Recently, I was “talking” to a friend (in quotes because it wasn’t talking in the conventional face-to-face sense but through an app called Marco Polo, of which I am very grateful for helping me stay in touch with friends across the world) about all the “gray” in motherhood. The conversation was sparked by a post I had seen titled “To the mom who loves motherhood—but misses her freedom, too” and something about it resonated so deeply with me.

As moms, we’re always in tension.
We love our children and cherish our time with them but simultaneously miss our freedom, our bodies, our time.
We feel fully the weight of the honor to bring these little beings earthside, to have them utterly dependent on us, to raise them, to have them trust us, but this weight can also be crushing at times. It’s not always rainbows and sunshine.
We’re thankful but we’re tested.
We’re overjoyed but also overwhelmed.

Motherhood isn’t black and white. It’s not “this” or “that”. It’s messy. It’s complicated.

Over the years, I’ve been learning to embrace the complexities, the gray. But we all need a reminder sometimes.

So this message is for all you mamas (myself, included).
Just because we miss and yearn for the bygone days doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate the current “here and now”. If anything, we’re fully feeling it all, fully present in the good, the bad, and the ugly.
It’s kind of like this: In the movie “Inside Out”, Riley’s core memories are filed away as one of the following: joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear. But later (spoiler alert), the feelings realize in “Headquarters” that Riley can benefit from emotional polarities and that she can experience multiple feelings at the same time.

In life, we all flit and flutter between emotions but especially so in motherhood. When we allow ourselves to feel our emotions, all of them, however mixed and messy they are, it doesn’t make us “weaker” but actually makes us stronger and fuller.