Dear Working Mom,
Are you having a stretch where you feel completely incapable of hitting any daily to-do item beyond the bare minimum?
If it’s not directly related to keeping kiddos alive, your team at work convinced you’re pulling your weight, and food on the table… then feel a slow sink when you notice that more days have passed since you did things that are important to you, but not urgent to anyone else.
Exercise.
Working on your goals.
Reading for pleasure, or undistracted Netflix, or a bath, or whatever your favorite way to stretch your soul is….
We’ve all been there, girl.
Maybe these are your newborn days… or your COVID work-from-home-with-kids-alongside days… or a phase for your toddler or teen… or a phase for you.
Whatever is going on, just know this: we’ve all been there. And we’ll all be there again. Don’t get disheartened, okay? We all get ups and downs, and sometimes it’s easier than other times. Keep that in mind for me, would you?
And if you’re anything like me, the times like these feel really scary and permanent. They’re not permanent, it turns out. But they are scary.
If you find yourself in a time like this, try out an A-B-C approach.
Here’s how it goes: are you struggling to find time and energy to exercise? First of all, acknowledge that this is a rough patch, and that you deserve accordingly gentle treatment. You can and will get through this, dear working mom.
And then pause a minute, and get specific. What are you hoping for, as a “best case” outcome? A 45-minute yoga video at home, completely uninterrupted?
Once you know what your “best case” is, label that your “Plan A”.
Now ask yourself: what would the bare minimum of exercise look like? Maybe 5 sets of wall sits, done whenever you can during the day, and no requirement to be done in one session.
We’ll re-label this “bare minimum” as your “Plan C”.
And now, pick out a “Plan B”. Do your best to think of your biggest obstacles, and imagine what it might look like if you did your thing around those obstacles, or even during them. So if you’ve got a young toddler, “Plan B” might be to do 25 arm lifts with the kiddo as extra weight, and 25 sit-ups with that little one in charge of holding down your toes.
And try again tomorrow, dear working mama. Go into it with your “A-B-C Plan”. You’ll be able to get at least a C, I bet, and you’ll feel better. I can personally recommend this, because it kept me sane with writing and one of my closest friends sane with exercise during our maternity leaves. Here are the main reasons we loved this approach to our personal goals and self-care stuff (and why we hope you do, too):
- because it was a predetermined option, it doesn’t feel like a cop-out
- it weakens that harsh and unhelpful tendency to think in all-or-nothing terms
- holding on to C days is a line in the sand… even when it’s really tough, we can be there for ourselves and our non-family-non-work dreams and values
- if we get a few days straight of C days, we tell our partners. We’ve explained the system to them, so when we say, “I need an extra half hour to myself, it’s been nothing but C days lately for exercise”… they know what we mean, and they are on our team!
So give this a try. And take note when you get any plan done, even if it’s a week of 4 C’s and a single B. Trust me, the faster you can boot out the lie that it only counts if it looks like 7 A-days a week, the happier and more flexible of a working mama you’ll be.
And you, mama, deserve all the happiness there is. And you also deserve consistent doses of time to work on your hobbies, care for yourself, and relax– even if they don’t always fit the ideal. So give yourself LOTS of credit and trust for continuing to care about fitting these things into your, even though that isn’t always an easy fit. And try out the “A-B-C Plan”.
All my best,
Wendy
PS You’re always an “A” in my book– you know that, right?!
