You know that feeling of being slightly underwater? Not like DROWNING but just under the surface and able to come up for enough air to keep moving along. I’m there right now. Are you? I see you working moms or moms of multiples or just moms. I think it’s undeniable that as a HUMAN you probably go through seasons where the margins aren’t enough. I’m there right now. And, what’s funny, people think I’ve got it together!
I jokingly say, but you should see my house. Reality, I don’t want anyone to see my house right now. Not even in a joking, “it’s a wreck” sort of way. The situation: every surface that can have a stack of papers or pile of toys or random puzzle pieces or half finished glasses of water/milk/smoothie/coffee… has all of those things and some. This coming from the girl who Marie Kondo’d her life two years ago. Every surface is chaos. I think that I get the island clean or the coffee table; but it takes one round of mail, one backpack emptied, or a grocery trip to undo it all.
Clothes. Let’s talk about the clothes. They are everywhere and no longer even neatly in a “pile of clean” and “pile of dirty” way. Nevermind that I have work travel again tomorrow … so I will be doing exactly enough laundry to have clean uniforms and clothes to wear in public for work. Just enough to survive. A quick breath above the surface before heading back under water for a few days.
I have continued to make margin for exercise, mostly because I’m not making margin to eat that great… and well I don’t want to be the size of my dirty house. Even then, I only ever stay for half of the hour long class because that’s the time I can afford.
Thankfully I do almost ALL of my bill paying online, otherwise that would be a mess too.
What makes all of this so hard for me to bear emotionally, I actually had a routine in place. I was ahead of life and schedule for MONTHS. What changed, you might ask? Well, I started a business. A side hustle turned into a full fledge business with employees almost overnight. That was in June. I still haven’t recovered. Oh, and I have a full time job still. It has been a full and exciting 6 months, but I have lost my margins. I had built margins into my daily routine to stay on top of cleaning and laundry and life and library books and grocery shopping… and all of those margins have disappeared.
Maybe you didn’t start a business last year … or maybe didn’t add a new kid to the household. Who knows what life threw at you that squished your margins to nonexistence, but you aren’t alone. Life gets FULL sometimes. Not busy, busy you create for yourself, but FULL just happens AT YOU! I don’t have a plan to start to create margin in my life again yet … but it’s on the horizon. I see the fullness subsiding. I know that there will be balance again. I know that my island AND kitchen table can remain clean for more than 2 hours midday on a Tuesday. Someday it will happen. For now, I’m grasping. Maybe you are too. You aren’t alone. And to those of you who have some margin in your life right now, reach out to the friends who never seem to be leaving the house or always slammed or coordinating drive through errands around carpool. Bring them a coffee. Shoot them a text. Keep including them.
Let’s find some margin together … maybe in 2019?!
