Witnessing frustration in motherhood, in life.

This week I’ve been witnessing my own frustration in motherhood. In life in general really. At any given time there are countless things that aren’t going as my mind imagines they should.

This week’s list includes;

• Our house build that looks like it won’t be finished until Christmas, maybe later.

• My energy levels that don’t seem to want to allow me to think after 8pm when the boys go to bed. These used to be my prime work hours but for some reason I can’t seem to focus at this time anymore.

• Our tiny rental that I’m still struggling to make work for filming my yoga classes. Work just feels so much harder because of this, and I then struggle to get motivated to do anything.

• Always feeling like I’m playing catch up in motherhood, life and work. I literally never feel organised.

I hate this feeling like this because I love this work. I was hanging out for our new house because I have so many plans for classes etc, but I guess I just need to suck it up and do the best I can here.

In many ways I’ve felt frustration like this before.

When we were trying to conceive our 3rd and it just wasn’t working.

When I had my first baby and I was struggling big time with all the changes in my life and how unsettled I felt.

I know that gripping on tight to how I expect things should go doesn’t help. And yet I found myself today clinging to these exact thoughts.

Round and around in my mind.

“This is so shit. I hate this place. I can’t wait til we’re in the new place.”

“The new place is going to be so great. I’ll be able to film whenever I want and I’ll be so motivated.”

“I’ll get back into a good routine once we get into our new place. Gah, this place is so frustrating. I wish we weren’t living here anymore.”

And around and around I went.

Then we went to our house contract appointment to be told that we wouldn’t be in our house til Christmas at the earliest, possibly later.

I felt my foundations shake. I’d been pinning all my hopes on the fact that we would be moving soon. But we aren’t.

The frustrations began to grow in my mind. From something that was bearable in the morning, something temporary that I just had to wait out… to something so big it was threatening to overpower everything.

I felt ready to just quit. Of what – I’m not exactly sure.

Once upon a time something like this would have had me starting to pick apart the threads of my life to ease these feelings of frustration.

I know exactly what I would have done. I would have blamed Andrew. I would have put all these negative feelings on him and asked him to solve them.

Obviously he wouldn’t be able to do that (and was probably feeling pretty shitty himself). Embarrassingly, I probably would have also sulked about this for a good long while, or created a fight somewhere else in our relationship, to again take the focus off these uncomfortable feels.

But instead, I was able to watch these thoughts. Let myself feel them. We talked about how we were BOTH feeling.

Yeah, I cried a bit. And I breathed a bit. I did some yoga. And then I worked at re-writing the story in my head.

I’m still feeling a bit down about it all. A bit restless that so much feels unknown. But I’ve also reminded myself that all of life is this way. Unpredictable. Messy. Uncomfortable.

Instead of getting worked up over it I’m just trying to make the best of this situation now. I’m working on creating a new space in this place to film. I’m working at looking after myself a bit better to help with my energy. I’m make a conscious choice to enjoy the good things about this place. Less space = less stuff = less cleaning.

The frustrations we feel day to day will always be there. It’s up to us how we choose to think about them. What is your biggest frustration in motherhood?