The older I get the more I realize that being a human is one big contradictory mess.
This week I read several brave posts by moms who proclaimed that yes, they love their children, AND they hate being a mom. In this article, the line that rang through my head was:
You can love your kids deeply and hate being a mom.
So much of life is being able to hold contradictions in our minds and hearts. It’s hard to grasp that two opposing things can be true all at once because we are so used to binaries. Good - Bad. Light - Dark. High - Low. Black - White.
I think the framing of dualities does us a lot of injustice. Perhaps in childhood it helps us organize the world around us. But as we get older, thinking in dualities drives us to extremes and makes us all needlessly dogmatic. It causes divisiveness, calcification and so much resentment toward the “other-side”.
In truth, I think we are all walking contradictions to some degree. It’s hard to be a water-tight human where we are consistent on all positions all the time. Sure, there are broad strokes that we can and should try to be consistent about but there is also great value in allowing people to be contradictory messes sometimes. Yes I love to write AND I hate everything I write. Yes I am still pursuing my dreams AND I’ve not done anything in awhile. Yes I am proud of the books I made AND I feel like they are pretty shitty.
Yes, I love my child more than anything AND I hate being a mom.
Maybe, sometimes, we should all just stop fighting so hard.
And let ourselves be contradictory messes.