I can’t believe I am going to write this blog post. It will be completely unedited. I just need to do it and not look back.

You see today I woke up feeling like a failure. A failure to my kids, my family, my friends, strangers and to myself. I don’t feel like this all the time but it happens more than I would like. Why on this day…who knows. Could it be the perimenopausal hormones? Could it be all the stress inducing incidents that have happened recently that I actually didn’t let my anxiety go into overdrive but now I’m at a breaking point? Could it just be the to do list is too big and it’s causing me to feel bad? Or is it my inner critic has been too quiet and she wants to be heard? Could it be seeing my kids hurting and my heart can’t take it? My guess it is a combination of all of these things.

I tell my kids to not call themselves failures but here I am feeling like and calling myself one. Now I want you to know that I am not writing this because I want you to tell me that I am wrong or that I am a great mom. I know that I am not a failure. I know that I am a good mom. I do know this, I promise. But today I am just not feeling it. I feel like I haven’t done enough yet in the same breathe I have done too much. I have set unrealistic expectations on myself and I am now paying the price for it. It is almost like a reminder to stop trying to do it all. A reminder that just because something is hard for my kids or they didn’t get something they wanted is not because I failed them. It is a reminder that I need to be kind and compassionate to myself. I know this feeling will pass but I need to go through it first. I need to cry and let it out. And apparently today, I needed to write it out.

I usually hide this from everyone. I don’t want them to know that I failed. I don’t want to bring anyone down with me. Or maybe I am afraid they will tell me I am right. I don’t want to add anymore attention or fuel to the fire. Maybe I like people thinking that I am laid back and can handle all the shit that is thrown at me. I kind of hope that is not the case because I don’t want to give the impression that I have my shit together all the time because I definitely don’t. I do feel like I am pretty honest and open about my life and my challenges but sometimes I just want to hide my flaws and failures. But today I decided I needed to share this. Maybe it would make me feel better. Maybe someone else feels the same way and I just made them feel less alone. I do know that this place of feeling like a failure is very lonely. It’s easy to stay stuck in this place. But I know from the past, I can’t dwell on this. I need to accept things that have happened and I need to move forward. Because in all honesty, I am human and not perfect. I am doing the best I can. (I need to keep repeating those words!) And I need to have realistic expectations and stop blaming myself for anything that doesn’t go the way we hoped it would.

Has writing this out helped? Yes it has. Do I still feel like a failure? A little but not as much. I still need to process some of the feelings that I am having. Details that involve the kids and I want to keep their privacy so I will do the work in my journal instead of here. Acceptance is a really hard thing. I have had a lot of struggles. Some I have handled better than others. And sometimes ones that I thought I have accepted creep back on days like today. So I will keep working through this. I will keep moving forward. I will keep reminding myself of the lessons I am learning or have learned from the challenging times. I will remind myself that I can do hard things. And I will keep looking for the good.