I live for fall mornings, the brisk air telling me to pull out a cardigan before heading to the kitchen to make myself a hot cup of coffee, a splash of hazelnut syrup, please. To then find my seat at my desk with my sky-high pile of journals to jot down all those pesky thoughts jumbled inside my brain. Lately, my mind has been consumed with all the things I wish I could be doing but can’t:
“because I don’t have time”
“because the kids are home with me”
“because I’m too tired”
And this way of thinking has been causing my mind to feed my heart a toxic negativity, a “woe is me” mentality, a “glass is half empty” attitude. And somewhere in my heart, I caught onto this lie that motherhood is a burden, that my current season is one to just endure through.
So it’s no wonder why I’ve been lacking joy. The kids have just felt like obstacles to my work, to my free time, the cause of my fatigue. It’s no wonder I’ve been lacking joy because I’ve been getting it all wrong. They’re not obstacles, they’re not the cause of my problems, they are a gift, my source of joy. “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me.”
With a new freelance gig that is taking up a lot more time than I had initially anticipated, I have been struggling to juggle the demands of (paid) work and family (because raising a family is WORK!) You would think three kids in, I would have maybe learned the fine balancing act parenthood is but that’s the thing. Life with kids is unpredictable. Take yesterday for example. I sat down at the local library to get a few good hours of work in (that were carefully planned to help me meet a deadline) but I got a message from O’s teacher saying she had a fever. So then I packed up all my things, headed over to her daycare to pick her up and then rather than get work done, I made her lunch, gave her a snack, listened to her never-ending (but entertaining and endearing) tales and lied down with her for her nap. Only then did I get very little work done.
That’s my current biggest challenge: to find joy in the mess, to remain present in the chaos, to not endure motherhood but to enjoy it. Though my head desires order and things to go according to (my) plan, to stay in a place of gratitude, even when things don’t (which happen to be most of the time).
Work-life balance? Is there such a thing? What have I been doing to try and keep my head above water? Head over to the podcast to listen to the episode!