بهانۀ پنجم: نمی‌توانم رؤیایم را دنبال کنم و هم‌زمان مادر/ دختر/ کارمند خوبی هم باشم

EXCUSE 5:

I CAN’T PURSUE MY DREAM AND STILL BE A GOOD MOM/DAUGHTER/EMPLOYEE

You can remove the word mom from this excuse and replace it with anything of your choosing: wife, sister, Christian, friend, fill-in-the-blank.

I hate this excuse.

Like, it actually pisses me off. Not because you might believe it, but because I did too. Do you know how many years I wasted trying to live my life to please everyone else? Do you know how long I beat myself up because I liked to work when all the other moms I knew wanted to stay at home? Most of us will grapple with this, and the vast majority of those who do won’t pursue anything that might come at the expense of anyone else’s happiness.

You want to join a gym, but that would require your husband to watch the baby so you can go work out and he doesn’t like to watch the baby? Oh, shoot, well, I guess you can’t go. Or, you want to move to a new city, but your family is super close and your mom will freak out if you’re not nearby? Okay, I guess you’ll just live forever right where you are. Or, you want to use your retirement traveling the world like you always dreamed of, but your daughter was counting on having you nearby to help her with the kids? All right, you better let that vision for your life go.

After all, their happiness matters more than yours does, right? They matter more than you do. The only way to be a good mother, daughter, sister, friend, or whatever is to show up for the other parties exactly how they want you to, when they want you to, right?

Ladies, you get one chance at this—literally only one chance at this life—and you have no idea when your chance might be over. You cannot waste it living only for everyone else.

I don’t mean that you should be wholly selfish. I don’t mean that you should assume life is only about you and what makes you happy. Part of being in a family or a relationship or a community means showing up for others. The problem is that most women I know don’t struggle to show up for others; they struggle to show up for themselves.

I was talking with my dad the other day about the idea for this book. I told him that I wanted to write about pursuing and achieving goals. I told him how many women send me notes asking me how to find the courage to do that. He told me to tell you to be selfish.

“You know what they told me on the first day of class for my PhD?”

My dad always, always starts any story with a question, knowing full well his audience doesn’t know the answer. I used to hate it as a child because I assumed he just liked to prove his superior intellect. As an adult, though, I can look back and see that he was teaching us, from a very early age, to work through a problem before waiting for someone to tell us the answer. Now, of course, I do the exact same thing to my kids and cringe to imagine what my eight-year-old self would think of it. In any event, I didn’t have an answer for him that day.

“No, Daddy, what did they tell you?”

“They told us to be selfish. They told us that getting a PhD later in life was something you did for yourself and nobody else. They told us that it wouldn’t be long before our spouse or our kids or our boss got frustrated by our classes or our homework or how long it takes to write a thesis. They told us if we weren’t selfish with this one thing—our dream of having a doctorate—we’d let someone else talk us out of it.” I’m going to assume that you spend a good deal of your life thinking about others and caring about others and being a great family member and employee and friend. But I’m going to tell you, at least as far as your goal is concerned, that you’re allowed to focus on it even if it means that you’ll miss some time with the people you care about. I’m also going to encourage you to ask yourself (just like in the previous chapter) if something is true or if something is an opinion.

There are two extremely well-known opinions that play deeply into the narrative about what you can and can’t be simultaneously. The first is work-life balance. The idea that work and life can ever be perfectly in balance is an opinion.

It’s the million-dollar question for every working mom, right, ladies? How do you balance your job and your family? It’s a valid question and worth discussing if for no other reason than that it’s reassuring to hear other working moms struggle with this too. My thoughts on this topic are really quite strong, and I don’t mind telling you exactly what I’ve said on numerous business panels over the last decade.

Work-life balance is a myth.

More than that, it’s a hurtful myth, because I don’t think anyone actually achieves it and yet we feel positive that other women somehow have. Someone somewhere mentioned it as a possibility—their opinion, mind you—and the media seemed to latch on. So when we feel off balance and are struggling to keep all our balls in the air, we assume it’s just because we haven’t figured out work-life balance. It becomes one more thing we’re failing at as moms, beyond forgetting it was “weird and wacky hair day” at school and buying the wrong kind of yogurt. Ugh! I detest anything that makes women feel wrong or less than, so allow me to debunk this ridiculous idea.

Work-life balance. Its description implies that those two things live in harmony, perfectly divided up on the scale of your life. My work and home life have never, ever been balanced evenly on any level. Even when I was a seventeen-year-old sandwich maker at the Sub Station in my hometown. Even then there were days when a big project at school meant that I couldn’t work as many hours. Or accepting a lucrative Saturday shift (ripe with tip money) meant that I couldn’t hang out with my friends. Work and personal life will always battle each other for supremacy because both require your full attention to be successful. It’s not bad or wrong; it’s just how life works.

Sometimes my boys have school activities or doctor’s appointments and I have to leave work to be present for those. Likewise, right now as I sit holed up at the only desk in our house (in my big boys’ room), my entire family is having a grand time downstairs by the pool. I can hear them down there laughing and singing along to pop music. They’re drinking LaCroix and living their best lives, and I’m up here . . . writing this book. Pursuing my dream of being an author who encourages other women means that sometimes I will have to miss out on pool time in order to make it happen. The scale is never balanced; it constantly shifts back and forth based on what needs my attention right this second. I think that’s real for most of us no matter what stage of life we’re in, and the only way we’re going to get past this mythology that some people have it all figured out is to start being honest about what our lives and priorities really look like. Here, I’ll go first . . .

MYSELF

In my early days as a mom and entrepreneur I wasn’t a priority at all. I would run myself ragged, taking care of everyone else and never once worrying about how it all might affect me. This was a disaster. I got really sick at least once a year. I was always stressed out. I was always struggling with my weight. It was a mess. Then someone pointed out that I couldn’t take care of anyone properly if I didn’t first take care of myself. My health and well-being are now my biggest priority. I get eight hours of sleep every night. Yes, eight. Not six or even seven. Eight full hours. I eat well, I drink water by the bucket load, I haven’t let Diet Coke touch my lips in over four years. Yes, I’m still addicted to coffee, but we can’t win ‘em all! I took up running and get in at least twelve miles a week. I carve out several hours a week for prayer, church, and volunteer work because my faith is extremely important to me. I don’t think the goal is ever to be balanced, ladies. I think the goal is to be centered. Centered means that you feel grounded and at peace with yourself. Centered means that you can’t be knocked off balance regardless of how chaotic things become. If I prioritize myself and make sure I’m centered, then everything else runs smoothly . . . even when it’s running at a hundred miles an hour!

MY MARRIAGE

I’m sure many parents would naturally list their children as their first priority, but my marriage will always be the most important relationship in my life. Dave and I have a weekly date night, and we take an extravagant annual vacation together—wait for it—without our children. When we’re at home we’re playing interference with three little boys and our queen bee, Noah Elizabeth, so it’s essential that we also get to hang out with each other regularly and act like real-live adults. Because we’re both so supportive of each other’s careers, it can be really easy to start neglecting our relationship, which has happened numerous times over the years. So rather than risk our marriage slipping into an unhealthy place, we’ve agreed to make each other a priority. We don’t want to have a good marriage or even a great one. We want to have an exceptional marriage, and exceptional requires intentionality.

MY KIDS

I have four children: Jackson, Sawyer, Ford, and Noah. So even when I’m not at work, I’m always on the go. There’s morning routine and school drop-off and dinner, baths, books, and bedtime. Then the weekends when we run from sports events to birthday parties and back again. That is a picture of what life looks like today with the kids, but let me back up and tell you about the first two years of running my company. I worked like a maniac. I was often in the office by eight in the morning, which means I was never able to do school drop-off. I got snarky notes from moms at school about missing field trips and bake sales, and I cried myself to sleep about them more nights than I can count. Nobody ever sent snarky notes to my husband for having to work during a field trip—but that’s a diatribe for another time. Most evenings I got home around seven, which means I missed dinner. It was a really chaotic season, but that kind of workload is also part of being an entrepreneur and running a start-up. Some people will argue that I lost valuable time with my kids, and I won’t disagree. But those three little boys also watched their mom build a company from the ground up. They watched me grow that company to something so big that their daddy came to work there too. They’ve seen firsthand the power of hard work and dedication, and I’m proud of the example I’ve set for them. That, for me, in that season, was another way of prioritizing my kids, just with a longer-term vision in mind.

MY WORK

I won’t pretend that there weren’t times when work didn’t take up most of my attention. I also won’t pretend that those weren’t the times that were hardest on my marriage, my health, and my ability to be the kind of mom I want to be. Now that I’m more established in my career, I’m better able to get my work done during office hours. Also, being five years into this business means I have the help of an incredible staff so it doesn’t all fall on my shoulders. My work is a priority for sure, but that looks different in my current season than it had to look in past ones.

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Remember, figuring out how to juggle all the parts of your life in a healthy way is a scale that slides back and forth. Some seasons of your life will require more attention in one area than another, and that’s okay. Someone once said it was possible to be in balance, but that’s only their opinion. You get to decide whether or not it’s true.

The other opinion that affects our narratives about what we can and can’t be at the same time dives into an area of life that I know won’t apply to every woman reading this, but it will apply to a vast majority—and the ones who suffer from it are drowning in it. I want to talk about it. I want us all to be aware that it’s happening so we can, as a community, take power away from this insidious thing.

Mommy guilt.

You guys, mommy guilt is bullshit!

There, I said it. I don’t know if my editor will even let me keep that in here, but if we’re going to hold on to one cussword in this book, Jessica, let it be that line right there!

Mommy guilt, in case you haven’t ever experienced it personally, is this gross, horrendous, cancerous thing that lodges itself in your heart and creeps its way to your head where it festers forever—unless you actively choose to kill it. Mommy guilt likes to remind you on the regular of all the ways you’re failing your children. Some women struggle with guilt on topics like going to work. Others struggle under the weight of guilt associated with everything from wanting time for themselves to not feeding their kids the right kind of blueberries. And I guess, if that was the only thing you had to worry about, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but being a mom means there are 967 things to worry about on any given day. So not only are you responsible for someone else’s clothes and shelter and dental hygiene, but you’re also going to go ahead and beat yourself up for those 967 choices you’re making as you’re making them and think that this will empower you to be better next time? No way. This is only going to confuse and overwhelm you and zap you of whatever confidence you had in yourself as a mom, which, let’s be honest, is tenuous on the best of days.

I can already hear the critiques on this one. Well, you told us to be self-aware. You told us we should be honest about the areas where we can improve. You’re right. The problem is that mommy guilt isn’t about self-awareness. Mommy guilt is about self-destruction. Part of growth in any area of life is a willingness to make changes to improve. But mommy guilt isn’t really about improving, and, more often than not, it’s debilitating. And yet we go back to it again and again.

Hear me when I say this: It doesn’t serve you in any way. It doesn’t serve your children either.

I said something like this recently on a live stream, and a commenter said something like, “No, guilt is so important. Feeling guilty is how we know we’re doing something wrong. Guilt is God’s way of telling us we’re making bad choices.” Holy crap.

No, seriously. That’s a load of crap wrapped up and pretending to be holy.

I don’t care what religion you were raised in. You weren’t taught guilt and shame by your creator. You were taught guilt and shame by people. That means whatever your people thought was shameful is what you learned to be ashamed of. Whatever your family or the influential people in your life thought was something to feel guilty about is what you have guilt about now.

Allow me to give you a way-too-personal example of this. I grew up in the eighties as a Pentecostal preacher’s daughter. Suffice it to say, I was not taught to view my sexuality as something good. In fact, I wasn’t taught to view my sexuality at all for any reason at any time. That’s something I was supposed to “save for marriage.” Nobody told me exactly what I was saving or what I should do with it once I did get married. It’s not any great surprise or any great originality to say that I was super uncomfortable getting comfortable with sex. My entire life nobody ever spoke to me about sex, except as this thing that was shameful to give away before a certain time. The problem is that even after that time came I couldn’t let go of the shame I’d learned to associate with it. It took me years of work to get past this, and I’m happy to report that now my sex life with my husband is fantastic, thank-you-very-much. But the shame I felt having sex with my husband in the beginning was very real, and I don’t believe for one second that this guilt I was feeling was God telling me sex with my husband was wrong. Guilt and shame are not from God, so please don’t allow yourself to assume that your mommy guilt is something divine.

Mommy guilt only works to make you question everything you have done, are doing, or might consider doing in the future. Everywhere you look, articles and books and shows suggest this or recommend that. The moms at school only like this brand or that style, and heaven forbid you parent differently than your sister-in-law or how your husband was raised.

Stop the madness!

Number one, dang it, you are doing your freaking best! The fact that you’re experiencing any guilt right now tells me that you care about your children and you’re trying. You’re not always going to be the exact kind of mom you wish you were, even when you’re trying your hardest. Today I was trying to put sunscreen on Noah’s chubby cheeks, and she fell backward and bonked the back of her head on the wood floor. Then she cried like the world was ending. You guys, I was trying to put SPF 80+ sunscreen on her to keep her safe, and I accidentally made her trip over her swim diaper. I was trying my best, and I still somehow managed to suck at it! That is life! That is parenting! When did we pass some law that we’re supposed to do this flawlessly?

When I was little we rolled around—without seat belts—in the back of a station wagon. Nobody cared about car seats or automobile safety. One of my friends’ moms laughs and laughs if you try to talk to her about safe pregnancy practices. “Darling,” she’ll say as she waves her hand in your general direction. “It was the sixties. I had a martini every single day during all three of my pregnancies.” I mean, what kind of screwed-up Mad Men situation was going on back then?

We’re all just doing our best, sis, and beating yourself up when you’re trying so hard isn’t going to help you do it better next time. You’ll be a better mama next month than you were this month, and five years from now you’ll be better still. Two decades from now you’ll horrify some new mother when you tell her the barbaric things you did when your kids were still small. In the meantime, hopefully you’ll work to improve in all areas of your life—including parenting—but I promise you it doesn’t serve you in any way to castigate yourself now.

It’s possible to pursue something for yourself while simultaneously showing up well for the people you love. It’s possible to be a great mother and a great entrepreneur. It’s possible to be an awesome wife and still want to get together regularly with your girlfriends. It’s possible to be this and that. It’s possible to decide that you’re going to be centered in who you are and what matters most to you and let other people’s opinions fall away. Don’t buy into the hype or the pressure or the guilt that you’ve got to be one or the other. Maybe that’s true for other people, maybe that’s their opinion, but only you get to decide what’s true for you.