Are our children meant to make us happy? When you’re feeling lost, it can be hard to understand where to find happiness, as this mum discovers.

I was under the impression that a Life Coach was someone who told you precisely what to do in order to nail life.

They would tell you what time to wake up, eat, sleep… when to do one’s laundry, meal prep, give you a cleaning schedule tailored to the rest of the tasks that you have going on in your life and most importantly encourage you to go to sleep instead of staying up late and watching true crime shows on Netflix.

Turns out it doesn’t work that way! No, instead of telling you what to do, they ask questions like “What makes you happy?” and “What do you do that lights you up?”

The only problem was that I wasn’t feeling sad- I was feeling utterly lost. Yet I simply could not answer those questions!

As a parent I suppose the ‘correct’ answer would be one’s children, spouse or something along those lines- but if I had said those things I’d only be lying to myself. And so I didn’t. I spent half of the course pondering on the first question they asked me- luckily for me I wasn’t dealing with Tony Robbins otherwise I would have ended up feeling sad at how much money I had just wasted pondering on one question which should have been a breeze to answer.

What truly makes me happy and lights me up is the concept that everything could run smoothly. That there would be no days throughout the week where my kids require a late note to cover their arrival- honestly those notes bug me! It takes at least 10 minutes just to line up and get the blasted note from the office. Then by the time they get to class they’re a good 15 minutes late. If they were allowed to simply go straight to their class and have their teacher make a note on the roll of the time they arrived, they would only be 3-5 minutes late if that.

Clearly being on time is important to me, it somewhat makes me happy- but that wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

Was it something I did? I mean I enjoy reading, eating, sleeping… but none of those necessarily make my heart skip a beat really.

I felt like something was lacking. I wasn’t getting enough of this particular thing. But the life coach didn’t have the answer. Instead they kept suggesting that I look within- as though I was going to pull the answers out of the very depth of myself. But how is anyone supposed to do that when you’re already feeling so lost?! It would be like trying to pull something out of nothing.

Except… I wasn’t ‘nothing’, I was just very much in need of direction and so perhaps if I just kept interrogating myself maybe just maybe I might be able to pull the answer out of somewhere.

I needed to write this down I told myself- and then BOOM – I found my spark, there was my joy, my soul was lit my heart overflowing and I had my answer.

I LOVE writing, it balances me somehow.

It’s not ‘what are you talented at’, the weight is in the ‘happiness’… this, what you’re reading right now, makes my heart sing. And I had filled my week with so many other obligations that I had no time left to do what centred my soul which in turn made me feel totally lost.

On any given day I have the start of a number of articles going through my head- and if I don’t get them out, the rest of my day is just blurred somehow. Almost as though I need to get my thoughts written out so I can better focus on all other areas of life- yeah I know that sounds crazy, but it’s the part of me that I love most, it’s what I do that makes me happy and it’s important to me because it’s all there in black and white for my children to read one day.

Ahh and just as I thought that my little ones had nothing to do with what lights me up, there they are- they are my reason for writing, I write so that they can read it all when they’re ready. They are also the inspiration of a great many articles of mine.

So beautiful Mouths of Mums community, what makes you happy? What sets your soul on fire? And are you doing it often enough? Because I tell you what, I hadn’t made time to do what I love for so long I felt as though I were drowning! Find it, do it, love love LOVE it- because lovely people, life truly is far too short not to be doing what makes your heart explode as often as you possibly can!

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