Having It All – Without Losing Everything

I always hear people talking about having it all…the perfect job…perfect family…perfect life, etc.

But, what about the rest of us? Some of us don’t WANT to have it all.  We’re forced by circumstances and life choices that we’ve made or others have made to DO it all. So we don’t even have the luxury of considering whether or not we want it all.  We’ve GOT it all and now we’re trying to figure out what to do with it.

That makes the real question – How do you have it all without sacrificing everything?

Compromise is not new to me. It is a word I learned early in my marriage. Until then, the only word I knew was excellence. I pursued it with zeal, almost with a vengeance. Once married, however, I learned compromise. Life wasn’t perfect and some days, excellence was nowhere to be found. So I learned to live with compromise.

After my divorce I discovered a new word: failure. It was a bitter pill for the woman of “excellence” to swallow but it lodged itself into my throat and threatened to strangle me until I had choked it down. Even for the woman who had learned compromise, failure was tough for there is no compromise in failure. It is final. There is no give or take. There is just failure. To kill failure then, I went back to the familiar. I attacked it with excellence. I was determined to be the best single mother ever and have the best children ever thereby vanquishing failure and dispatching it back to whatever dark corner it had slithered from. 

I involved my boys with sports from the early age of 3. I was team mom to both teams even though they were not on the same team and often had games at the same time or 10 minutes apart on opposite sides of town 30 minutes apart. I thought this is what a single mother of excellence would do. They were involved with Church and Youth Group. I ran myself ragged. I baked cookies from scratch, I cooked full meals daily. I made hot breakfasts and hot lunches. I hosted sleepovers and outings in the park. I drove children to the movies, roller-skated (yes, I know) with them on Saturdays and coached basketball, a game I had never played except in gym class, for several seasons.  I did all of that and more in the pursuit of excellence. I think I was under the misconception that if I did enough; single parenthood would never have to touch my children. If I sacrificed enough, they would not have to sacrifice at all. If I did without, it would ensure they had plenty.

After a while, excellence burned me out. I was a single mother of two small boys and being all things to all people at all times was leaving me nothing to and for myself.  I had nothing and yet, stood to lose everything.

I had to make a change. Excellence was too high maintenance so I needed a new path. I could no longer give 100% to 100% of things 100% of the time. Close to my breaking point, I had to make hard and fast decisions. I had to decide for myself, what are my priorities? What do I have to do? What do I want to do? What will I get to when I can? And perhaps most importantly, what will I let go?

That was my first step in the process of defining myself, deciding what kind of mother, single mother, woman I was going to become. In order to do that successfully, I took a leaf from Clint Eastwood’s book and tailored it to fit my own situation. I decided - a woman’s got to know her limitations. 

It was here that I found what I should have been searching for all along: balance. Not excellence, not failure and not even compromise. Compromise was only a tool to use to achieve balance, not the end result that I should settle for.

Finding my balance helped me achieve another important objective: self acceptance. It was in this period that I found inner peace. I accepted the fact that to no one’s surprise except perhaps my own, I was not now, nor would I ever be a perfect Mom. There were things I wanted to do but had no time to do, just as there were things that I should do that did not get done. But through it all, I worked to my fullest capacity to get things done and done well. I enjoyed cooking so I still cooked full meals most days. I hated cleaning however, so I became the Queen of “straightening up” as opposed to “cleaning up.”  Balance. 

Operating within my capacity, and no longer above it, decreased my stress and increased my self esteem. When my daily tasks became manageable, I actually began to manage them without ending my day at exhaustion’s breaking point.  Balance.

What happened next was a wonderful surprise to me. I graduated from managing my life and that of my children to creating successful lives for us. What was happening to me was after I defined myself, and then accepted myself; I noticed instead of just being myself, I was becoming my better self. Finding my balance then ultimately was the key to finding myself. Have you found your balance?

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