Moms, Learn to Pause Life for a Moment
Being a mom isn’t easy, and sometimes we realize we’re going at full speed non-stop. We want to get to everything and we become supermoms trying to handle it all. But sometimes it’s important to pause life for a moment.
Moms work in and outside the home, take time for themselves, carve out time for friendships, find quality time with their children… and finish every evening barely able to stand from the fatigue.
But if there’s one useful trick that moms need to learn, it’s how to hit the pause button. Life goes at a frenetic pace, barely giving us time to stop and take stock of where we’re going or how we plan to continue our lives.
So sometimes, just as if life were a game, we have to pause life for a second to relax and breathe. Then, with our batteries recharged, we can start to play again.
You might be asking yourself something like: pause life? What’s the point of pausing?
Yelling time-out in the middle of a basketball game to try to make a comeback makes sense, but can a mom push the pause button from time to time to keep her sanity?
She can and she should. You need to learn to stop, to look at what you have around you and to listen to what your heart has to tell you.
Press pause
You might think that pressing pause means leaving things as they are, then picking them up again, returning to whatever exhausted you. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Sometimes pushing pause is necessary to recharge your energy enough to then be able to pick up what felt exhausting before. Now you can take it on with new energy.
“You didn’t take away my future, you gave me a new one.”
–Anonymous Mom–
A useful tool
Pressing pause is a useful tool that will help you find peace in your life.
Sometimes moms feel tired and overwhelmed by life, perhaps because they’re victims of the judgement of others or because they don’t feel perfect.
Or perhaps because their partners don’t seem to satisfy them emotionally, because they don’t have enough money, because they want a bigger house…
Sometimes it seems like there’s just too much to handle.
There are many problems that come out of lacking money. Maybe it causes you to work more hours than your body can take. This might mean that you don’t have enough time for yourself or your kids, that your self-esteem suffers.
Your self-esteem doesn’t have to depend on what material goods you have, not at all. Your self-esteem is who you are, what you’re able to achieve every day.
To observe your surroundings and evaluate what you can change and improve, you have to press pause. It isn’t easy – it’s a conscious exercise about what your life is like and how you can improve.
It’s difficult to stay afloat when you have a pit of despair in your heart or accumulated emotions that won’t let you breathe. Despair, pain, trauma, rage, or confusion can break you and make you think that pressing pause isn’t an option.
But at those moments the pause button is more necessary than ever.
They will be when you most need to take a breath, a pause to reflect over what your life is like, what your life has been in recent months, and what kind of life you want to have in the future.
Are you doing the right things to have the life you truly want, or are you stuck, unsure of where to go?
Your kids are part of your world
You’re imperfect, human, prone to be reactive and volatile… you can feel conflicted about what you feel now, the sensation of loss about the past and the uncertainty of the future.
Your children will grow up and need an emotionally healthy mother, who knows how to be all right, who can achieve her goals, who is capable of being with them and giving them all her unconditional love.
If, as your children grow up, you don’t press the pause button, you’ll feel sad, self-centered, and you’ll have missed the chance to understand how life really works.
The little things are what truly matter: enjoying your children, yourself, and all that life offers you every day… without having to go full speed all the time.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Bowlby, J. (1986). Vínculos afectivos: formación, desarrollo y pérdida. Madrid: Morata.
- Bowlby, J. (1995). Teoría del apego. Lebovici, Weil-HalpernF.
- Garrido-Rojas, L. (2006). Apego, emoción y regulación emocional. Implicaciones para la salud. Revista latinoamericana de psicología, 38(3), 493-507. https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/805/80538304.pdf
- Marrone, M., Diamond, N., Juri, L., & Bleichmar, H. (2001). La teoría del apego: un enfoque actual. Madrid: Psimática.
- Moneta, M. (2003). El Apego. Aspectos clínicos y psicobiológicos de la díada madre-hijo. Santiago: Cuatro Vientos.