Things are harder, now; a love letter to mothers.

You are not a permissive parent.

You are not.

You’re not the tired mother who has no patience. You are not the mother who doesn’t work hard enough, or the mother who works too hard. You are not the sum of the stories we tell ourselves, and you are not defined by them either.

It’s tiring. It’s tiring to turn against things so ingrained in us, since childhood, since babyhood, and instead choose empathy over control, the unconditional over the not-so.

We choose warmth over coercion. We hold our babies despite the ache in our arms, the tiredness in our hearts, the warm beds that we leave behind us as we stand to rock.

We might spend more time listening, or more time talking and it might take us just ten minutes longer to get those teeth brushed. But it was done with love and care. It was done with them in mind.

It’s easier and it is harder. It’s beautiful and it’s tiring and my head hurts but that laugh is the sweetest noise I have ever heard and I know that both you and I would do a million and one things over and over and over again just to hear that sound like a tinkling bell wash over us again.

I don’t want to pretend that turning against instincts isn’t hard. And we do that in so many ways, but we also run towards them with arms open wide and embrace them. Is it when they’re in bed with us, knees pressed into our stomachs, sometimes small fists to our faces that we feel it the most keenly of all? The bittersweetness of wanting, craving, needing space to just sleep while loving every sigh of breath as they sleep in their safest, safest place.

You’re doing it. You’re creating magic in every minute of parenthood, even the hard ones. You’re carving the way for a new path, opening doors of wonder and delight for your children, choosing apologies even in the less-than-perfect moments and speaking a language of love that you’ve written just for them.

And yet. And yet what do you choose for yourself? Do you choose the five minutes of nourishing yourself in some small way, or do you tend to do a quick run around with the hoover, a mad dash to tidy up before they wake once again? But, more importantly, which one do you think you deserve?

Mothers, when we undertook this not-at-all-small task of mothering; whether we grew and birthed these children or we welcomed them into the folds of our family in some other beautiful way, did we amount to any part in the equation? Or was it more of a fraction, a small decimal point in the sum of us plus them equals family.

This is my love letter to you mothers. The ones who spend their days feeding babies - whether that’s pulling them to the breast or mixing bottles - the ones who sit facilitating car naps in the rain, the ones who pull apart the small sibling squabbles once again. You are raising the future, you are creating a revolution at which love is at its heart.

You’re undoing and rejoining, watching golden connections form and sometimes breaking old, muddied ones, there you are smoothing frayed edges and stroking furrowed brows. You are turning the pages and weaving a new tapestry that maybe looks that little bit brighter and hopefully less stained than the one that came before it.

This is not a letter to tell you how to mother, or what to say or even how to say it. It’s not an instruction manual and it’s not a here’s-how-your-family-should-like-guide. It’s just to say; you’re deserving. You deserve. Kindness is radical. It’s world-changing. And it’s yours to take.

If you struggle to find kindness in your every day, if you would like a toolkit of life-changing mindsets and a group of supportive mothers that can help you find your way towards more, then you may like to take a look at joining the Kind Motherhood group course. It’s my second time running it, and I’d be delighted to have you there. Click through to find out more here.