Are you a Mum who is always overwhelmed in Ramadan..? Are you bombarded with unending chores and duties and more culinary demands..? Too many of us feel burdened and stuck. What we need is a transformational Ramadan.
A month of family, faith, and fewer chores and cooking. It does seem like a dream but it can be achieved with less effort than you may think.
The work of maintaining a marriage and upholding motherhood whilst keeping your inner peace and sanity can seem like two different worlds.
And you’re not alone. Most mums share those sentiments.
What we need is to bring together all our different roles under the umbrella of our faith. We need to reflect, recharge, and prioritize.
Below are a few ideas to help you transform your Ramadan so that you can have a smooth and rejuvenating month.
Let Ramadan bring you the ease and comfort it promises to all who partake in it.
Multiply Your Intentions
This is a great and easy way to multiply your rewards. The more you multiply your intentions the more you multiply your rewards.
Working on building our intentions helps us to think in different ways, to become more open-minded, and to strengthen our will for what we do.
This will also leave you more fulfilled and engaged with the task at hand.
For example, why do I cook every day? To feed my family. That’s the main reason but I can enhance that with other intentions…
- To provide healthy home cooked meals
- Build good eating habits for myself
- To build good eating habits for my family
- Stay away from junk
- Protect the world from more plastics
- Set my kids up for a healthy future
- To be a role model for my family
- Earn the Pleasure of Allah in good service
- To fulfill my duties as a mother
The list can go on and will be different for each of us. Doing this we can all be happier if we become aware of what our actions truly entail, so that we may be rewarded for it too.
Enhance Your Fard
It can be very stressful as everyone around us in Ramdan speaks of praying more, standing for long hours at night, and reading more Quran, whilst were too busy to even think about adding more to the list.
Yes, it’s great to do more voluntary deeds this month, but what’s better is to first get our fard/ obligations right. And to take that on for all the months to come after Ramadan.
This means if we’re not praying at all then we should start praying 5x consistently. Then to pray on time. Then we should focus on praying at the earliest time without delaying it before it ends.
You get the point. We should do this with Quran, commit to reading a page a day if we’ve been reading nothing for months, Focus on reading with quality, reading well….looking into translation and meaning, etc.
Focus on correcting, and perfecting your fard acts. And doing what you already do every day but doing it well.
Add Quality To Your Day
Our day is full of actions that we can tweak to make more rewardable. And not just spiritual rewards but actions that leave us feeling happy and motivated as we do them.
For example, when I speak, I intend to speak well, share good and kind words, hold back bad and hurtful words, to adorn my speech with a smile.
When I clean the house, I clean in a calm state, I try to be grateful for what I have as I clean them, I try not to waste water as I clean …
We all speak a lot during the day, so why waste it on speech that’s hurtful or ineffective. Instead, we can speak well and have a greater positive impact on our loved ones.
Adding quality to our day means, taking care of our thoughts, feelings, and actions as we go about our daily routine. That’s what we should prioritize and soon enough it will become a habit without thinking.
Whatever you’re doing or saying, ask yourself if you can do it better…
Turn Habits Into Worship
This can be easily done as you change your intention to what’s positive and Pleasurable to Allah.
Everything good we do can be found within the guidelines of our religion.
So seek the greater good in your heart and you will easily make that chore or work more rewarding.
As we learn more about our faith, we are equipped with knowledge that supports and motivates us to do more good.
This way, even making your bed in the morning becomes an act of worship, because being tidy, taking care of your home, dusting your bed, etc is all from the Prophetic Path.
Knowing and intending to follow on that Path will increase your rewards and make you a role model to your kids.
Make Good Your Minds Chatter
We all have that constant chatter in our minds that we wish would go away.
But why wish is gone when you can easiily replace it with better?
I mean, isn’t your mind going to chatter if it’s not busy doing something? So instead of waiting for it to disappear…why not replace the unwanted with what’s pleasant…
What we watch, listen to, see, and read, all make up the content of our minds. And that is what the chatter will be inspired by or limited to.
We need to fill the content of our thoughts with what’s useful to our lives and positive for our mental and physical health.
Watch documentaries instead of tv shows, listen to podcasts/ lectures/ interviews while we iron or cook. Stop bad thoughts with positive ones, or by simply remembering Allah or His Prophet, do your morning and evening Duas, listen to some Quran, revise what you have memorized, count your blessing as you work…etc…
We need to engage ourselves in what is beneficial so that when we’re alone with our mind, it can engage us in what is good.
Revive The Worship In Motherhood
Motherhood is a full-time job and the most rewarding, both spiritually and physically.
The work of the mother cannot be replaced by anyone. We all mourne what we lost with our mothers even if we have all the love others can give us.
It’s no wonder the value of mothers is great in Islam. The power a mother has is immense and we need to invest in that power to make it impactful.
Motherhood is an act of worship, we are rewarded for carrying our children until the hurdles of birth, then sustaining that fragile human till they become independent and able.
Seeing the great work you are doing as you connect with your toddler, or whilst you homeschool your distracted 5 yr old will allow you to parent more peacefully. Because you are being rewarded for every second you spent raising a healthy, kind, smart, and caring human.
Seeing it as an act of worship will help us to prioritize our children and our connection to them.
And that is part of your spiritual journey, it’s your act of worship and it will take you closer to Allah if done correctly.
Let Your Child Join You
It’s no use pushing your child away when you want to pray or read Quran, they only get more clingy and curious. Maybe even hurt and confused as to why is Mum doing this because they do not understand.
It’s better for them and you if they just join in with whatever you’re doing. They learn whilst you get things done.
You can invite them to pray, sit near you, and give them a scarf or hat to take part.
Bring their toy and let them fiddle in the corner of the prayer mat. This way you can also supervise them as needed.
Even better, I would give my toddler his snack, making his snack time, my time for prayer/ Quran or studies. Give him what takes time to eat, so that he’s engaged for longer.
Give them what they enjoy( not a screen) to engage them, and you can sit near to read some Quran.
It’s a good idea to introduce them to what you doing so that they don’t feel left out.
They’re just curious and that’s a good trait to have for later. Right now, we just need to let them get over that initial thrill and novelty so that they can move past it.
Since I’ve been doing this with my toddler, now I can sit to read for a long time and he will just go about playing whilst checking up on me too.
Let Go Of Chores
Most of us ladies love to work, work and work until we put our feet up. And on most days we plan to do more than there are hours in the day to get the work done.
Limit your chores. Your purpose is not to clean, dust, hoover, tidy and cook for most of your waking hours.
We have to prioritize what needs to be done today and what needs to be prepared for tomorrow.
Then we should focus our energy on no more than 3 household chores that we need to do today.
Don’t fall for the trap of, I can handle more today or I have time for a bit more cleaning. It’s a never-ending cycle.
This extra time you feel you have is for more meaningful things, things that will add value to your day. Time for connecting with your children, some time for connecting with Allah, and some time for yourself and your marriage.
Or else you will find you have no positive energy left for these valuable, important things.
You will feel stuck and unproductive in the long run.
Especially in this month, learn to replace an unimportant chore with an act of worship.
Prioritize Your Obligations
Your young children are your responsibility. They are your priority, day and night as they depend fully on you.
It can feel like we cant surely give them more attention than we already do, can they seriously need more..?
Yes, they can and they do. That is a normal part of their development, they have phases of attachment and dependency.
We shouldn’t feel saddened if we cannot finish our prayers at night because the baby woke to feed…or a toddler needs comforting.
We must tend to that and that’s where the rewards are.
It can be testing no doubt, but we have to remember…our growth lies in our tests.
Remember, Allah wants us to focus on our obligations over what’s voluntary.
If you need to go to sleep or happen to fall asleep whilst calming your toddler, it’s okay. There’s no wrong in that.
What would be wrong is praying voluntary prayers till late and then missing Fajr (that’s obligatory) because you are too exhausted.
Perhaps next time, we can begin our prayers earlier or get kids into bed early so that we can pray more…whatever the solution, the children are not the problem.
Even the Prophet would hasten his Fard congregational prayers in the mosque when he heard an infant cry due to the distress it may be causing the mother…
“When I enter the prayer I intend to prolong it. Then I hear the crying of a child, so I shorten it knowing the difficulty his mother will have with him crying.”
[Bukhaari]
If this is the case for Fard then what of our nafl, voluntary acts of worship.
Connecting with your child and prioritizing them is an act of worship.
We need to find more smart and tactful solutions for the hurdles of motherhood and parenting.
Your Journey Is One
Your connection with Allah and motherhood is not separate from each other, They are interconnected.
Right now whilst your child is fully dependent on you, they are part of your journey.
They will either help take you closer to Allah or push you away in those testing times.
Rule of thumb – Our growth lies in our tests.
We should face them and seek to understand and learn what Allah is teaching us through the hurdles of motherhood.
Or else we will never overcome them, and it will only add to our frustrations.
Our children bring out the worst in us, and those are the things we need to face and tackle to improve ourselves.
Whenever we get angry or frustrated by our children, we need to remember, that it’s the anger that needs working on / or reflecting on our day, routine and how to prevent such situations.
And by doing so we become better and grow closer to Allah.
Holistic Muslimah
