becoming Amy real life

Focusing

From my personal Journal:

” Thoreau wrote in Walden “I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately. To front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what they had to teach. And not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

I want to sort out for me the essential parts of what motherhood means to me, so that when this stage of my mothering life is over, I won’t regret having missed out.”

What are the essential parts of mothering to you? When you try to get at the heart of it, what do you find?
Sure, there’s the diaper changing, nose wiping, eternal picking-up-after. There’s the throw-up and the lunches and the homework. Birthday parties, play dates and feeding.
But there’s more, so much more.
There’s the teaching, the loving, snuggling, kissing, healing, comforting, encouraging, confiding, lifting, holding, singing.
When you peel away the layers of busy-ness that society tells us we have to have- lessons and crafts and toys and games and stimulation and on. What is left?
Mothering at it’s heart is using love to shape the lives of those we have been entrusted to care for.
Boiled down, stripped of all the trappings, motherhood is LOVE. Pure, focused and uncomplicated.
I am striving to let that filter through everything else that motherhood requires of me. To let love underscore the laundry and the cleaning and the discipline. To let love be the only thing I require of myself. However fancy or plain it is exhibited- my goal is to let LOVE be the foundation of my life- to let LOVE wash away all the complications, all the voices in my head and in the magazines and on the t.v. telling me all the things I’m not doing right/ well/ enough/ at all. To know that even if my children don’t get all the lessons, trendy clothes, fancy gifts and parties that their peers may or may not have, they were loved to the very best of my ability- and that was enough.

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  • Amy {The Idea Room}
    January 12, 2011 at 3:10 pm

    Love this. Such a great reminder why we do it all.

  • Christie
    January 12, 2011 at 4:07 pm

    Beautiful. And such a great reminder. Thanks.

  • Gwen @ Gwenny Penny
    January 12, 2011 at 5:58 pm

    Amen to that! Love it.

  • Amy @ Increasingly Domestic
    January 12, 2011 at 8:55 pm

    I agree Amy! Love should be the foundation on which we build our lives. If we view everything we do for our families as an act of love it makes it more bearable.

    Amy's are AWESOME. The end.

  • Rugrats + Royalty
    January 14, 2011 at 2:03 am

    Truer words were never spoken!