Step 1:Choose a career that you absolutely love and allows you the freedom to work for yourself, choose your own hours, and change the world.
Step 2: Add a second career you feel super passionate about that does exactly what your first career does, only in theory it will give you more free time to spend with your kids.
Step 3: Keep both careers because you love them both. Extra bonus: you can work on both of these careers at home so you don’t have to spend any time away from your kids while you’re working. Best of both worlds! Moms CAN have it all. Yay!
Step 4: Solo parent your 2 small children while your partner embarks on training for a life-changing job. You are proud of your partner. You are excited for the adventure you will go on as a family in this new job.
Step 5: Maintain the status quo. Keep up the same pace you had before when you had an extra pair of daddy hands helping out.
Step 6: Project confidence. Kids can smell fear.
Step 7: Thank everyone for all of their generous offers to help out. Don’t follow up out of pride, fear, and guilt.
Step: 8: Feel like a badass! You are killing it. You’ve got this whole solo parenting thing down.
Step 9: Discover that you will need to leave the area sooner than you anticipated. Make plans to put your house on the market in less than 1 month. Make simultaneous plans to move in with your parents until you are able to leave the area. Start the terrifying delightful process of putting everything you own into boxes. Make the simultaneous decision to burn everything you own and start over in your new city and new home. Secretly wish that the latter was a legit option.
Step 10: Ignore the fact that you are trampling all over some of your most valuable self-care and healthy habits. Not all, but some so it’s ok, right?
Step 11: Fight with your 3 year old daily. I mean you tried to breath through it. You tried to take the high road. You tried reason. You tried threats. You tried bribes. Nothing sways her.
Silver lining~ this kid is tenacious. This will serve her well in her future career as President of the United States.
Step 12: Secretly train your baby to cry on command when anyone other than you tries to hold him. Bonus points if he cries for over an hour.
Step 13: Continue to stubbornly act as though everything is ok.
Step 14: Wear sunglasses at all times because you are likely to cry uncontrollably when someone does a small (or large) act of kindness for you or your kids, which happens frequently.
Step 15: Overwork yourself because money is tight and when you’re not working you’re not making money. And you need to buy not 1 but 2 Halloween costumes because your daughter changes her mind daily.
Step 16: Acknowledge that you are stretched too thin, but only admit this to your journal. Then of course, write a blog about it.
Step 17: Feel like an utter failure because nothing is going right.
Step 18: Get sick. Not horribly sick, but just incapacitated enough to finally ask for help.
Step 19: Lie on my couch with my baby while my mom entertains my daughter and cleans my kitchen. Then lie on her couch with my baby instead of teaching my yoga class, while she entertains, feeds, and bathes my daughter.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
I am not superwoman. I’m not supermom. I’m not super anything. And that’s ok.
I’m human. Even though I teach self-care and healthier habits, I don’t always get it right. Sometimes my stubbornness and determination gets in the way of my ability to make healthy choices.
Can anyone relate?
So what I am going to do about it?
Step 20: I am going to make a new plan.
I am starting over. I am going to try and ask for help more often, which is literally the hardest thing in the world for me to do. I am going to say no more. I am going to pare down my teaching schedule. I am going to work really hard on my Conscious Healthy Mama program because that is where my heart is. I am going to streamline and simplify as best I can. I might burn all of our belongings so I don’t have to move them. I am going to have a daily gratitude practice to remind myself of all of the amazing things people are doing to help my little family. I am going to revisit the self-care practices I’ve been ignoring and slowly start listening to the voice in my heart that is telling me what I need. I am going to take this one day at a time, one step at a time, one breath at a time. I am going to be the best mom I can be and the best human I can be, even when it means scrapping everything I thought I knew about motherhood and myself and starting over.
