Maintaining The Balance

I am participating in the 2012 Wordcount Blogathon, which means one post every day for the month of May.

I’ve been feeling disoriented and out of sorts all day. I woke up very early this morning after a night of virtually no sleep, had to deal with an autism meltdown resulting from a power outage, and then due to circumstances beyond my control, had to skip the long run I’ve been itching for all day.

Because of all of this, when I sat down to write this post, I came up empty when I was digging around in the warehouse of my mind for a topic. All is not lost though, because Facebook came to the rescue. I posted a status update asking for topic ideas, and a friend of mine who is a fellow mom immediately fired off a whole list of ideas, that will pretty much see me through the rest of the month.

If anything, I was left with the opposite problem: too many ideas to choose from.

In the end, I decided on this one for today:How does Mom manage parent time, marriage time and self time while also working outside the home?

How indeed?

Moms in general have to wear many, many hats. Special needs moms have to wear even more, simply by virtue of the fact that parenting a special needs child requires a completely different set of parenting skills to parenting a typically developing child. Add to that the fact that I work a full-time job that involves two hours of commuting each day, and I do all of the admin for my husband’s business. I also make sure the household bills get paid, and I am trying to establish myself as a writer.

It can be very, very hard to carve out time for my husband, much less for myself. But for the sake of my sanity and everyone’s happiness, I have to find a way to do it.

I have tried to stay on top of things through a variety of means. Written daily schedules. Routines. Planning. To-do lists.

All of that helps, but it is not the complete answer. I can plan and schedule until the cows come home, but it all comes to naught without one crucial ingredient.

Commitment to go to bed by a certain time.

It is incredible how powerful a simple commitment like that can be. It cannot merely be a commitment with myself – it has to be a declared intention. I don’t exactly post it on Facebook, but I do tell my husband that I will be going to bed at such-and-such a time. Once I make and state it, I feel obligated to follow through. And so my mind immediately calculates how much time I have, and how I can best arrange what I need to do, to fit within that time.

And you know? It works.

By following this practice, I have been figuring out how to do things more quickly. I have also been spending more time with my husband and getting enough sleep to enable to get up early to go running in the mornings.

I don’t always get it right, as some late night status updates on Facebook will testify, but I am doing a lot better than I used to.

Now, if only I could find the time to follow my secret career ambition of becoming a Mythbuster…

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/leoglenn_g/5789714663/. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.)