After promising to make a post every week on Sunday, I completed stopped for last few weeks.
It all started with sickness and one week turned into 2 and then it became a month. With every passing week, I was guilty of not keeping up with my promise. After all my husband did warn me to set a smaller goal given the things on our plate but I did not listen. Anyone with a child would have experienced this, what happened was a chain reaction of me getting sick followed by my husband, followed by my child or vice versa. This time my sickness showed no signs of slowing down and the list of tasks I had to abandon kept piling up. The guilt and thought of failure kept bugging me and I tried my best to get at least some short post out, but I simply could not even stand to look at the laptop, let alone type something in it.
The reason I am talking about my sickness is throughout the entire period, the mom-guilt raided me like anything, making me realize how much hard we are on ourselves by setting some unrealistic goals. Not to mention the being judged by others which seems to be so prevalent in this digital world.
Hence I am going to share some pointers that helped me through not just last month but through other recent phases filled with sleepless and exhausting days.
#1 Set realistic goals:
Setting a realistic goal is key to living a happy, healthy and content life.
By putting too many goals on your plate, there is more chances of delays or dropped tasks and pretty soon it could go out of control and make you feel more like a failure.
Hence write down your goals and pick only the top 5 items and prioritize those goals for that day. I will write another post on setting yearly and how to align your daily goals towards that.
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#2 Adjust your goals based on the situation:
Evaluate your current situation and set realistic goals. I will give an example.
When I was in newborn phase and pumping million times a day, all I had time and energy to do was pump, wash bottles, care for baby, run around for appointments and come back home and repeat. My house was a messy maze, my kitchen was overflowing with vessels, but I turned a blind eye towards it. Trust me it was not pretty!!
Did I become de-sensitized towards cleaning? No, I just had to re-prioritize based on the current situation – managing life and baby with literally no sleep. Those days my goals were simple and very less:
– pump, take care of baby, eat, brush teeth, take a bath.
As days moved on and I gained my energy back, I could add more tasks to my list and align to my yearly goals. In the meantime, this simplified list made me feel less of a failure.
To summarize, when things get hard, create a simple list that you can stick to.
#3 Do your top priority item first
You have more energy and less exhausted in the morning (assuming you got to sleep at night :)) Always get your top priority item done in the morning. This could be a critical item or most time consuming item. Easy way to identify such tasks is – what do you hate to do at night and end up procrastinating or postponing (e.g. washing bottles?)? Or what tasks impact you the most if you don’t do it on time (e.g. office work)?
Those are ideal tasks to complete the first thing in your day.
Pros of doing this – feeling more accomplished since you got your top tasks out of the way!
there is minimum impact if you could not finish other minor tasks.
Easy example: I used to do some left over office work on Sunday night. Now with kid, something or the other happens on Sunday night (kid falling sick, or sleep regression) causing me to stress and not handle the situation well.
These days, I complete my office work on Friday evening or Saturday morning. Whatever happens on Sunday night, I have time to deal with it, instead of stressing about my pending office work and not focusing on problem at hand.
#4 You do you!
This is so important for your healthy mind. There are always super moms around who seemed to do so much more than you can even think of.
It can be rather intimidating and unfulfilling to compare and see how much activities they seem to achieve while you can hardly get through the day.
Always play to your strength and decide on what is more important to you and your family. Never compare your goals with others as that could cause conflict of interest and plunge down the path of failure again. Some examples:
A mom chooses to provide store-bought packaged food for her children so that she has more time to work and provide financially for her children. She has decided on this and is not going to be impacted by fear-mongering by other moms fixated on home-made food.
Another mom chooses to do home cooked meal for her children and sacrifice other tasks to achieve this goal. Again she would not be bothered about spending more time in kitchen than on other tasks. She could care less about others who consider cooking a demeaning task.
(PS: I have given binary situations above to drive a point, real life is much more complicated than that 🙂 )
They are playing to their strengths and their planned goal and that sometimes means making hard decisions and sticking to it.
#5 Do not fall into social media trap:
Have you ever seen a mom share a crying baby picture in Facebook or Instagram or a super messy house. Never, no way. For some reason, only the happy and lovely pictures are shared in social media. However some time reality is far from it. Heck, even I don’t have pictures of my messy house from the newborn phase, who wants to relive that horror 🙂
There is not a single person in real life that I have met, who has not had gone through a hard life at one point or other in their lives. The reason they don’t talk or publicize those bad experiences is simple – they don’t want to relive the experience!
Although with the new influencers in digital media, this trend has been changing now and people are more ready to talk about unpleasant parts of their lives.
Point is, don’t get overwhelmed by the sunny life pictured in the social media. If it does, stop following social media for sometime and focus on real life.
Trust me, you will start to observe that real life is more sunny when you pay attention 🙂
#6 Get timely help
This is another hard one for most of the moms. We have the need to do everything by ourselves. God knows to whom we are trying to prove/showcase by doing everything single thing under the sun by ourselves. Who am I kidding, this is hard for me as well.
Delegation is a key to successful life. Evaluate the reasons in your life on why you are hesitant to delegate and try to find a solution.
Few scenarios with potential solutions:
- Others may not do as well a job as you do – I call this Monica clean – F.r.i.e.n.d.s. reference 🙂
- Solution: learn to pick your battles here. the choices are simple – which is better, a house cleaned by someone else even though it is not perfect in your eyes – or a messy house since you don’t have time to clean. Obviously #1. Even after you chose #1, you can pick some tasks that you decide to do for yourselves. For example, I usually do the bottle cleaning by myself since I can make sure there are no milk residues since a sanitary bottle is more important in this situation – however I do this only after trying to delegate and the person was not able to do the level of cleaning that was required for this.
- Financial issues
- Solution: Evaluate your spending habits and try to reallocate your budget to get the needed help. Something my husband always reminds me – Sacrifice a Starbucks coffee or a restaurant lunch and buy the item that I actually need.
- Save up money ahead of time when you anticipate that you need help – e.g. hiring help in the newborn phase.
I am sure what ever the issue is there is a amicable solution that you can arrive at. Remember, there is no point in exhausting or stressing yourself trying to do everything on your own and impacting your health – especially your mind. You need to be hale and healthy to enjoy the lovely life with you family.