Loving Yourself: The 20-Year Plan

It took me 20 years to stop hating myself.

What a harsh thing to say! Reality can be harsh though, can’t it? I’d like it to not be so harsh for you. For you, a kindred person walking a path very similar to mine, I’m betting. A mother like me.

So, I’ll tell you the truth, although harsh. It took me many years to stop hating myself, and I force myself most days to make this so. The reasons behind why I’ve felt this way for so many years are actually quite irrelevant. But what you should know is that loving myself doesn’t come naturally to me–and maybe not to you, either. It doesn’t come easy for me, and that’s why it took me so long to figure it out, as discipline takes time, and discipline and time are the main ingredients needed to change a nasty habit like that.

So now, I start the day, every day, with the same song. After I’ve left the house in the early morning, still dark outside and dew fresh on the ground, with lunch for later in hand, warm coffee in a stainless steel travel cup, my over-the-shoulder leather bag, my badge clipped to my scrubs. I look up at the morning view of stars still piercing through the backdrop and I think of cooler days ahead and I thank the Creator for what I’ve been given because it is vast, innumerable, the evidence in the bright blue of my children’s eyes.

I slide into the seat of my mom-van and I breathe deep, because it is already whispering to me from deep in my gut. Feel it? Have you felt it?

Not good enough. Not right. You should have done better. You didn’t get that done? You should’ve said it nicer. You should have done that sooner. You do not measure up.

(What a nasty little voice).

Quiet. I ask it to be quiet. It is too lovely a day to ruin with such thoughts.

I think hard and I shake my head slowly, and I take a sip of coffee and swallow hard, but like I said, it doesn’t come naturally for me, and my shoulders feel heavy with a painful regret that the chiropractor can’t fix. They feel heavy. For what?

Because of this weight of guilt and things undone, expectations not met, imaginary judgments from others, I purposefully play a song as I drive away from my little piece of paradise. It’s the song I told you about earlier that I play every morning. I crank it up loud because when I do, it wins me over. It’s a song that speaks of grace, depthless mercy, and of a war already fought for me, one that has already made me new, one that gave me freedom, a freedom I used to refuse.

But not anymore.

I’m 32 years old now, not old but not so young, and I think I might just be starting to truly live. I feel like a bird set free from a cage, like a fish swimming free in the sea, like a child taking a leap from the fourth stair down into safe arms below. I feel like the wind over water.

My epiphany has come. I don’t have time to waste on such worry.

Time is a’wastin’.

Recently, I saw a funny poster card thing on Facebook and, for some reason, it hit home for me. I’d show it to you, but it is not the most appropriate one I’ve seen and maybe you are sitting with a babe on your lap or next to one who can read and does so over your shoulder almost all the time like mine do…. It was a picture of Mother Teresa.

It said,

Mother Teresa didn’t sit around complaining about her thighs. She had *stuff* to do.

What good is it to believe you aren’t good enough? What good does it do to remind yourself of past regret? I’ve wasted many years thinking about things that have already passed me by. How selfish of me to be constantly consumed with the way I feel. The way I dress. How much I weigh. What they might think of me. My thighs in shorts. What I’ve said and how I said it. Was I there or did I miss it. Me. Me. Me.

It overwhelms.

Less of me is better. Less of me is freedom. Less worry is better. Let them like you or don’t. Either way. Doing the most good in one day for as many as you can. Loving yourself enough to forgive yourself for mistakes you have made and ones you will make again. Saying sorry when it needs to be said, but not constantly feeling the weight of the sorrow. Making yourself believe you are good because the Creator said so. Filling your days with joy, babies, gifts, good food and drink, kindred spirits, the wonder of the outside world beyond yourself and your feelings, the coziness of home and the journey to define what makes it so. Finding ways to celebrate the souls that join alongside you in your journey. Searching for the lost ones, too.

All of this is good.

Life is good.

God is good.

He has made you good, and He has made me good, too. So, for all you mamas of the world, here’s the kicker of my 20-year plan just for you, for free and in the abbreviated version:

Don’t spend so much time judging yourself so harshly that you lose the ability to love yourself at all.

We’ve got stuff to do.