>>Right now my oldest son is 5 daughter 3 and son  about 15 months.  I am finding it very hard to cope.  I am not especially organized by nature but I was not a terrible slob either.  Now I feel so overwhelmed by the constant mess and piles everywhere and boxes of unsorted stuff, and the constant needing to feed and dress them and everything.  I am also in my first trimester. 

I am very far from my ideal.  I want to be organized.  I want to have a place for everything and be on top of housework, with getting the kids involved in a loving, supportive way.  I want to get out of this depresssing mess.  I am finding it very hard to be home with them all.  I am so unhappy being a mother.    Right now I like the concept of homeschooling more than the reality of being home with my kids.   it gets very hard.  When they start fighting, when the one year old is climbing on the table or pulling things down from teh table and  always this internal critic that it’s my fault for not better handling it for being proactive etc .  Of course there must be solutions and I want to change and I don’t want to be so stressed and miserable. I don’t know where to start.  <<

I’ve had times I’ve felt like this, too!  Being a mother is a hard job, and it’s very common to feel like we’re just not making the grade – I’m pretty confident that most people reading this have felt this way at times.  The very first place to start is to stop beating yourself up for not being perfect.  This is really the most important thing you can do; accept that you have limitations and love yourself as you are.  That’s lots easier to say than to do, isn’t it?

We mothers tend to expect way too much of ourselves, and give ourselves very little recognition for all that we do.  You don’t hear much talk or validation of the huge amount of work mothers need to do day in and day out just to keep things functional.  Functional, not sparkling or perfect.  Just making sure everyone is fed and has clean clothes to wear is a lot of work.  We want to raise our children with joy and love, but sometimes the things we feel need to get done get in the way of that.  

 There’s also the physical reality that being pregnant takes a lot of energy.   The first trimester is especially tiring, and my memory of that stage this most recent time around is spending most of the day in the reliner in my living room. 🙂   But whether pregnant or not, when we build up in our minds how well everyone else is managing and how we can’t compare, we end up feeling inadequate and dissatisfied with ourselves.  

Sometimes we think that the only way we’ll improve is by looking at all of our imperfections, but it’s not true.  It’s demotivating to think of ourselves as failures and that no matter what we do, we’ll still keep falling short.  It’s much more effective to recognize what we do well and build on it.  Self-love builds us up, self-criticism breaks us down.

You might be hoping for organizational tips to help you get things in order (and I’ve shared different tips in the homemaking category that you can look at if you want), but I have a very strong sense that you’re at least average in how you’re managing your home.  So the real issue isn’t what you’re actually doing but how you feel about what you’re doing. 

That means that meaningful improvement is going to come from you changing your way of thinking about yourself, not from running faster, trying harder, or working longer.  Look at yourself in the mirror when you get up and then later before you go to bed, and say, “I love and approve of myself.”  Fifteen times in the morning, fifteen times in the evening.  If you’re uncomfortable with the mirror, then say it to yourself in your mind – at least a hundred times a day.  There’s a lot of negative programming we need to overcome and the only way to do it is to recognize it for what it is, and reprogram ourselves with thoughts that better serve us. 

Practically speaking, when feeling overwhelmed by all the work around us, I’ve found I do best when I just do something.  Every box you organize will make a dent in what needs to be done and give you a sense of accomplishment (though you’ll need to remember to give yourself credit for it instead of thinking that it’s inadequate because there’s so much more to do).  I have to periodically remind myself that the reality of life with small children means constant messes and ongoing organizational work no matter how organized you are. 

The stage of having several small children is in my opinion the hardest in many ways.  I found things started getting significantly easier for me when my oldest was 5.5.  I had a long space between a couple of my kids and it was much, much easier to manage six kids with the youngest being close to four than when most of them were under four!  Kids grow up, we improve our skills, and things really do get easier.

Avivah