This past summer these three words rang in my head as I read them on my little phone screen. You. Are. Enough. Before reading this post it never occurred to me that I was indeed, enough.  Usually late at night when I rock earnest babe back to sleep I scroll my Instagram and Pinterest accounts to keep me awake. This is the time when I realize that I need to be more, there are always tips and pins that tell me how to be more positive of a parent, more skinny, more happy, more successful, more pretty, more face contoured, more hard working, more, more, more!!  When everything I see is telling me I need to be more, it is REALLY hard to feel like I am enough. 

Then I turn this battle inward, I believe that once I get more I will be happy (SO NOT TRUE); but when it is in my face enough, I become so sure that once I have a thigh gap…I will be enough. Ugh. Seriously, I did not even know that was a thing until Pinterest told me how I could get more of it. 

Back to “You Are Enough,” I read this post on She Laughs Project’s Instagram account and I stopped in that moment, I read the words out loud to myself and I realized that I had never told myself I was enough. So to see it that once, I did not believe it.  With a whole world telling us how to constantly improve ourselves, the majority of the time outwardly it is hard to see that we are enough. Fast forward to months later, I am sitting in a MoPs meeting and a MoPs mama sharing her personal story asked us, “Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are to question God? He made you, exactly the way he wanted you. Who are you to question that?”  I swallowed back tears, who DID I think I was??! At 32 years old, I had no idea that I was made enough and in that very teary eyed, pride-swallowing moment I gave myself permission to accept that I was enough. My life changed. 

I was enough, and it was liberating. I believe that our minds are very powerful things and I made it my mission to repeat to myself to remind myself often that I was enough. I am beautiful enough. I am strong enough. I am mom enough. I am smart enough. I am pretty enough. I am enough and reader, so are you!! In seeing the beauty that I can see in myself and loving myself as I am, has opened me up to see the beauty and love in everyone else. It feels so free, so light and so kind – I look back and cannot believe at the ways in which I judged myself, the things I said to myself.  In place, I remind myself that I am my kind of pretty, my kind of strong and my kind of happy. All these which are evolving as I change as a person, but that is okay because people change. Now that I am here, loving me I refuse to turn back. 

I am so thankful for the She Laughs Project, and their three small words has changed me as a mom, a wife, a woman, a sister and a friend. I am enough and I want all of you to know that you are too!  I have stopped looking at “make yourself more” posting accounts to “love you as you” accounts on social media and it has helped me to keep my positivity. I needed to not only change how I was thinking about myself but also change how I allowed my outside world tell me who I was. 

I am enough, just as I am. And I am happy, truly happy , it only took 32 years to get here but I am happier knowing that I get to be a better example as a self confident joyful woman to my daughter.  I want to be the change, any earnest readers feel the change too??  Let’s climb together because victories are way better when celebrated with those that you helped lift along the way. 

In closing, I want to tell you so you know, you are enough. 

x. earnest mom.