[Guest Post] 21st Century Motherhood: Following Your Instincts

This post is part of my Mother's Day series celebrating 21st Century Moms. Please support these guest bloggers by leaving some thoughtful comments.

Following Your Instincts
by Darcel Harmon

The 21st Century Mother needs to know that it's ok to follow her own instincts. Before there were books by the experts, there were the tribes and villages. Even if you are a new mom, you don''t really need to read all of those parenting books unless you want to learn new techniques, or read more about research, or one author's take on a certain subject, or maybe you feel this person really gets it, and you enjoy their work.

Once you became a mother, you knew. You knew that you had never experienced anything like this in your life. Our instinct is to nurture, and love. Why do we fight that? Why do we let someone else tell us to fight it?

I'm not saying that books on parenting and motherhood are bad, I actually love to read. The truth is there is a lot of information out there. So many different points of view, some you agree with and some you don't.
Sometimes your eyes are opened to a different way of living. There are positives to seeking outside advice from friends and family that you trust. The truth is that no one else knows what is best for your child.

We don't trust ourselves anymore, and I don't understand why. I don't know when it happened, and I don't know why it keeps getting passed on to each generation. It's time to change that, don't you think?
I believe it's so important for mom and baby to be with each other immediately after birth. That body contact between the two is like a intimate dance. Together the two of them can make their own mothering path.

It's really a beautiful thing, motherhood. We grow, birth, and mother this tiny person who continues to grow and requires us to challenge everything we thought we knew, or thought that we would do.
In the same way that we go on and on about trusting birth, and trusting that our bodies know what to do.
What about trusting in ourselves to navigate this motherhood journey with our sisters, friends, and sometimes strangers. All of us doing the best we can, on our own path of what's right for our family.

A confident, instinctual, 21st Century Mother.

Darcel Harmon is a Stay at Home Mom to two spirited little girls and one adorable little boy. Her passions include but are not limited to, reading, writing, birth, and breastfeeding She blogs at The Mahogany Way about how Attachment Parenting and Unschooling look in their daily lives.