Choosing Yourself is NOT Selfish

I fucking hate the fact that in our society, every society if we’re being honest, women choosing themselves is synonymous with being selfish. Women just cannot win- if we talk about our kids we’re boring and have no ambition, if we don’t, we’re a bad mother who shouldn’t have had them. If we work, we’re selfish, if we don’t, we’re boring and have let down feminism. It blows my mind that in this day and age we can still have our daily life choices dictated to us. Well, we’re not doing that anymore- they can try and tell us what to do but it is our choice if we listen. I’m not saying it’s easy but we can start by not joining in. You will never catch me gossiping about someone else’s life choices (male or female). As long as they’re not being a dick, I have no real interest in what they’re doing with their life. I may not always agree with what others are doing but 99% of the time it has no real impact on my life and therefore is a complete waste of my time to get worked up about, people are almost always just choosing themselves and doing what they want to do.

I strongly and passionately believe that choosing yourself is the opposite of selfish and I know this through personal experience. When the kids were younger, I thought it wasn’t even a possibility for me to choose myself. I sacrificed every single part of me that made me me and I called it love. I completely lost myself in motherhood and I used to beat myself up and think of myself as a failure. Now I know that it was the biggest act of love I have ever done and that it came at an extraordinary price. If you asked me if I would do it all over again, I would say yes, but I would do it differently, I’d make keep a little love back for me.

Growing up my mum wasn’t always at home; she was away for months and months at a time, eventually years and this lack of stability and the impact it had on our family, shaped the way I saw motherhood and who I wanted to be as a mum. I was so desperate to heal my inner child wounds that I gave the kids everything I had. I poured all my love, hopes and dreams into them and spent every waking minute with them. They became my entire world and I was, and still am, utterly obsessed with them. Looking back, I can see that I was hiding behind the role of being their mum. I loved those early years and I know in my soul how lucky I was to have so much time with them but I hid. I used it as an excuse to not listen to what I wanted, to not dare to figure out what I was going to do with my life because I was far too busy raising babies. I will never regret this as I have had the best time going on adventures with them, discovering the world together and building our bonds, forged in the fires of pain and love but I recognise now that for at least part of it, I was using my role as mum as an excuse to not figure my shit out.

The problem with chronic self abandonment is that eventually, you become pretty miserable. Self-abandonment doesn’t always look like staying in a toxic relationship or anything as dramatic as that. A lot of the time it’s actually self neglect. It’s not listening to what you want, its constantly showing yourself that your internal world- your thoughts and dreams are not as important as other peoples. If you do that for long enough, you start to believe it. What started out as being easy going and helpfully quiet becomes your entire identity- except it isn’t an identity, it’s a lack of one. That continual dismissal of your internal voice wears your soul down and crushes your spirit, you shrivel into a shadow of your former self, all whilst looking so happy and helpful on the outside. You smile and wave and say you’ve had a great day and then go to bed that night and cry because you have the breath stopping thought that the rest of your life will look exactly the same, nothing will change and there is absolutely nothing exciting for you to look forward to ever.

This is how I felt for years. My days were busy and full and everyone thought I was smashing it. And I was in one sense- I feel like it’s so important to be honest to how life actually is, there’s no constant happiness or constant unhappiness, life is a series of ups and downs and that’s how it should be. You cannot appreciate the good with the bad. I loved being a full time stay at home mum before the kids went to nursery and I would not change that for the world. It was when they went to school that I felt the change. They were growing up, finding their small windows of independence and for the first time I had a chance to breathe and consider what I wanted form my life. And I panicked. I pure panicked. Ha, I even considered having another baby! Anything to delay having to listen to my thoughts and be faced with the fact I had no idea what I wanted to do.

Anyway, I’ve wittered on for long enough now- my back hurts and I need to stretch. I’ll carry on in my next blog post.