Blog Friend Feature: The Mommy Matters

Photography is NOT my strong suit. At all. Which might explain why I fell in love with this week's Blog Friend Feature: she left me speechless with her gorgeous photos. Every time I went to her blog, I felt like I was getting a little stalkerish in my love for her photos.

But, then I read a little deeper and got to know Courtney from The Mommy Matters.  And while I'll always be jealous of her photos, I've gotten a chance to really see her heart. She is incredibly sweet, thoughtful, and focused on her family. I know you will love her, too. 

Before I just start running my mouth, I have to take a second to thank Shell for featuring me here today. It’s always an honor to be featured in someone else’s space…especially when it’s someone whose blog you stalk have been a fan of for so long. I’ve been a reader here for a while and I admire the community Shell has built around her site. I look forward to Wednesday’s every week and love knowing that I can pop over here to her corner of the blogosphere and share my heart without judgment. 

I thought a lot about what to write for this post. When Shell emailed me, I started making notes and trying to decide what I wanted to say. Of course, I want to dazzle you all with my fabulous way with words and all that, but I wanted this post to reflect who I am as a blogger and as a person. I like to think that I can be funny, though my attempts at humor are somewhat overlooked. I get a lot of those “cricket” noises when I attempt to crack a joke. In actuality, I’m just an ordinary mama, with a pretty extraordinary life.

But that hasn’t always been the case. 

It hasn’t always been my mindset…that I had an extraordinary life. 

For a long time, I was unhappy. I was depressed. I was stuck in some miserable form of existence where I didn’t like who I was, where I was going, or the people around me.

I like to think that my husband helped to change a lot of that. He carried me away from the little town in Alabama where I grew up, and showed me that there was a whole big world out there just waiting for me to explore. And my son. I can’t forget about my son. I owe so much of who I am now to that little guy: my budding career, my blog, my only-recently-realized ambitions and dreams. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be, until I became a mom and a wife.

The journeys of marriage and motherhood have brought a lot of lessons my way (as they do to all of us).  But if I’ve learned one thing and one thing only, it’s that happiness is not a guarantee, it is a CHOICE that is made daily.

We have all been dealt different hands in life. We’ve all been placed in different locations, surrounded by different people, and given different circumstances...both good and bad. But what we do with those circumstances is up to us. 

We can either let them drag us down, hold us back and make us miserable.

OR

We could learn from them, push through them, overcome them and come out better in the end.

I went through some dark and depressing moments in my life. I’ve been through things that other people couldn’t imagine, but I’ve come out on top. Sure, those moments were hard. Most of them brought me to my knees and left me wondering “why me?” And for a long time, I felt like I was at the bottom of my rope with nowhere to turn and no place to go. But, I learned that when you’re at the bottom, as low as you think you can get, the only place to go is UP.

So you move past the frustration and the pain and the heartache and you just keep going. I think Dory said it best in Finding Nemo. Sometimes, all you can do is to keep on swimming…just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming…

You have the power to change to your own life. You hold the key to your own success. The only person holding back…is YOU.

*image credit: redbubble.com

Please leave some comment love here for Courtney and then go follow her blog!