Balance?

Yesterday was a hard day for me. I gave blood after church, which always totally zaps my energy, and then made good on a promise to take Sara to the mall. I can’t even find the words to describe how tired I was when I got home. Hannah came home for dinner, which is always a treat, but by the time I got home from taking her back to school I was beat. So I didn’t blog.


The prompt question for blogging today is about how one balances their children, relationships and work life. That’s a really good question. At first I thought to myself “well, I do okay I guess. I spend a lot of time at work, but I always make my family a priority, right?” And then I got stressed out. Maybe I don’t have balance. Maybe I need to do something differently! Maybe I would have blogged if I had had balance yesterday!

Once I became a parent, I was focused on finding the best way to do things for my family . I wanted to be more organized, more engaged, more encouraging, just more. But I have found that sometimes the wish to be more, combined with the effort to make this happen is more likely to make me become less. Less because I’m stressed or spending time about money trying to be more. Less because I have anxiety about not doing enough or the right thing. Trying to figure out if I’m balancing or not can sometimes build the same type of anxiety in my chest because if I’m not doing it right someone will suffer, right? If it’s me suffering, well, that’s kind of okay, but I sure don’t want my kids to suffer.

Okay….breathe…

Here’s what I do know:

I do know that I’m a pretty good mother. I also know I’m blessed – I have kids that are pretty easy to parent – but it is definitely an intentional thing as well. I give my girls my time and love, advice and discipline, and in the end I don’t think they feel slighted in any way (at least most of the time).

So rather than stressing out about whether or not I’m balancing everything appropriately, I think I’ll celebrate the fact that somehow things balance how they need to. When I need to be spending more time at work, everyone at home comes through to make that possible for me. When I need to be home with a sick kid, like today, the people I work for allow that to happen. When I need time for myself, somehow I’m usually able to do a bit of that as well.

So here’s to balance – however it happens!