At the beginning of the year when I had the Vision Board Party, I definitely didn’t expect to have picked up all the things that I have since then. I didn’t expect managing my mental health, still in the middle of a pandemic & trying to learn and own my own self worth—outside of being a mother. I knew that in order to be the person that I wanted to be, there would be work, but I didn't know that there was so much more work to be done.
I thought to myself that surely the hardest days of life were gone....I was wrong and I expected just as much from the other women that attended. On Saturday we met up and mostly just talked. We talked about love, sex, children, careers and dreams. We did an exercise where we wrote down all of the things that had stopped us from doing what we set out do to in the beginning of the year. We metaphorically "carried" those things on us and talked about what we could do to let those things go. We took a walk by ourselves and just talked to God. We just asked him what he had to say to us and to help guide us as to what's next.
How do we show up in the middle of our grief for ourselves while trying to raise our children differently? How do we balance yesterday's pain and today's joy? How do we take care of ourselves while taking care of a family? How do we face our very real reality and still have hope for better days? I have discovered that the only way to do this is to figure it out.
We must be willing to see ourselves in a vulnerable state and in need of something that we must learn to give ourselves: Grace. In a world that promotes perfection and a right way and wrong way to do things, we must accept the nature of our lives and accept the challenge that comes along with being the first ones to evoke change.