Spit-up On My Shoulder

Do you have days where you really need to get your emotions out on paper, but don’t know how to start? I love the journaling prompts below from Melissa Gayle West’s book, If Only I Were a Better Mother: Using the Anger, Fear, Despair, and Guilt That Every Mother Feels at Some Time, as a Pathway to Emotional Balance and Spiritual Growth. How’s that for a title?

When I first saw the book in a bookstore years ago, it felt like it was leaping off the shelf, begging me to read it. I wasn’t disappointed. Melissa’s book is one that I return to again and again when I’m struggling with mothering issues.

No matter how old your children are, you may find the exercises helpful. Try one or try them all!

Journaling is a great release for me and was particularly helpful when I was experiencing postpartum depression. I hope that you can also find comfort expressing yourself through writing.

JOURNALING EXERCISES FOR MOTHERS

1) Write about what the word “spirituality” means for you. If mothering is to be a spiritual path for you, what does that mean in your life and words? What is your vision of mothering as a spiritual path? How does the darker side, the “underbelly” of mothering (the inevitable griefs, fears, guilts, despairs, angers), fit into your vision?

2) What most gets in your way of practicing mothering as a spiritual path and as a doorway into wholeness? What can you do about this?

3) Make a list of the ten things that disturb you the most about being a mother (for instance, “I don’t have enough time for myself,” “I’m afraid my child will die,” “I’m afraid I will hurt my child somehow”). Pick one of the items on your list and write about it for twenty minutes from that place in yourself that feels it. Ask your inner censor to take a brief break, and then let the part of yourself that you picked write as honestly and unobstructedly as possible.

4) Write about a painful incident concerning yourself and your child in the past. If you hadn’t already decided the experience was painful, how else might you have seen it? From your vantage point of the present, what did you learn from it? What in it can you now be grateful for?

5) How have this culture, your childhood religion, and your own mother, grandmothers, and aunts influenced, for better and for worse, the way you now are as a mother? What images, ideas, and ideals might you need to let go of in order to deepen your practice of mothering with an open heart?

6) What about being a mother are you thankful for?

7) What is it that you most need to let go of in order to enter more fully into being an alive, open mother with your child? What to let go of will be different for every mother. For one mother it might mean letting go of being rigid about certain things with her child; for another mother it might mean the opposite, letting go of giving in to her child in certain situations.