Moving into 2012, I'm taking the opportunity to reflect on 2011, celebrate accomplishments and failures, to learn and grow, reconnect with my husband, and move joyfully forward into the new year with renewed passion and commitment to live from my heart, to follow my dreams, to be fully present and mindful, to keep striving for better balance in all aspects of life, and pass that spirit and optimism onto my family.
You may resolve to recommit to your health, pursue a new passion, reinvent your career, improve your marriage, or whatever you want to achieve in the new year. But when you set your resolutions or goals or whatever you call them, do you ever hear a subconscious whisper of doubt or fear, that you will fail to achieve your goals? It may be so faint you don't hear it, or maybe it's not there at all and you truly believe that you can accomplish ANYTHING you put your mind to. If that's the case, congratulations, you are a rare and exceptional person! Most of us, however, doubt our potential and have a deep-rooted fear of failure.
So I ask myself today, how is this year different? How will I possibly accomplish everything I want to do? Can I really live the life I've always dreamed of? Can I change the things I want to change and lead my family by being an inspirational role model? What fears might prevent me from achieving my goals, and being the mindful mother and woman I want to be?
Life is humbling sometimes, but humility, gratitude and optimism are what propel me forward, to believe that I really can do whatever I set my mind to do.
Thank you 2012 for the opportunity to reach for the stars, and truly believe that I can make all my dreams come true.
Maybe you've never felt this, or maybe you simply can't admit it to yourself. But have you ever looked around your home—surrounded by diapers and strollers and sippy cups—and felt like you were trapped in a bad film? Have you ever woken up and thought (while your child is endlessly whining and demanding your undivided attention), My God! What have I done? I have. Many times.
My childless girlfriend casually said one day, "Oh you probably can't even remember what it was like before kids..." Um, no, not exactly, I thought. I honestly DO remember life without kids, and frankly, I miss it sometimes. I miss sleeping in and the Sunday Times and spontaneous adventures and a life without constant interruptions!
Don't get me wrong. I love being a mom and I wouldn't trade my kids or life for anything else. But if I'm honest with myself, being a parent is a lot of undocumented, hard work, with very low ROI (return on investment), and it's not glamorous. Not at all.
My solution? Have a life of your own outside your family (I'm literally writing from a hammock on a Mexican island with aforementioned childless friend). It will give you the opportunity to miss your kids, and be fully present when you return. So go ahead, leave your family every once in a while! I promise it will be worth every moment you are away, and your family CAN survive for a few days without you.
I write and think a lot about work/family balance, and how difficult it is to find you’re groove. Whether you’re the primary caretaker, work at home or in an office, it’s hard to find enough time to get it all done without having a nervous breakdown. (It’s normal, so stop beating yourself up about it!)
The question I’m thinking about today is not about how you should juggle X, Y or Z in order to find balance. The question is, are you HAPPY? Are you doing what you think you SHOULD or MUST do, or are you doing something that really INSPIRES you and brings you JOY? Are you living the life you want to model for your kids? Most of us don’t take the time to ask these questions, or put happiness on our priority list, but we should.
Because at the end of the day, your kids don’t care about the square footage of your home, the size of your stock portfolio, or the brand of your car. They just want unconditional love, and happy parents.
Seven years ago today, I became a mom. It was as humbling then as it is today. While I strive for a Utopian work-family balance, sometimes I feel like a miserable failure.
Reflecting back on those first days and weeks and months of motherhood, I can't say I enjoyed it much. I felt awful. I had extreme difficulty with breastfeeding; I felt overwhelmed and overly-anxious, lonely, crippled with sleep deprivation, and torn between staying home with my baby or going back to the job I previously loved. I felt plagued with guilt and fear, and suffered from severe postpartum depression. I slept about 8 hours a week for roughly 6 months. I thought I was losing my mind.
How I managed to get myself out of this is a long story, but somehow my husband and I were able to reinvent our lives from two parents with full-time jobs and a (wonderful) nanny, to two parents running home-based businesses and ample time for ourselves and our family.
Though often I feel like my family is totally out of balance (and always feel like it's my "fault" if we are), I endeavor to keep us all on track, and have ample time/space for everything, everyone, and be fully present in every moment.
It's extremely challenging to cultivate balance, and feel happy in all aspects of our lives, but I truly believe it's possible. I have a long, detailed strategy of how I balance family and work, but even with all my lists and systems and strategies, it doesn't always work.
In those moments, when everything comes unraveled, I try to not judge myself, because that's just the way it is with kids sometimes. It's a mess, and it's magic, all at the same time.
So all this is to say, keep striving for balance, people. I believe we CAN enjoy our work and family and ourselves, if we make it our top priority.
I want to live in a world where parents don’t have to choose between career or family or self; a world in which all parents have meaningful, flexible work, and have ample time to simply be with their families without constantly rushing. I want to live in a world where parents feel fully supported by society and by their communities and by each other. Yes I know it sounds Utopian, but...
The truth is that we don’t live in this world unless we create it. We have to build community, make time for ourselves and demand flexibility from our jobs, or create businesses of our own so we can design our lives to work around our families. It’s challenging to live life the way we really want, but I truly believe we can do anything we set our minds to. So strive for happiness, work less, play more, put yourself on your priority list, and enjoy life as much as you possibly can!
Because really, how many of our kids will ever think, If only my parents had worked harder and made more money!?!
In our race to build careers, create financial security, and amass material things for our families, many of us have forgotten to strive for happiness. Often we’re so off-track, we don’t even know if we’re happy or not. Busy planning for our futures, we don’t stop to think about how our happiness—or lack thereof—affects our kids. Or maybe we think of it, then push it way down out of our consciousness, because there are more important things to do.
The things is, kids don’t care about money or the size of your home or the brand of your car. They just want unconditional love, undivided attention, and happy parents.
Ask yourself if there’s one thing you can do right now to be a happier person. Not a better parent, or a harder worker or a bigger bread winner, just happier.
Maybe you used to play the guitar but put it aside? Maybe you were a dancer but hung up your dancing shoes when you became a parent; or maybe you know (like me), that if you committed to two yoga classes a week, you would be a completely changed and happier person?
If we prioritize our own happiness, we have a better chance of actually being happy, and passing it onto our kids!
We’ve probably all heard the flight attendant speech many times. You know, the speech that tells us to put our oxygen mask on first, before our child/ren? Yep, that one. I often think this particular part of the speech is an ironic metaphor for parenting.
As parents, though we know we should care for ourselves first, often we don’t. It feels counter-intuitive, selfish, wrong. If you and your baby are hungry, you should feed your baby first, right? Well, yes and no. I would argue that we simply be more strategic, and feed ourselves before our kids are hungry. We can even take that concept and apply it to other areas of our lives so we nourish ourselves before anything else, thereby having more energy and love to give. If we consistently put our children first, eventually we feel depleted, exhausted, starving on multiple levels, until we have nothing left to give!
Whether you work outside the home, run your own business, or you’re the primary caregiver, you MUST put your oxygen mask on first. Make time to schedule YOURSELF into your busy life. We all have plenty of excuses for why we can’t, or don’t have time, but think about what you REALLY WANT for your family. What kind of example do you want to set for your kids? What do you want to teach them about self-care? Conversely, what are they currently learning from you about self-care, and are you comfortable with that? Is there anything you’d like to change? Try to think of ONE THING you can do right now to take better care of yourself, and go do it. Take the oxygen mask…and breathe.
Before we have kids, I think it’s safe to say that the majority of us have NO idea what we’re getting into. As new couples, we look at families with children and we think warm, glowing, happy thoughts. We name our hypothetical babies in bed as we cuddle with our partners. We dream about becoming mothers ourselves, but don’t truly understand what’s going to happen if and when that happens. In the media, motherhood looks beautiful. Expectant mothers “glow”, they instantly fall in love with their babies, they giggle and play with their kids in the park – they look happy! And maybe many of them are, but as a mother of two young children, I see the another side, and I worry for all the moms who think they should be happy, when they’re really not. I see a lot of moms who are pretending, because it’s not socially acceptable to be an Unhappy Mom. What about those of us who hated being pregnant, hated breastfeeding; those of us who didn’t instantly bond with our babies and really felt (if we’re truly honest with ourslves) that having a newborn was more of a trauma than a difficult childbirth? What about those of us who really miss our former bodies and sleeping in and having private time and reading novels and having our own identities beyond mom/wife/worker? The societal pressure to be Happy Moms is driving many women into a deep, dark depression, and we need more honesty and open dialogue about how we’re really feeling. If not for our own sakes, for our children – to become better, more honest mothers and role models. It’s OK not to feel all the things the media tells us we should feel. And it doesn’t make you a Bad Mom if you don’t love motherhood 100% of the time. I’m curious to hear from moms about this. How many of you feel like a Bad Mom at least some of the time? Please tell me I’m not alone!
Guest post by Jennifer DeLuca, Owner of BodyTonicPilates Gymnasium On September 25th 2009, I found myself in a very strange place. I was at home with my just-turned-one-year-old son and my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, as a single parent.
I might have been in shock when the door closed behind my ex-husband, but how could I even tell? My daughter had just started preschool three days before. Precocious, curious and easily bored, I could tell her need for stimulation was growing exponentially. My son was your typical one-year-old boy: exhausting. During the day he was constantly on the move. At night he would wake up and cry so loudly and so often that I finally had to move my daughter out of their room and into mine and insert earplugs, so the two of us could at least sleep. And still, there was dinner to cook and stories to read, some semblance of normalcy and stability to uphold because, even though I knew it was okay if it happened, I didn’t want my children to see me fall apart.
In the meantime I had a small business to run. I own BodyTonic Pilates Gymnasium in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I am the proud boss and co-worker of 8-10 instructors there and was teaching clients and apprentices 4 or 5 days per week. I’ve always been responsible, but I think that this level of responsibility warrants an entirely new word. It was a completely unmanageable existence, but I didn’t see any way around it. I was just spinning around and around like one of the balls I was keeping in the air.
Within the midst of all of this, I was approached to co-lead a Pilates and yoga retreat in Tulum, Mexico. My first thought was, “I have too much on my plate.” And then with a little uncertainty, and a hint of mischief, I said, “I’ll do it.”
I went. And I slept and I practiced yoga, and I taught Pilates, and I ate three full uninterrupted meals per day, with many uninterrupted conversations, and met many interesting people. There was sun and sand and water and blue sky as a constant backdrop. On the very last day, after all the guests left, I walked to the waves, took a deep breath in and burst into tears. I would never be able to return to my life the way it was. I could not allow myself to live a life with no time for a delicious breakfast of fresh fruit, yogurt and a croissant. I could not live a life without space for beautiful sounds, scents, sights and nature and laughter with good people.
When I arrived back in Brooklyn, the kids were fine. The ex was fine. BodyTonic was fine. And each of them grew a bit without Mom there. Voids got filled and new spaces opened up. I could see that the more I cared for and nurtured myself, the more that everyone benefited. The myth of “too much going on to get away,” is just that, a myth. The truth is, I was not acting in a responsible way by being totally responsible for everything and in fact, I was probably being irresponsible.
In the next few days I served croissants and yogurt and fresh fruit for breakfast, even if it wound up on the floor. I downloaded the sound of ocean waves to have in the background while I cleaned up at the end of the day. I spent my nights in candlelight. I reserved a day each week to take care of ME. The following month, I began sending the kids to Dad’s to sleep one night per week. From a stressed out mom at the end of her tether, I was restored to a caring, present, patient and fun parent! I became a full person again, someone I was be happy to be. A year later I completed my Yoga Teacher Training at OM yoga Center NYC and now I am gearing up for our Pilates and Yoga Retreat 2012 and all of it's positive aftereffects.
There's been a lot of chatter amongst parents about New York Magazine's recent cover story, "I love my children. I hate my life." It was certainly a shock when I saw it on the news stands, and though I rarely purchase print magazines anymore, I bought this one. Numerous studies show that parents are less happy than non-parents. OK, got it. But why? Why are parents so chronically unhappy? Personally, I think it has a lot to do with expectations and new mom guilt. Before we have children, we often dream of having them. We name them in romantic moments with our partners before they're even conceived, and those of us who struggle with fertility romanticize parenthood even more. We don't exactly know what we're getting into when we have children; how it's going to affect our lives, how we will manage the sleep deprivation, roller-coaster hormones, work/family/self balance, how we'll deal with the guilt when we have to go back to work (compounded if we actually enjoy working!). So I would like to post a challenge to all expectant parents: Think about your expectations of parenthood, and ask yourself why you want children. What do YOU expect while you're expecting? How will you maintain your happiness and liberate yourself from feelings of guilt for not loving new parenthood every moment of every day? Being a new parent is hard, more difficult than most people will tell you, but if you manage your expectations, and prioritize yourself even a little bit after you have a baby, you will have a better chance at being a happy parent!
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