Those are both clear-cut methods of comparison. Easy to measure how much I was worth and how well I was doing compared to the "average" of my peers.

Parenthood is very different. Although I have always wanted to be a stay at home mom (SAHM), I am finding it hard to let go of my former method of measuring success and realize that motherhood has completely different ways of measuring success.
There will be no deadlines, syllabi, rubrics, or grades. There will be no salary, raises, or bonuses.

My academic and professional careers that were filled with comparison and competition will be obsolete in the world of parenthood.

I am not writing this blog post to whine or to try and justify mine or anyone's choices.
I want to be a SAHM because it's what I want to do and it's what I know will be best for our family. I'm not saying it will be easy, though. I can sympathize with women today who find it hard to find fulfillment in staying at home based on the criteria we've been judged with our whole lives.
It is not easy to switch from one mentality to another.

There are probably many of you that have never felt this way and many who have. It's a deeply personal subject that I think women avoid discussing, especially in the LDS culture. Any mention of having mixed feelings of staying at home puts you right in the middle of radical working mothers and die-hard stay at home moms. A place where you don't want to be. I wish we could openly discuss our feelings without the threat of being attacked. There is nothing wrong with discussing how our culture affects our opinion of motherhood and our identity as a mother.

Personally, our culture that is focused on academic and career success has affected me. Not in a bad way, just in a way that makes it necessary for me to change my mindset and make a formal transition to parenthood.

I am so excited to be a mother and I am immensely grateful that our circumstances make it possible for me to stay at home with our baby. I wouldn't have it any other way, but I will be the first to admit that it won't be an easy transition from one mindset to another.

However, judging from the amazing examples in my life (mother, aunts, cousins, in-laws) I sure as heck know that it will be more than worth it.

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Quiero a Mi Madre

I love my mom.

I didn't actually know how to say that in Spanish; it helps to have a bilingual husband. It makes me look a lot cooler than I really am. 

I digress.

I heard a neat fact today that relates to motherhood; after a mother gives birth to her baby her body is flooded with happy hormones. Not the kind of hormones that you have after eating double chocolate brownies with caramel on top; these hormones actually alter the brain and make the mother fall in love with her child. This kind of love is the epitome of selfless, unconditional, divine love. The mother has just barely met this little person and she would lay down her life in an instant if she needed to.

I almost started crying when I heard this. I thought about my mother and the feeling she must have had when I, and all of my siblings, were born. She went through immense discomfort, inconvenience, and immense pain just so I could receive a body and experience this earth life. Not only did she do this, but she absolutely fell in love with me when I had nothing to give in return. I went through life feeling this love and benefiting from her protection, love, and sacrifices.

When I was just a little kid I learned about the love of Christ and how he suffered and sacrificed for each of us. It was because of my mother's Christ-like love that I was able to have faith in Christ's love for me.

I am so grateful for my mother and her example of Christ's love; I can comprehend that Christ sees me as a person of great worth, someone worth sacrificing for, because I first understood this from my mother. 

Thank you for teaching me about the most important part of the gospel without even preparing a lesson. Thank you for giving me the assurance that no matter what choice I made I always knew you loved me. Thank you for always sacrificing when you received nothing in return. When it came to what was good, better or best for your children, you always chose the best. Thank you for choosing your children over the world.

I may not have said it when I was younger, but I'm saying it now. 

Thank you.

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