If you have a close, communicative, tell-each-other-everything relationship with your mom, that's great (and rare). But, like it or not, your mom does come from a different generation.
A few months before Lily was born, I jolted up from a rare, deep sleep. I'd been dreaming about a dinner of lobster and clam chowder and it was fantastic. The next weekend, I ate it. As I savored every bite, I wondered when on earth I'd be able to have another meal like that. It certainly wasn't the most child-friendly restaurant—would I ever eat there again? In six months? In a year? Five years?
If my husband and I aren’t careful, kid-centric talk hijacks our conversations. We talk about things they did that day. (Hilarious. Or frustrating. Usually both.) We talk about dreams for their futures. (Please let them marry non-felons.) And then usually we’re too tired to do much other than watch a re-run of The Rachel Zoe Project. I mean Mad Men.
Time is the most valuable commodity and we all get the same 24 hours in a day. It's amazing how differently we all prioritize those precious hours, though. Being the giving, nurturing creatures that we are, its easy to forget about ourselves.
When two people love each other, nothing is better than raising a family together. That said, parents often put their parenting and career responsibilities at the top of their priority list, and allow their marriage to fall to the bottom. Most parents are on an endless treadmill of chores, meals and responsibilities, and forget to invest in nurturing each other.
I think it's hard to admit that you want kids. After all, we're told that this is the quickest thing that makes guys run the other way. But if you want something, you have to say it out loud—right? So I applaud these celebrity women who, since the start of 2011, have been totally upfront about wanting to have kids sometime in the very near future. Maybe it's going around?
Today's modern woman has taken on a lot more responsibility than ever before and is now learning to balance a career, motherhood, household upkeep and a loving relationship. How is it possible to evenly give attention to each one of these daily occurrences?
How does the stress of being a busy mom affect us? We overeat, do not exercise, and of course our sex life goes kaput, as does our intimacy with our partner, our confidence and our self-esteem. More and more, we see mothers suffering from the deadly disease of perfectionism. You assume that to "do it right," you must execute all tasks flawlessly and ignore the need for self-care. In turn, we see higher rates of exhaustion-related illnesses, low self-esteem and partner-related issues, due to mother's burn out. It's time to drop the "supermom" ideal.
Welcome to our new YourTango Expert series on motherhood and love! Women are natural givers who do their best to make sure everyone else's needs (and wants) are met, often at the expense of their own. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day, right? Our first topic is sex, because countless studies and surveys show that moms are chronically overworked and undersexed. We recently asked our experts how can mothers shift their mental energy (their attitudes and approach to sex) and their physical energy (their schedules, their bedroom routines) to help make sex more of a priority.
For most parents, children are a gift to our lives and motherhood is one of the highest callings we can have in life. But as any mom knows, it's also one of the most intense jobs in the universe. It's 24/7, non-stop and never ending.Moms the world over are in need of more than just one holiday to celebrate the intense commitment made to their children and in this week's new YourTango Experts spotlight "Motherhood & Love", our experts will share wisdom on how to juggle it all and stay not just sane, but happy!
It seems Katie Holmes' new horror movie, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, features a little bit of art imitating life. Holmes plays Kim, a woman who marries a man with a young daughter, which sounds familiar to the actress's marriage to Tom Cruise (he had two adopted kids from his previous marriage with Nicole Kidman). Not only that, but Kim and the daughter, played by young actress Bailee Madison, bond in a mother-daughter way over some horrifyingly scary action — something the real-life mom can definitely relate to.
