Flowers for ‘Bad Mothers’

Beloved flower Lover,

Hello ‘bad mother’ have we got your attention! “Apparently confession is good for the mothers soul”, this according to http://www.badmothersanonymous.com/ , made us smile as we began to prepare our Flowers for Mothering Sunday blog post.

OK, the way we humbly see it, is that the good/ bad mother’s question is unique to our generation.

We are gripped by the terror that we’re not Good Mothers. That so-called Good Mothers can be so bad for their children that we need to be punished.  Over-anxious and over-ambitious for their offspring, ‘bad mothers’, can risk making themselves and their family feel like failures. It’s like, good mothers don’t just want the best for their children: in their minds, if their sons and daughters are not super-brains with armfuls of certificates, then what have all their maternal sacrifices been for?

Amazing.

Some of us mothers are trying to find fault with each other. We openly police each other, wanting to find a mother who’s not as good as us, so we won’t feel so bad.

How does it feel to admit that being a bad mother, on Mothering Sunday, isn’t always the greatest job in the world. Does it make you a bad parent?  Because we know what we believe, we experience, we wonder what women of today actually want to create energetically and see reflected back into their lives.

Well we were reminded by the energy of a conversation about a mother who quit her job recently to stay home because she thought it would be so great. Yet guess what. To her shock and horror,  the feeling of joy at being a stay-at-home mum lasted barely a nano second. Even though she’d opted to leave her job, she was consumed with guilt.

Energetically, she felt she’d betrayed her mother, feminism and her self. She explained that her mother’s generation had sacrificed so much to give her opportunities they never had, and she’d thrown them back in her face. Her mother also made no secret of the fact that she couldn’t understand her decision. She still can’t.

But, most unexpected of all, she found being a full-time mother dull and mega boring. And she realised that one of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are ‘Bad Mothers’, that we are failing our children and falling far short of some indefinable ideal.

We felt a hush and quiver in the room as we read the draft of this blog post to the team. Denial was now revealed, the elephant in the room was now seen!

A Good Mother is never fed up, is she? She is never miserable. A Good Mother doesn’t resent leaving her telephone chat to coo over her child’s drawing.

We are convinced that this obsession about being a Good Mother has its roots in feminism, that knew little of the energetic difference between ‘man-made’ and ‘divine laws’.

We’ve realised that the workplace isn’t conducive to being a working mother. We’ve either quit to become full-time mothers, or we’ve carried on with our careers compromised by the pull of children at home. Either way, we experience emotional stresses, experiencing the ups and downs of fear, anger, grief, sadness, worry and anxiety.  Either by quitting or being torn two different ways , that we feel we’d better be Good Mothers and have perfect children. Otherwise what was it all for?

We’ve know that fearful energy around trying too hard to be a Good Mother and overloading our children, work, relationships with unfair expectations.

We are interested in stimulating creative energy which changes the dynamic of that energy so our visions are experienced. We learnt quickly that  a parent can allow their delight and pride in their children to be spoiled by disappointment, by frustration when the children fail to live up to expectations formed before they were even born . Expectations that have nothing to do with them and everything to do with the parent’s own energetic dreams. Quite simply, trying too hard to be a Good Mother can be bad for our children. Here at the team, we wanted to change that energy dynamic.

We have found that Motherhood can become stressfully competitive. Even down to the cards and flowers we get from our children. Instead of supporting each other, some mothers love to beat each other up. Some of us feel that if we can find a mother who’s more selfish than we are, that makes us a better mother. We are interested in how to use flowers to change that energy dynamic.

What is it about parenting that allows us to be so nasty to each other?  We have all made mistakes, like from forgetting to invite the ‘Tooth Fairy to visit’, to failing to turn up at school when the children are putting on a show. Yet the real scoop is that all of this is really supporting us to open up to change our focus. To dialogue with our emotions and learn how we can step back and relate differently to our feelings.

Infinite love and gratitude for that.

So, what’s the solution? What could we get excited about? What is the focus of what we want to experience in our hearts? Joy, peace, happiness maybe?

We are simply interested in how we can be inspired, to feel  joy,peace,appreciation of motherhood,especially during the times when we are not openly cherishing ourselves.

It feels to us that it’s time we all accepted ourselves for who we really are: mothers who do our best, and for whom that is good enough. Even if, in the end, our best turns out to be, simply, not bad.

Introducing new energy, through flower energy, helps to change our focus. Giving and receiving flowers has led us to discover ‘the laws’, that govern life.  Giving flowers can even feel like a beautiful ‘life-line’. We give thanks for being able to use their beauty to charge up our imagination to create feelings of peace,joy and happiness.

We give thanks for flowers because they taught us how just by giving and receiving beautiful flowers that we trigger biochemically, feelings of calm, peace and relaxation in the body. Just by getting into the movie theatre of our minds to rehearse good feelings, we then know through genuine feelings of something we would prefer to focus on. Peace, love and joy. These are then released as associated hormones in the sender and receiver’s body.

Sharing floral images of beauty will only help us release health promoting, stress eradicating hormones into our lives. Thus changing their life.

We can guarantee that when you want to celebrate mothers and you want to know what flowers to choose, That by connecting to your heart, that you will experience the full immersion of their loveliness.  As you return to that calm place and connect with the heart of your subconscious core, you will make a heartfelt choice.

We give thanks for the opportunity to enjoy Mothering Sunday everyday, because you are perfect right now. Right now.

The Team

The London Flower Lover

p.s.

We hope you too can laugh at confessions from   http://www.badmothersanonymous.com/ , as much as we did.