Nope, I'm not doing it all.
On being okay with the things we don't do.
“Can you give me a sec?” I plead to my son. “How many’s that?” He says. “A means one,” I respond, looking down at my laptop. “One… Muuummm!” He shouts. “Okay. I’m sorry. What I meant was five minutes to respond to a few emails.” Well, how many will that take?” He questions so innocently. “Count to sixty. Five times then I’ll be done.” I say, knowing very well he is yet to learn how to count to sixty or have the patience to repeat it five times. “But I can’t.” He softly declares with his head bowing towards our old wooden floorboards. “That’s okay. How about a Smartie cookie (store-bought nonetheless), and I put on the Paw Patrol movie to help pass the time?” He reluctantly agrees. This is not an isolated scenario. He’s often waiting for me to just reply to an email/dm/message/comment/thread, which now I can probably get 30 minutes of work in if I set up a movie, play dough, colouring-in and a snack bar that rivals any gold class cinema.
Lately, a lot of you have asked how I do it. How do I manage to work, be the primary carer, and maintain a home, marriage, and exercise regime? Along with friendships, a (semi) tidy house, and time to read, write, curate and work on Dear Dilate. Well, the obvious fact is that I have help in the form of paid childcare and a husband (along with parents and siblings who make up our village); I write most nights, which means I roll into bed around midnight and spend an embarrassingly large amount of time on my phone. The less obvious tenable is that there are many things I don’t do – and this reality is something we may not read or hear about. It’s not exactly inspirational, marketable or worthy of a grid post, so why am I telling you this? Because I’m not a wonder woman or an angel of the house, I have just learnt to be okay with the things that constantly sit at the bottom of my to-do list – and one day, I may or may not get around to them (like the piles of washing surrounding me right now). To have any form of inner contentedness, we need to get comfortable with what we don’t do, including living up to others’ expectations of what we should be doing.
Quite often, the pressure we place on ourselves, as mothers, along with societal expectations to juggle it all like clowns with smiles painted across our faces. We are walking a tightrope of deadlines and family time one day, riding the unicycle to school pick-up the next while juggling sports schedules, play dates, groceries, and keeping house and medical appointments through rings of fire and RSV. Life as a modern parent demands a ludicrous number of tasks – but we can’t do everything, and we certainly can not do everything at once. No one individual can, and once we respect ourselves and the decisions we make to live a full life with our kids in toe, we open ourselves up to a guilt-free existence.
“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.” Writes Joan Didion, in her famous essay, On Self-Respect. A meditation on her self-validation, the importance of rejecting external ideals and the power of inner harmony; “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.” And it has probably taken me three or so years into being a mother and over 30 plus years of being a woman to understand that verity – how I feel about myself, short-comings and all (and there are plenty), is a communion of self-awareness, self-respect and self-preservation. It is that respect I have for myself and how I decide to live that is so freeing.
The paradox of saying yes to doing things we both enjoy and need to do (even if we don’t want to but out of necessity than pleasure), we are inevitability saying no to another. Behind anyone you admire – whether it be their art, their career, their family life or their sheer determination to train for a New York Marathon – understand that there are things they have had to say no to, or at least no, not right now to be able to achieve the many things they already do.
For everything I do – like work, being mum and diving headfirst into this creative pursuit- there are many things that I don’t do or don’t (and I say don’t, not can’t, as it is a choice) commit to regularly. I rarely bake from scratch or do crafts at home, I’m forgetful when it comes to replying to texts and organising date nights or nights out with friends, I’m always a maybe but probably a no to RSVPing to events, I’ll randomly rock up-to gym classes but never at the same time. I often run out of yoghurts for Fred and Nespresso pods or only think of the washing on at 9:00 pm – I don’t do a lot of things, but I can live with that. Except for the coffee pods, that is one thing I can not live without!
What are you doing and not doing?
Jade x