BALANCE

The answer I have learned is NO. We can’t do everything expected of the modern Woman everyday. It is impossible.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to be the world’s best Mom to make organic food from scratch, to drop their kids off at school without yelling at all in the morning, to then go to work where everything is working perfectly or being distracted at work thinking about the kids, to keep up with all of our relationships including parents, siblings and friends from college, to have a great love life, exercise an hour a day, meditate and to work on our relationship with ourselves and get 8 hours of sleep.

I have found Work/Life Balance for a Working Mom to be the equivalent to the modern Holy Grail, a goal we are all looking for but might not actually exist. It doesn’t stop many of us from being on a Quest to find it.

In my own Quest to find balance I have had to change my thinking from assessing how I am doing on a certain day to over a week or a month.

There could be a period of time such as my kids Spring Break where I am getting very little work done other than the bare minimum because we are doing a lot of family events.

In contrast, when I am at a Conference, I am focused on working other than calling in once a night to see how everyone back at home is doing.

When I am I am on a girls weekend with some friends and I might not be working at all and yet am still calling in and checking in with my family. In the course of a month, there is some balance but I have stopped getting too hung on the daily tally.

On a day to day or hour to hour basis, it varies on whether or not I have Work/Life Balance. I do know that I need to be kinder to myself overall. We are all striving for it and the gentle we can be in the meantime, the better.

I have given up on being critical of myself for not having perfectly balanced days in my the Quest to find it we discover something else, a group of other women who have our backs.