Creating our own 'perfect'.

"Comparison is the thief of joy" - Theodore Roosevelt.

Comparing myself to others is something I struggle with almost on a daily basis. I always have done. But the most recent comparison and the one that has made me loose some perspective is my role as a mother, and I know I will not be alone in saying that.

Since Maisie was born I found myself struggling to adjust to motherhood. Although she did have good days, she has mostly been irritable, crying sore a lot of the time with no definitive reason and generally unsettled. I always compared myself to other mothers who managed to go to coffee shops when their babies were days old, who went away on weekend breaks when their babies were a matter of weeks, those who were able to wear a full face of make-up and look so glamorous all the time whenever I struggled to wash my face most days and barely made it outside the front door. I always felt like I was doing something wrong, that I was a bad mother and that I was missing out on what these other mothers had. It got to the stage where I felt like Maisie deserved better than me. That she would be happier with one of the other mothers who were obviously doing a much better job than me, giving their babies more than I could give Maisie.

Now though, having gained a new found perspective on my life, I have realised a few things. Firstly, there is nothing to gain from making comparisons. When we compare ourselves to others it is usually the worst of ourselves that we focus on against what we presume is the best of others. This only leads to distraction from the real value and meaning in our own life, in our own self and we waste precious time focusing on other people when we should be using that energy for ourselves. Secondly, motherhood is hard work, no matter how 'easy' people make it seem. People will share with you only the parts they want to share and social media is like looking at other peoples lives through a pair or rose tinted glasses. Nobody is perfect and nobody is living a painless life, so respect everyone's journey, especially your own. Lastly, I realised that everyone's experience of motherhood is different for many different reasons and you cant even begin to compare them. My experience of motherhood is that for the first 8 months of my little girls life, while she cried and I doubted myself, unbeknownst to us she was battling cancer. She had a cancerous tumour which was growing, expanding and slowly invading her body and squashing her organs. This knowledge now fills me with guilt. Guilt that I know I shouldn't accept because I didn't know she was suffering, but I let the joy from all those bad days where Maisie just wanted to be held close, cuddled and sleep in my arms to be sucked away because I was thinking that I needed to be out in the world going for coffee and play dates in order to be a good mother. When in actual fact I was doing everything that she wanted and most importantly needed.

With Maisie now going through her chemo treatment my experience of motherhood is significantly different from all those other mothers that I look to. And I realise that it doesn't mean that it is less valuable, it's just different. I am choosing to live life now with complete gratitude, to fully recognise the good things I have in my life and on the bad days I am focusing on the greater things that cant be measured or compared; the love and admiration that I have for my little fighter. I have been creating our own kind of 'perfect' and it is pretty perfect.

This was a day spent at the beach in Portrush. While other families sat very chilled around us talking and laughing as their children played carefree in the sand and splashed in the sea, we sat on a picnic blanket petrified that Maisie would touch the sand and eat it, worried that a child would get too close, and continuously applying sun-cream as she cannot be exposed to sunlight for too long. This scenario had every potential for the comparisons to over rule but what I saw was a little girl who was smiling and laughing at her mummy and daddy, who was enjoying watching the other children run around, who giggled hard at the incoming waves that splashed my feet, who thoroughly enjoyed her first taste of ice cream and who slept contently the whole way home. 

We were due to fly out on our first family holiday this year, it was something we had planned last year and were really looking forward to. We had imagined our little girl splashing in the pool with her daddy, enjoying the taste of fresh watermelon from the local market, enjoying evening strolls in the pram along the beach and seeing new sights and places with wonder in her eyes. However, we obviously had to cancel. So instead of looking at other peoples holiday snaps I focused on my girl and what I could do for her. On a day that was cold, wet and miserable outside when we should have been on holidays, we brought the holidays to us. We lit the fire, got dressed in our summer gear, played with our bucket and spades and little Maisie had great fun and knew no different. It was a special day and again our own kind of perfect. 

These are now the little moments that make up our life, these are the moments that can so easily be missed when comparing ourselves to others, these are the moments that I want to and need to hold on to going through this difficult patch in our lives. These are the moments that I will remember most during those four weeks of chemotherapy. 

Wendy.