It’s a brand new year, which means that everyone will be making New Year’s Resolutions to lose weight, meditate more, show more gratitude, pay down debts, and on and on. Those are all great long-term goals, and I will put some effort into all of them. But when it comes to short-term resolutions to be “better,” I’m going to take a hard pass.
So much attention is paid to self-improvement in January, and as moms, I find this to be a pretty big slap in the face. We have just spent the past month ensuring that our kids had a magical holiday: we scheduled visits with Santa, schemed with that pesky elf, baked 1,000 cookies, coordinated the matching pajamas, sent out the holiday cards, bought presents for everyone on our list, filled our own stockings (because it would look weird if only ours were empty), sat through every holiday-themed episode on Disney+, read “The Grinch” 10 times, kept the advent calendar on track, and only Santa knows how exhausted we are.
It might be a new year, but it’s still the old me. How about this January we kick our heels up and celebrate the absolutely amazing mamas we are?
How about we enjoy that extra cookie (that we probably baked) because we burned 15 million calories wrapping presents? How about we watch that marathon of “The Real Housewives of Miami” because we have earned having the television all to ourselves for a change? And how about we acknowledge that all we need to do to be a better New Year’s version of ourselves is to do LESS. You are TIRED, mama. Take a break. You’ve earned it.
