A Wife, Mother and Now, a Brand by Melissa Swedoski

Can you effectively juggle all the things you have going in your life? I’m not even talking about balance, because as someone recently pointed out to me, there is no such thing. When you are with your kids, your work life is out of balance. When you’re at work, your home life is out of balance. It’s just the nature of things; it’s not right or wrong. 

So taking a cue from Danielle Smith, perhaps life is more about being a juggler. A really good juggler. Because you have to keep several things going at once as a mom, don’t you? There’s the house cleaning, meal preparation, bill paying, budget following, bath giving, hugs bestowing, really fun mom. There’s also the sexy wife, doting wife, penny pinching mom, writing, reading, trying to work mom.

That’s only a small part of it, and guess what? Juggling gets tiring. To the point that you drop some of those balls. And guess what else? Jugglers do it, too. Ever watched a professional juggler? Trust me, they drop their items all the time. Thankfully the ones with chainsaws steer clear of crowds for the most part!

I was fortunate to get the opportunity to attend The SITS Girls Bloggy Boot Camp in Dallas last weekend, and in addition to giving us great hints on how to work with brands and build our own brand, there was a lot of discussion about how to do it all. And one thing that was frequently repeated was, “You can’t do it all.”

That doesn’t mean I’m any less competent, it just means that I recognize it’s not possible for me to spread myself on so many playing fields without expecting something to suffer. I can’t take our kids to daycare and not feel guilty. But I can work as hard as possible while they are gone so that when I am with them, I’m not worried about work.

It’s a tough predicament to find yourself in when you’ve spent so many hours working to be the best. I have come to the conclusion that people who appear to have it all, don’t really have it all. Sure, they have the nice home, nice car, spouse and kids, but there is something they are missing. Whether they stay up late and lose out on sleep, or have to travel for work and miss out on their kids’ games, or have a dirty, dusty house because they have more projects than they have time, something is falling short.

You can hire maids, cooks, nannies, and gardeners to make it look like it’s all together. You can even hire people to answer your email, post your tweets and ghost-write your posts, but in the end, you’re still missing something.

I think I was not only invigorated by being in a room full of women with a passion to build their business and build their brand, but I was also invigorated by the brutal honesty of some of the more successful women in the room who guilelessly acknowledged: You can’t do it all. 

Building a business is hard. Building a business with babies, toddlers, preteens, tweens, teens and on and on is even harder. But you can succeed. You just have to recognize what you can do without losing it all. And that’s where I’m starting from now. Trying to figure out, what do I want and how do I get it without giving up who I am? 

I hope you’ll join me on the journey.

Tags: Bloggers, Bloggy Boot Camp, family, later moms, marriage, midlife mom, midlife motherhood, motherhood later, parenting, raising a family