Falling In Love With Myself

This year I am going to fall in love with myself. I wrote a bit about it in my post about intentional living, but I want to share more. Self love. It's a difficult topic. People seem to confuse loving yourself with being conceited or self involved. But I don't believe I can be a great mother to my Everly without loving myself. She deserves a mama who loves herself and teaches her to do the same. Everything I do now is motivated by Everly in one way or another. I want to be a better mother, a better wife,  a better person because she deserves better from me. Always. I want to teach Everly that she is absolutely perfect and teach her to love herself. I believe the best way to teach anything is by example. It's becoming more and more important for me to love myself.

There are a lot of things I like about me. There are also things I don't like and that's what I'm going to be working on this year. Every time I look in the mirror I see a flaw. I want to work on turning my flaws into strengths and accepting my imperfect body and soul as they are. If there's something I cannot accept I will change it. It will be an ongoing love affair.

The past year over at Alex's blog she's been writing all about self love and it's been inspiring. Every time I read one of her self love posts I find myself nodding along with her writing. I may not be just like her or going through the same experiences, but the lessons she learning are universal. Alex said "I am okay with embracing all parts of me now. I embraced for the first time this year, my bravery, my creativity, my strong will to survive (more on that in a minute) my sense of humor, my ability to be a good friend, my questionable fashion sense, my impeccable ability to bake desserts, and my way with words. I also embraced the fact that I'm completely negative, I'm a bitch, I despise spending time with people, I despise people, I feel that I have to answer to no one in this life, I'm incredibly difficult sometimes, I'm neurotic, and want nothing to do with the majority of people whose paths I cross. I'm fine with all this! Yay go me self esteem blah blah honesty blah."

Today I'm embracing myself as this imperfect woman, imperfect wife, imperfect mother. Sister, daughter, friend, confidant. I am all of these things, imperfectly. I love that about myself. Perfection is boring. I am a flawed individual. But I am strong and smart and curious and above all I have a good heart, a good soul. I have blossomed from the girl I used to be into the woman that I am. The right words often escape me in describing how deep my feelings run. This is hugely personal to me. When I look at the photo above I can easily pick out flaws. They practically leap of the screen. Today I choose to pick out the strengths. The bags under my eyes are not those of a sleep deprived woman, but those of a mother who loves her daughter so deeply that she stayed up half the night rocking, nursing, and comforting her to allow her to get some sleep. My Everly is young. She will not need me forever. But she needs me now and I am everything for her. The woman in this photo is strong. She is brave. She is vulnerable. And she's a mother who loves fiercely.

xo Sue