What no one tells you when you are pregnant is that if you leave your job to raise that baby, your life is turned completely upside down. It is the best, most beautiful time of your life. BUT it is also one of the hardest transitions to navigate. They give you books on pregnancy and labor – not how to feel fulfilled as a stay at home mom. You’re left to navigate that one on your own. Now, as a 35 year old mom of five, I feel I’ve accomplished that and want to touch other women’s lives who may be where I was.
When I found out I was pregnant with our first, we were both completely shocked. I honestly thought I couldn’t even get pregnant.
29 weeks later, I had a 35 week preemie to take care of. I left both jobs I loved to stay at home with our son.
While I absolutely love being a stay at home mom, it was difficult at first. Depressing even.
Literally overnight, I lost my sense of purpose and thought every goal I had would now be wrapped up in raising our son.
Now, we have 5 kids and I can honestly say that I am the most fulfilled I’ve ever been. It will take intention on your part, but if you’re willing to make some key changes, you can find fulfillment too.
Let’s dive in and figure out how you can reinvent yourself. Not outside of being a mother, but as a mother who knows who SHE is too.
Who were you before you had kids? What were your goals? Do you still have those same desires?
Getting Started
First, I want you to write down (or visualize) the most important things to you.
Who do you want to be?
A great wife, mother, friend? What hobbies do you have? What goals would you have if you didn’t have kids?
Write those things down.
Think of what you would want people to say about you if asked to describe you.
Maybe you were a great friend who was always there and took great care of your kids, but you also had a passion for something and went after it.
We need to start claiming the things that we want to be. The truth is, no one is going to do it for you. If you want to be a great anything, only you can make that happen.
Finding the Time for Personal Goals
The first thing you need to do is figure out where you’re going to find the time for anything when you already feel stretched so thin.
A great way to find extra time in your day is to get rid of social media.
It only breeds jealousy and contempt. You see the best of others’ lives and feel less than.
Instead, use the time that you would usually mindlessly scroll to further your passions.
For me, this looks like reading books on my Kindle app. I have Kindle Unlimited and only let myself read the books that are free between that and my library membership.
In the last 3 months, I’ve read 14 books. And I have FIVE children between the ages of 8 and 8 months.
You have enough time, you just have to take it back from Tiktok and Instagram.
Daily Routine
To feel fulfilled as a stay at home parent, you have to wake up with some idea of how your day is going to look.
This is where simple routines come in.
Set up some sort of daily routine that helps you to automate household chores.
We have a Roomba that does the vacuuming for me.
I have a meal plan in place so that I don’t have to think about what to make for dinner.
I put together overnight oats most nights so I don’t have to think about breakfast.
You can read all about my stay at home mom cleaning schedule here and exactly what I do to stay organized here.
Do a load of laundry every night and dry it in the morning. Never go to bed with dirty dishes.
Enlist the help of family members that are old enough to contribute.
When you feel like your chores are handled, you feel less guilty about spending time on yourself.
Mom guilt is detrimental to your mental health, but all of us struggle with it. Daily schedules like this are how we manage it.
Sense of Accomplishment
When I was going through a period of, not really depression, but just sadness and lack of motivation, I realized this was my problem.
I’ve been through depression before and this wasn’t it.
You can read my journey through postpartum depression here.
This was different though. I was just in a weird lull.
I wasn’t ever able to feel accomplished.
My husband went to work and worked hard. Then he came home and spend quality time with me and the kids.
He went to sleep every night exhausted, but felt fulfilled.
I didn’t realize why I didn’t have that until he and I had a heart to heart about why I was so sad all the time.
It felt like I was on a hamster wheel – breakfast, cleaning, lunch, homeschool, cleaning, bedtime routine, repeat.
Everything I cleaned just got destroyed after the next meal time anyway.
What was the point?
I had no idea how to find purpose as a stay at home mom.
Somehow my life felt like it had been diminished to just scrubbing pots and pans, vacuuming, and changing diapers.
Then I realized I needed to do something that my kids couldn’t undo.
For a while, I cut the grass while listening to podcasts.
This lifted the veil on my sadness because no matter what, no one can come behind you and make that grass grow faster.
Then I realized it had been over 2 years since I’d even touched this blog you’re reading.
I decided to pour myself into blogging again and between that and routines with my family, I have found my purpose.
I am a devoted wife, a homeschooling mom, and a blogger (usually between the hours of midnight and 3 am.).
My blog contributes to my family financially, (not important for most, or even for my husband, but it mattered a LOT to me).
Exiting Survival Mode
In order to really find joy in who you are, you are going to have to lock down some routines to get the mundane things out of the way.
This way you have time to work on your own goals.
The hard truth is, you will never feel fulfilled as a stay at home mom if you feel like you’re failing as one.
You can’t feel stressed at every meal time and upon entering every room of your house and still feel fulfilled.
Setting Personal Goals
I feel that to this point I have mainly pointed to outside motherhood to provide fulfillment.
The vast majority of my contentment in life comes from being a mother.
I just told my two oldest kids the other day that I have no idea what I was doing before I had them.
I thought I had a life then, but I didn’t know what it felt like to be truly alive until I loved them.
For this reason, many of the items on my fulfillment checklist involve my kids.
I feel like a success as a parent and a person if my kids enjoy the way I educate them.
So I find fun ways to do home school and plan fun excursions for us as a family.
Support System
We don’t live near family, so finding a support system has been more difficult for us.
We prioritized making mom friends and meeting neighbors when we relocated.
You need to invest a little effort into building your own support system.
Whether it’s with family nearby, friends, or even just within a homeschool coop.
Find your village, cultivate friendships, and make sure you aren’t alienating yourself.
Being a mom is the hardest job there is. Add to it being a stay at home mom and you will feel your to-do list is never ending.
The chores are never done. You will find reasons to stay home if you look for them.
Just get out and create a small social circle that truly gets you, your children, and your desires.
Really just deciding that we were going to leave the house every day was a huge help.
Enjoy This Season of Life
I’ve been at this stay at home mom thing now for eight and a half years.
Most moms I know complain about feeling unfulfilled in the sense that they don’t have time to get it all done.
They worry they aren’t actually enjoying their kids while they’re little and will one day regret it.
I wrote this post about how to enjoy your kids while they’re still little that I think really applies here.
The main point is that your own children are the most beautiful thing (or things) you will pour yourself into.
If you are worried your kids are enjoying too much screen time while you juggle household chores (like I was), commit to a different way.
Spend quality time with your kids, building up your relationship with each of them.
Become a better parent, one you can be truly proud of, before you worry about any of the other things.
Most of the negative thoughts I’ve ever had as a mom have come like an avalanche at the end of the day when I’m most convinced that I’m a bad mom.
Honestly being fulfilled came about accidentally. I just didn’t want our house to be messy and I wanted to be my kids’ best friend.
I felt like my husband and I had an amazing marriage, but I was somehow messing up my friendship with my kids because I was stressed about everything else.
So, I poured myself into mundane daily tasks because I felt guilty if I didn’t.
It wasn’t until I took a new approach toward having a clean house (when we took minimalism for a test drive) and made the daily choice to connect with my kids throughout the day that things started to change.
If you are feeling like you are unfulfilled in life and parenting, I highly recommend adding date nights with your kids to your schedule. It has been a game changer for us.
We spend one on one time with each of our kids throughout the week while the others sleep or have quiet time in their rooms.
Sometimes a date day is just one of them coming with us to the grocery store.
It’s nothing fancy, sometimes it isn’t even much time. But those moments mean more to each of our kids than anything else and they talk about it nonstop for days afterward.
Self Care and Personal Growth
The annoying saying “you can’t pour from an empty cup” is true.
When you spend your needs worrying only about the needs of others, you start to lose yourself.
You will feel like a new mom when you start spending some alone time with your own thoughts each day.
Maybe what you want out of life will pivot like it did for me.
I truly thought I was going to be going to get my master’s degree in Psychology. I graduated from Penn State with my Bachelor’s and within a month, found out I was pregnant with our oldest.
Passion for counseling and helping people has always been who I am. I didn’t see the point in life if we just go through the motions and don’t try to leave a better place in our wake.
My “why” has completely changed. Now, I feel like my purpose is to be the best mother I can be, and in the margins of my time, I write this blog.
While as a counselor, I could have reached maybe 8 people per day – with this blog I reach exponentially more.
I went from truly wanting to become a marriage counselor to realizing that blogging is my passion.
The most important thing to me though is being a person my husband and kids can be proud of.
Now that I have gotten out of my own way, I feel I’ve accomplished that.
My husband would tell you I always was someone he could be proud of.
It wasn’t until I started doing things on a daily basis to take care of my own mental health that I actually started to agree with him.
Whether you start reading books (Colleen Hoover for the win!), start going to the gym, or even just start meditating for a few minutes a day, self care needs to be a priority.
My Heartfelt Request to You
If you’ve read this far, THANK YOU.
It means so much to me that you have visited my little corner of the internet.
I really want to reach out and touch your heart, because if you found a blog post about becoming a fulfilled stay at home mom, chances are – you are where I was.
It wasn’t until the cloud lifted and I set goals to took the first step toward making changes that I really realized how unfulfilled I was.
My request from you is to stop accepting where you are and any unhappiness that you feel.
Let go of your old life, the full-time job you had, and embrace every bit of being a mom.
Enjoy your young children while they’re tiny. Feel lucky to be their mom.
Create a happy home for them – you’re the only one who can. The only person that can give our kids a happy mom that embraces the magic of childhood is YOU.
Set realistic goals, read positive quotes every morning, find the good in every day.
The journey to being a fulfilled mom is just that – a journey. Enjoy the experiences along the way because these days are fleeting.
Believe me, If my stubborn, anxious, depressed self can do it – you can too.
