We don’t want to admit that we are living out an abusive cycle of motherhood. Some of us will say that mothering is hard, more of us will agree that our own mothers had it hard, but almost no one will look behind the altar and name the emptiness.
We don’t want to admit that we are living out an abusive cycle of motherhood. Some of us will say that mothering is hard, more of us will agree that our own mothers had it hard, but almost no one will look behind the altar and name the emptiness.
At the top of a mountain stands a stone altar. To reach the altar you must climb a steep, narrow, and winding path. The path is covered in pebbles and riddled with holes. On one side is a rock wall, slick and high. On the other side is a sheer drop. The climb is terrifying.
The path is full of mothers.
There are two sides to every boundary - but you can only control one.
That’s the hardest thing to learn and to accept for so many of us - for the ones who need control, for the people pleasers, for the traumatized, the anxious, and the scared. All we can do is state our boundaries clearly and follow through with holding them. We cannot force anyone on the other side to accept them.
Merriam-Webster defines a boundary as something that indicates a fixed limit or extent. It is a dividing line. We all have boundaries - there are things we will not do, things we will not accept, choices we have made about how we live our lives. Last week we talked about how you know where you need boundaries. It’s time to go deeper.
The holidays are coming, y’all, and with them can come family, friends, travel, obligations, budgets, and stress. So this month we are going to focus on how you can create beautiful boundaries in order to have truly happy holidays.
Trigger warnings everywhere these days. They’re on Facebook posts, they’re in the opening credits of TV shows, they’re even on college campuses. They’re absolutely everywhere - except where we need them the most - our daily lives.