I only had 10 minutes to grab everything I needed from the supermarket and I couldn’t find the shopping list I had created only minutes before. I soon had to pick my children up from daycare and school, take them to their afternoon activities, then race home to get dinner on, homework done and get the children in the bath – regardless of their temperament. Then somehow I would have to wrangle them in their pyjamas while they also danced, squealed and ran around the room like they were on show at a circus. Then there was the washing. Don’t even get me started! My head was on overload and the stress was becoming a weight on my shoulders.  
 

I am not sure what frazzled me that day. It was just another typical day of motherhood. Maybe that’s what irritated me the most. I had nothing to be agitated by, yet I was moody, irascible and impossible to please. I was cross at the world around me, cross at my kids, but most of all I was cross at myself. I had reached home to dishes still in the sink, toys scattered all over the floor and the kids’ pyjamas hanging off the table and chairs as if they had a life of their own. Weirdly I had thought the house was clean when I had left that morning. I let out a huge sigh. I needed to get the kid’s dinner on fast and I was starting to lose it. Life was overwhelming and I needed cookies and plenty of them. 

It wasn’t until I slammed the door of a cupboard in the kitchen that I snapped out of it. The piercing noise from the door slamming in an otherwise quiet room was startling, to myself and my children. It was as if someone slapped me across the face with a wet fish and I woke up to see the reality I had created around myself. I suddenly realised I was in a bad place and I needed to snap out of it. Fast.  
 
Unfortunately, I am still trying to figure out motherhood. Sometimes I think we should have all been given handbooks on how to survive. It all looked so easy before that baby popped out. I remember the thoughts I had after visiting some of my friends who had children, well before I had any of my own. I knew how I was going to bring up my children, my angels. How differently I would answer and behave from what I had seen and experienced. They would be superbly intelligent, happy all of the time, and oh so much fun. Maybe that was where it all stemmed from, this disappointment. The expectations I held of myself before motherhood even begun.  

After far too many cupboard doors slamming I realised one of the hardest lessons I ever had to learn. That image of me that I had perceived years before having my own children – that perfect mother, wasn’t reality.  But, the second thing I learned, maybe even more important than the first shocked me when I finally realised it. It was so simple.  

I was concluding each day with a fail or a pass. I had created a list in my mind of ’things every perfect mother must do’. The unfortunate thing was the list was, on most days, unattainable. The more unfortunate thing was… the list was written by me.  

I had to rewrite that list, lower some of my expectations and allow myself to fail, and then get up regardless. My kids didn’t care how fancy their dinner was. Or if their toys they had left on the floor two days ago was still in the same corner. They didn’t care if their clothes were neatly pressed, or carefully folded. This didn’t mean I stopped trying or doing chores. But when my house didn’t reach the local House and Garden standard it was ok, I was ok. My kids were ok. That list was made and written by me, and I had the power to change it, tick it off or completely ignore it. What truly mattered was being a mum who wasn’t keeling over from exhaustion. And if that meant ignoring the toys and making a peanut butter sandwich instead of an elaborate dinner, then that was perfectly and wonderfully ok.