Does this board game my ten-year-old made sound like your approach to mothering? Are you just trying to survive the hike? Ready or not, Mother’s Day is upon us. Everywhere we turn, we face airbrushed, orchestrated images of life with children. We struggle to find common ground between these silky perfect fabrications and the bumpy, lumpy fabric of our own lives. This steady diet of unrealistic images of motherhood and womanhood is just one of the stumbling blocks that can make us believe we are not enough—that entrenches in us a mindset in which our goal is merely to survive, rather than thrive, at this job called motherhood.

My dear friend Jessica Martin-Weber, better known on the web as The Leaky Boob, is a tireless advocate for breastfeeding and natural parenting. And she is passionate about helping women capture the joy of mothering—not the pre-packaged Hallmark card variety, but the joy that comes from embracing the imperfections and the chaos. About teaching our kids that they are enough, even as we acknowledge that we are too.

Everyone who’s ever parented a child knows that we can’t take care of them if we’re not caring for ourselves. I elaborate on this idea and provide a multi-sensory self-care exercise in my guest post on Jessica’s blog this week.

And as my Mother’s Day gift to you, please enjoy this plan I call the Power Hour which gives you a minute-by-minute guide to reclaiming an hour a day for you. When I presented this last month at MommyCon Austin, I delighted in hearing how the moms (and one dad!) were going to take this guide and carve out their own power hours—some as pre-dawn stirrings and others during late night solitude. It doesn’t matter how you put on that oxygen mask. Just that you do it.

Here’s to thriving, rather than surviving, the joyous messiness that is motherhood—and life!