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Honoring each others’ choices

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2 Responses to Honoring each others’ choices
  1. Sherrrie All
    March 20, 2014 | 12:25 pm

    Not sure I can really explain why this happened, but when I read the book “The Mommy Myth” by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels http://www.amazon.com/The-Mommy-Myth-Idealization-Motherhood/dp/0743260465 (parts of which can be a little hard to swallow but I encourage every woman to press on!) something in my brain just dramatically switched! And I was almost instantly better able to reserve criticism of myself and other mothers. (I recommend Amy’s book too for this; I just happened to read The Mommy Myth first).

    By reading The Mommy Myth I was able to let go of a lot of judgments about motherhood that I had been holding onto for a very long time – even way before I ever became a mother!! I think it was the idea that parenting is hard no matter who you are or how well equipped you think you are going into it. It helped to learn about all of the societal forces that try to create a one-size-fits-all approach to mothering. These forces can cause us to feel smothered by so many shoulds that we can never possibly be happy if we are constantly letting the shoulds affect us. The book helped me identify many of the motherhood shoulds I had been carrying around all of my life & helped me look at them in a new light. It gave me the permission I needed to question my shoulds & in doing so I was better able to understand, appreciate and respect the choices of other mothers as well.

    Also, watching myself “break” so many of the “rules” of parenting that I had set up for myself before actually becoming a parent – by embracing the brutal truth that parenthood makes me a hypocrite & there is nothing I can do about it – I’m often eager to eat my pre-parenting words & apologize for my past criticisms and judgements and to be more compassionate about the current differences I see.

  2. loving
    May 22, 2014 | 5:01 pm

    Ah, thanks for the recommendation and for sharing from your experiences. You share your parenting insights so vulnerably and powerfully! Appreciate that.

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