At work I had a poster above the whiteboard that said
The struggle is real.
But where there is struggle, there is strength.
It was a very crude piece of decoration in my classroom. I heard the phrase somewhere and quickly took marker to poster and slapped it up there for the next day. Yet, my students LOVED this poster, and would point to it sometimes when I gave them challenging tasks.
Sometimes, I would even give impossible tasks. I would tell them at the end that the point was the struggle, not the answer. Some teachers thought this was cruel, but my students didn’t. They loved it. Some were often unconvinced that the task was truly impossible and asked to keep trying as part of their homework. This always made my heart smile.
Anyway, this quote and the lesson I was trying to impart on my students, is one that I keep trying to remember as a new mom. Because the new mommy struggle IS real. Continue reading “the (new mommy) struggle is real”