I feel like I’m standing in the middle of the five-way intersection pictured in my recent post at Parentables on how to pick a good doctor.
Kids, career, husband, house, garden, community, friends, parents: how do I manage it all? And what is really important? Is happiness more important than success? Are kids more important than career?
As if there was some kind of synchronicity in the world right now, a few of my favorite writers are asking similar questions. And providing some answers.
In I am mother. But first, I was just me., Meagan Francis of The Happiest Mom ponders whether we should throw ourselves into parenting (or any activity of the moment):
Right now my life is so wrapped up in my family and home that it would feel natural, and true, to say I live for and around and through my children.
But the kids, the family, can’t be the whole picture. Kyran’s right: eventually children grow up. At some point the people who are most important to you move away or die.
I think the key is in realizing that everything is temporary. That our children aren’t ours to keep, and that this intense period of our lives – along with the stresses and wonders it brings – will pass. But the parts of ourselves that we now apply so fervently to our role of “mother” will remain.
And those essential pieces of us will need new outlets…outlets that we would be well-served to begin seeking and nurturing now, even in the thick of motherhood…
In 5 Ways to Know When it’s Time to Let a Dream Die, Britt Reints at Parentables grapples with goals and when it’s OK to revise them:
The beauty of life is that we can’t predict the future, even when we’re setting goals. Perhaps while you were busy dreaming up your perfect life, life was preparing something even better for you down the road.
In The Cost of Being an Overachiever, April Dykman asks whether it’s better to be successful or happy after reading a new study by Timothy Judge, “On the Value of Aiming High: The Causes and Consequences of Ambition.”
While high-achievers enjoy more success in their careers, Judge says that doesn’t lead to a happier, healthier life.
Although the study doesn’t address the reasons for higher mortality rates for Type As, Judge speculated that maybe “…the investments they make in their careers come at the expense of the things we know affect longevity: healthy behaviors, stable relationships and deep social networks,” he says.
And finally, Brigid Schulte at The Washington Post takes a birds-eye look in What’s so bad about American parents, anyway?
American mothers who work outside the home — and that’s three-fourths of all moms, many of whom work full-time — spend more time with their children today than stay-at-home mothers did in the 1960s. They do so by forgoing sleep, personal care, housework and any shred of personal leisure.
No wonder that what [Pamela] Druckerman [author of Bringing up Bebe] sees in Paris — chic mothers with good posture who calmly watch their children play while sipping a latte from a nearby bench — looks so good in comparison. She writes: “They don’t radiate that famous combination of fatigue, worry and on-the-vergeness that’s bursting out of most American moms I know (myself included).”
Why is all this giving me pause? I started this blog because I wanted to find something as fulfilling as raising children. I thought my basket should hold more than their eggs, since we all know that little birds one day leave the nest. But I didn’t realize how much I would love blogging, and how it would become another intense love that, paradoxically, now battles for space in the basket with the first. I also never imagined finding the community I have found with my readers, essentially creating a new family. Now I have added the all-consuming pursuit of renovating our house and putting down roots in our new home city.
I too, am realizing, that it’s OK to give some goals higher priority than others (home life over career, for now), that it’s all right to ditch some completely (has fame made anyone feel at peace?), and that being happy (not overwhelmed or stressed or ambitious) makes other people around me happy. And people, in the end, are what really matter.
If you click over to any of these posts, I’d love to hear what issues strike a chord with you, too.
Share this post:
Oh God I’m so excited to have found your blog through Minimalist Mom’s…I feel so similarly about blogging and balancing family life and being happy. I feel it has really enriched my experience with my son (now four). To really stop and appreciate things and think about and be really deliberate about how I’m spending my time. I’m always questioning the bizarre mix of over-involved parenting and technology addictions that lead to ignoring one’s kids. Often see the behavior–seemingly inconsistent–in same person. Following kid around video-taping them on cell phone, but never actually playing with the kid.