When I became a first- and only-time mom, I, like many, had no idea what I was doing. ‘Trust your instinct,’ people kept telling me. I tried, I really did. But how can you trust your instinct when you can barely even find it?


INSTINCT: a natural or inherent aptitude, impulse, or capacity (Mirriam-Webster Dictionary)

INSTINCT: the way people or animals naturally react or behave, without having to think or learn about it (Cambridge Dictionary)

Trust your instinct. A poem.

Instinct, you are loaded with expectations I cannot meet.

Were it not for you, I would not know that I should know better.

I would not know that I should know at all.

I long for questions to roll lightly from my tongue and run playfully in my mind.

Not lodge in my throat like large chunks of unbuttered bread. No tea to wash them down.

I long for patience.

Patience to accept that answers must ripen before they may fall. Patience in the place of torment.

Torment caused by indecision, transition, outcomes pending.

Always. Seeking. Answers. Please. Come to me.

I long for Basic Instinct. Gut Instinct. Mother’s Instinct.

Instead, I calculate, articulate, gesticulate and hesitate.

Every move. Every thought. Every word. Every breath wrought with judgment. Every judgment wrought with judgment.

Instinct, you are relentless in your absence.

Trust your instinct, they say, but I was raised to never trust a stranger.

Viv for today xo

Why trust your instinct? 32 inspirational quotes.


trust your instinct quote


I’m pleased to say that I did eventually find my instinct and we’ve become the best of friends. But in my journey to find it, I wasn’t always gracious, as my biggest parenting fail demonstrates.

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