Success You Feel

Success You Feel

I believe that doing your best will always bring success.  As a young woman, my best included planning, working, and being rewarded.  As a young wife, my best efforts left me proud of my little home and confident in my ability to raise a large family.  Doing my best yielded visible, tangible results.  Success was easy to recognize.  I knew when I had achieved my goals.  

However, when I became a mother, sleep deprivation and loneliness soon led me down the dark and unanticipated road of postpartum depression. The line between success and failure blurred. One trial of motherhood is that even when you are doing your best, the results are rarely visible or measurable.  Simple chores became overwhelming tasks that would send me to my room in tears.  Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t seem to stay on top of anything.  I fell into a habit of reproaching myself.  “Why can’t you just get the laundry done?” “Spaghetti for dinner, again?” “How can you expect to have a big family when you can’t even handle one baby?”

Things got better as I got more sleep, but that ugly voice in my head was always lurking in the shadows -- waiting for an opportunity when I was alone to magnify my failures.  It was easiest to ignore when my house was clean; however, every time I was pregnant again or had a new baby, the voice would return with a vengeance.

After my third baby was born, I experienced a deeper depression than I had with my previous two children.  For almost a year and a half, my perceived failures blinded me to the good in my life.  I felt so alone.  Sometimes the weight of hopelessness was so heavy on my shoulders, I felt literally dragged down.  

The only benefit of my depression was that it forced me to slow down, reflect, and ponder.  As I considered my plight, I was finally able to realize a truth that had previously evaded me.  Doing my best would always result in success, but not always the visible, easy-to-recognize success I imagined.  This idea changed everything!  

Some days my best might bring tangible results: a clean house, dinner on the table, helping out a friend, or completing a project.  Other days, success might be harder to recognize: dragging myself out of bed, crawling to the couch, and keeping the children from fighting with each other, while fighting my own sickness.  Days when I spent all my time comforting a sick child (and allowed my house to be completely destroyed by the other children) were every bit as successful as days where I actually got to check off my to-do list.  

While I still struggle to accept my best efforts on the hard days, this realization has helped me to finally silence that destructive voice in my head.  When writing in my journal, I look past the things I didn’t accomplish and write down the things I am thankful for.  Special moments with my children that had been blurred in the periphery when I had focused on my failures come into view and I can see their priceless, eternal worth.  

Sometimes success comes with applause, pay raises, and millions of followers on Pinterest.  But as a mother, success comes much more quietly and personally.  It sneaks into our hearts, and if we are looking too hard in the wrong places, we will miss it altogether. The fruits of this kind of success bring peace, love, and gratitude.   I believe that the best success is the kind you learn to feel instead of see.