Love Starts With You!

This is a follow-on from my recent post 'how marmalade got the better of me'! The marmalade making day was a hard one, but I learnt so much from it. I think sometimes it's so easy to get a bit stuck in the routine of everyday that we miss the bad habits we're getting into, so having a really hard day that 'shakes us up' enough to look at ourselves can be a really good thing. I feel like I keep on re-learning the same lesson in many ways, which is 'be yourself, be yourself, be yourself!' It's amazing how hard it can be to simply be who we are. I feel like I'm un-learning so many survival mechanisms where I haven't been myself in order to learn this lesson and be authentically me in more and more of my life.

Children are such an incredible gift because they draw out the best and worst in us. In many ways, they show us who we are- whether we like it or not! This is certainly the case for me. I realised I'd been getting stuck in a few 'un-me' patterns with my daughter (the marmalade was just the tip of the ice berg baby!). The primary reason for this was self doubt, which caused me to feel guilty about not giving into my daughter's every demand. In this place, nothing you could do would be good enough anyway. But I was running away from the guilt, rather than looking at the situation in the face and owning it. Then, after the awful day, the revelation really sunk in- "Amber needs me to be myself." I absolutely have to put myself first, trust in my instincts and not give into her demands. That way, I value me and I value her, and suddenly I have tons of ideas of things we could do together. It's the sad truth that by sacrificing ourselves for our children, we end up sacrificing them... we must value ourselves. Anyway, this has been such a timely realisation for me, and I wanted to share it. It has also inspired several creative ideas, the first of which I have photographed and is a wonderful reminder to me that loving myself is where I should begin every day.