Work-Family Balance...The great white whale for moms

“I feel like a hamster on a wheel.  I move and move and never get anywhere.” (Mom Friend #1)

“I’m on a merry-go-round and I can’t stop the ride.” (Mom Friend #2)

“This month has been positively craptacular.” (Mom Friend #3)

“Once dance is over, we’ll be better.  Or maybe dance and soccer.  And school.  Yeah, talk to me in June.” (Mom Friend #4)

“Screw you, April.”  (Me.)

“My God, will this month never end?” (Also me, about 4 days into May)

It seems like no matter what mom I talked to, this spring has been rough.  Bad weather.  Sick cows. Brandings. Deadlines.  Soccer. Dance recitals.  More soccer. Tax day.  More bad weather. Baseball. Field trips. Rodeos. Rain.  More rain.

Craptacular describes this spring pretty well, in my opinion.

Sometimes I feel like one of those crazy plate spinners at the circus whirling dozens of different plates in the air on sticks and just one forgotten field trip or missed appointment away from complete and total disaster.

CRACK. SMASH.  Little bits of plate everywhere.  Except those plates are my life, in pieces, at my feet.

“Someday, I’ll get my stuff together, I promise,” one mom friend told me.  “I’ll figure out a better work/life balance.”

Ahhhh, there it is.  The old work/family balance conundrum.  Also known as mommy guilt.  We feel guilty spending time at work when we think we should be spending more time with our kids.  When we’re at home, our mind drifts to the to-do list we have waiting for us at work.  We feel like we are constantly letting someone down and we can never find that perfect balance of work and family and fulfillment and contentment.

I’m here to let you in on a little secret.

A perfect work/family balance doesn’t exist.  And mommy guilt is bullshit.  Yes, I said it.  A perfect work/life balance is unattainable and mommy guilt is a bullshit construct we’ve been taught by society.

Think about it.  What other woman in your life has a perfect work/family balance all of the time?  Most of the time?  I can’t think of one other mom that I know who has it figured out because the answer just doesn’t exist.  It’s a myth we’ve learned somewhere and it’s slowly eating away at our souls.  We are berating ourselves for getting the wrong answer on a test that doesn’t have any right answers.

I bought into this myth.  I thought that if I could just tweak something in my life, find some missing piece, everything else will fall into place and life will be smooth sailing.  I tried:

• Planning my way into Nirvana.  Now I just have a really expensive, really heavy planner that I hate and resent because I spent a lot of money on it and it didn’t really help any more than a $10 planner.
• Cutting back on my schedule.  But that didn’t work.  I just postponed the crazy because I crammed it all into the weeks following my break and it was right back to sheer insanity.  I only delayed the inevitable.
• Getting help from friends, family and babysitters.  Except that then I felt guilty for making my problems someone else’s problem and for needing help in the first place.  Don’t good moms just plan better so they don’t have to use everyone else? (See bullet point #1).

I had this issue even when I wasn’t working.  I had the guilt because I wanted to be working.  I loved being a mom but I missed using my brain in creative ways and weighing in on issues and problems.  So while my mommy heart was bursting with joy, my creative heart was sad and lonely and withering away on a vine.  It was that need for something more (and a brilliant idea from a friend) that led us to start the Dirt Road Wife blog and eventually my photography business.

And now?  Now that I’m running a business and building a brand and trying to figure out where I want to take my life in the next 5 years?  Where has that got me?

A teary phone call at 11 pm to my husband at home after two days of running a convention that was both a disaster and a triumph.  A lost night of sleep because my kiddo wanted to take a stuffed animal to play with at school because she felt like she didn’t have any friends and I blamed that on me and my schedule.

“I’ll do better next time,” I told myself.  “I just need to find a better balance.”

But I never figure it out.  No matter what I do, I always feel like something isn’t getting the attention it needs.

Why can’t I just get it right?  Why?

I started reading the Rachel Hollis book “Girl, Stop Apologizing,” this week.  She tackles this subject head-on and as I read her words, I felt myself nodding along.

“So when we feel off-balance and we’re struggling to keep all our balls in the air, we assume it’s just because we haven’t figured out work / life balance. It becomes one more thing you’re failing at as a mom beyond forgetting it was weird and wacky hair day at school and buying the wrong kind of yogurt.”

Here is one of the most successful women on the planet telling me she forgets crap too.  This woman who has assistants to help with her business and a nanny to help with the kids and she can’t get it right all the time either.

I read that chapter three times and finally let my heart absorb the words.

No one is getting it right all of the time.  Not.One.Single.Person.

Let that sink in my friends.  We are chasing a great white whale with maniacal zeal and in the end, we’re gonna wind up missing some limbs, endangering our friends and going half-stark raving mad.

So listen up, friends.  We don’t have to be Captain Ahab.  We can stop this ship and turn back to port before the damn whale smashes our entire ship to pieces.  We can say “Enough!”

To be clear, this isn’t a copout to take a complete powder on your life or run for the hills shouting “No king! No king! La la la la la la!”

But it is permission to grant yourself grace and acceptance in knowing that all you can do is all you can do. And permission to ask for help, accept it and NOT FEEL GUILTY.

The thing about guilt, mommy or otherwise, is that it is completely pointless.  Guilt doesn’t help us really accomplish anything other than making us feel worse about ourselves and paralyze us to the point of breakdown.

“Work and personal life will always battle each other for supremacy, because both require your full attention to be successful.”

The next time you feel like bashing yourself because you aren’t getting it perfect, remember none of us get it perfect.  We just don’t.  Working moms, stay at home moms, hybrid moms…we all feel the pressure and we all make mistakes and we all think everyone else has it figured out.  But they don’t.  Stop beating yourself up.  Instead say “Ugh, there goes my crazy life again.” And leave it there.  No guilt.  No self-recrimination.  No feeling overwhelmed.  Just recognize the feeling and move on.

There will be times when you have to give work (a job, your business, a volunteer organization) your full attention.  There will be times when you must be there for your family and work takes a back burner.  Recognize the tug between those two worlds as normal and stop beating yourself up for it.

I’m going to put that in bold and a different color so you’ll remember it.

The constant tug of war is normal.  Stop beating yourself up for it.

If I’ve learned anything from this spring it’s that I’m not alone in not getting it right.  All my mom friends were felling it and worrying about it.  And we should be supporting each other’s imperfect balancing act instead of perpetuating the myth that we can be all things to all people at all times.

So the next time you feel like those plates are about to spin into another dimension because it’s getting out of control?  Stop.  Breathe.  Tell yourself its okay to feel frustrated. It’s okay to feel depleted.  Ask for help.  Say no to new obligations.  E-mail me and I’ll commiserate with you.  But don’t beat yourself up because you aren’t perfect.  Friend, none of us are.  It’s time to stop believing in the myth and creating false expectations for ourselves.  It’s time to stop feeling guilty for failing to achieve a false perfection.  It’s time to give yourself grace and love.  And maybe a margarita or two.

Teresa