Today marks the beginning of Random Acts of Kindness (RAK) Week.  In my head I’d been planning to really focus on looking for opportunities to do random acts of kindness for the people that I encounter throughout this week, and write a blog post a day about the experience.  I was interested to find out whether seven days of consciously participating in ‘performing’ (surely there must be a better word?!) random acts of kindness would help it become an unconscious habit that I continued with long after the end of the exercise.

I really ought to know better by now.

Yesterday, two incidents occurred that have resulted in me abandoning those plans (for today at least) and instead choose to write about something really close to my heart.

Scene 1:  6.30am, Sunday morning

I’ve just got out of the shower, and my partner is still fast asleep in bed.  Our littlest daughter, Lola, sidles into our bedroom clutching her pink teddy in one hand, rubbing sleep from her eyes with the other.  She clambers into my side of the bed and lies down, snuggling under the covers.  Content that she’s comfortable, I return to the task of applying my make-up and towel-drying my hair.  A few seconds later I hear her singing softly.  I can’t quite make out the words, but the tune is one I recognise – a song from the nursery nativity play she was in at Christmas time.  I listen for a couple of minutes as she gains confidence and begins to get a little louder.  My partner is awake by then, observing her quietly.  I stop what I’m doing and watch her too.  She’s standing up on the bed by now, admiring herself sing in the mirror on the wardrobe door.  She catches sight of me smiling at her.  Instantly she stops, throws herself face down on the bed, covers her head and half mumbles, half shouts “Don’t look at me!”

Scene 2:  6.30pm, Sunday evening

All three girls have had a bath, got their pyjamas on and brushed their teeth.  They’re all tired after a long day of playing.  It hasn’t been a particularly good afternoon – they’ve done their fair share of misbehaving and I’ve done my fair share of shouting, hating myself as I did it, knowing that it has absolutely no effect beyond making them (and me) feel bad.  I’m drying Ella’s hair with the hairdryer – “I want it straight Mummy, like yours. I don’t like it curly” – as we stand sideways on in front of the mirror.  She glances at herself out of the corner of her eye, turns and smoothes her hands down over her tummy, frowning a little as she does so.

These may seem relatively minor in your world.  In fact, some of you may even be wondering why I’ve bothered to share these two little scenes with you in so much detail.

Well, the reason I did is this: In watching my children, I saw myself.

Those actions they did, seemingly innocent to outsiders, hit me so hard I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

“Don’t look at me!”

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said this before.  It’s rare that I say it now (though sometimes I do still close my eyes and try and kid myself that doing that means that no-one can see me).  As my confidence has grown I don’t mind being seen so much, though I much prefer being behind the scenes than up front.  I don’t want my little girl to feel like that.  I want her to recognise her talent (she loves singing) and feel good enough about herself to develop it further.

That little frown.

How often I have stood in front of that very same mirror, trying on different outfits in an attempt to find one that feels comfortable.  I didn’t realise how obvious my actions were.

The thing with Ella is that she does have a bit of a tummy.  When she was born, she had severe reflux.  Everything I gave her – breast milk, formula milk and eventually purees and finger foods – came straight back up again, spectacularly, within seconds.  I lost count of the number of times I’d been covered in projectile vomit.  The lowest moment was when I ran out of clothes and my in-laws walked in to find me crying in my underwear, coated in half-digested banana and blueberries.  If any of you have ever suffered with the burning sensation of acid reflux, you’ll know how painful it is.  Imagine a newborn baby, starving hungry all the time because she couldn’t keep anything down, but not wanting to feed because it hurt so much.  That was her (and my) existence for the first 18 months of her life, until the sphincter at the top of her stomach finally developed enough to keep the food in.  As a result of Ella being so poorly, she’s been left with a distended stomach.  It’s not noticeable unless you are looking for it, and it is reducing as she gets older, but yesterday evening was the first time she’s noticed it for herself, and it moved me to tears because I don’t want her to think that she’s fat.  She’s not. She’s perfect.

I have been silently and ferociously beating myself up inside my head since yesterday, purely because of these two incidents.  My imagination has generated a whole host of possible future outcomes for my girls (all negative) as a result of the two scenes I witnessed.  I’ve told myself how awful a mother I must be, for passing on my old negative behaviours to them, and how terrible it is that I haven’t been able to help them feel confident enough with who they are to accept themselves.

Through writing this post I’ve now realised that I’m being too hard on myself.  It’s not just me that has influence over them – everything does.  School, nursery, friends, society, the books they read.  I can’t protect them from it all.

And I’ve suddenly remembered another thing that happened last night.  After her bath, my middle daughter, Mimi, was dancing – completely naked and unashamed and totally in her own style – to a song we’d put on in an attempt to cheer them all up.  Her energy and confidence and sheer joy at moving her body was awesome to watch.  I hope she never loses that.

Maybe I am doing something right.

This recollection has reminded me that I need to be kinder to myself.  Yes, it’s important to be kind to other people, and doing random acts of kindness is one way to do that.  But kindness needs to start from within.

So today’s tip for the first day of Random Acts of Kindness Week, is to be kind to yourself.

Get rid of the negative self-talk and say kind things to yourself instead.  You might be surprised at how much of a difference it could make to your day (and to those around you too, for that matter).

Because really, what could be more important?

Your thoughts and feelings about this post, are, as always, very welcomed, so please feel free to leave any comments below.  Thank you.