Why stress less mama? Because I realised very early in the process of becoming a parent that it would be way too easy to stress about everything!

No new parent knows exactly what to do in every circumstance. We face new and greater challenges every day. In preparation for the inevitable bumpy road ahead and in an attempt to remain sane I have made a conscious choice to worry less and enjoy more, because although stressing is what seems to come naturally, it’s also a sure fire way to ruin everything that’s good about raising kids.

I come from a background of worriers. My beautiful Mum was the worst. Her life was dominated by two things:

• fear of what might happen if she couldn’t control every situation and
• fear of what people might think about pretty much anything she, or the rest of our family, did at any given point in time.

My challenge

So my constant challenge is to resist the temptation to wallow in the comfort of the familiar, that is,  to choose not to indulge in a worry-fest about my parenting expertise, or lack thereof.

My family

Our twins are now 2 years and 7 months old.  As a mid-40s Mum my baby-making days are over and now I’m focused on raising my kids. And what I’ve realised is that as hard as I sometimes thought it was in the beginning caring for two newborns, the fact that they sleep anywhere, eat, poop and, most importantly, aren’t able to move much, can make them infinitely easier to deal with than toddlers, particularly ones who’ve inherited their parents’ strong wills and stubbornness.

On the flip side, toddlers are a hoot to have around. They kiss, they cuddle, they giggle – and they say the funniest, cutest things that make you want to squeeze the stuffing out of them because you’re bubbling over on the inside with so much love that you just don’t know what to do with it.

A word about taking advice

There are lots of blogs about motherhood out there. Some really wonderful ones giving great advice. But sometimes having so much information at our fingertips can, in fact, add to our stress levels as we try to work out what is right and what is wrong, and what we should or shouldn’t be doing to be good parents. Not that I think knowledge is bad – far from it! But I think we need to pick and choose when it comes to heeding advice. What works for some might not work for others. I read a  lot of what’s out there and some of it just doesn’t suit me – my personality, my values, my kids’ personalities – and i know it wouldn’t work for me. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad advice or wouldn’t work for others. Every parent and every child is different, every family situation is different, and that’s why there is no definitive ‘manual’ on child raising , or a comprehensive list of ‘shoulds’ or ‘should nots’ that we can easily apply to every parent.

Stress points

I started compiling a list of stress points that can affect new parents, and once I started thinking about it and talking to other Mums and Dads I realised that so much of the anxiety we feel doesn’t come so much from the situation we’re in but from our reaction to it. In other words it is purely self-inflicted – we heap the pressure on ourselves!  I want to get to a place where I don’t do that anymore, where I am more accepting of what life throws my way so I can react with calm confidence rather than freaking out before, during and/or after each challenging episode in my life.

Related articles

• Acceptance (megsdigest.com)