The juggle

How do you juggle? How do you juggle everything that needs to be done? The grocery shopping, the cooking, the constant cleaning, the laundry, the work that is done at weird hours because that’s the only time you can do it and thank god your job is flexible, the momming, the dog momming? How do you take care of it all? How do you remember it all?

I forgot to order groceries. We order through HEB and do curbside, because honestly being in the store stresses me out and I just don’t like doing it. And so, I delegate. I quite literally just have to pull out my phone, put an order together and someone else does my shopping for me. But I couldn’t even remember to do get that done. I put the whole order together, mind you. Meal plan, check. Groceries in my “cart,” check. Hitting the button that says “order?” No check.

And don’t get me started on the cleaning. It just doesn’t happen anymore. I tried to switch gears from cleaning everything at once to cleaning one area of the house a day. And I’m happy to say, that worked…. for a week. But then life got in the way and I just couldn’t find the time (see also: just didn’t want to?) to focus on the rest of the house while juggling my tiny tot who likes to get into everything she can but isn’t supposed to.

So how do you do it? No. Really. How? If you have the secret, I’d like to know. Because I just can’t seem to manage it all, week after week, consistently.

The answer in my house? We don’t. We decide what is important and we focus on that.

We need food so the grocery shopping gets done, just as soon as I remember to actually click “order”. We enjoy our walks around the neighborhood with our mini dog rescue, so we take the time to get out and get active every morning. We enjoy clean clothes, so the laundry gets done (this also takes me just about the full week to do, though, if I’m honest. If it happens in three days or less you know I’m throwing myself my own little “I’m a Rockstar mom, woman and wife” party). We have responsibilities with work, so we get those done and then some.

Everything else can wait. *repeats to self a few times to be okay with this*

This has been hard for me to accept because I want so desperately to be the woman who can do it all. Who can juggle the home and home life and killing it with my freelance gig all at the same time. The women who make having it together look easy and effortless. But it’s just not possible. And I’ve decided I’m done making it such a big deal. Because in reality, I am the woman wearing sweats, barely getting it together and making that look like it was an act of god (because it is dammit) instead of effortless.

And so, we let things go and we decide what’s important enough for us to spend our time doing. There are only 24 hours in a day, and we get to decide how to fill them.

The most important thing to me is pouring into my daughter, making sure that she is engaged and feels loved and cherished, always. Outside of that? A hot cup of coffee and time to myself in the mornings. Self-care Sundays because I don’t pay enough attention to myself and have to do better for me. Time spent together as a family. Sitting down to a meal together every night. Beyond that, the things I have decided that need to get done? They happen when they happen. And if they don’t happen, we try to get ‘em next week. If they continue to not happen, we vote them down the priority list, because clearly, they weren’t that important anyway or we would have made a point to do them (you make time for what’s important, and all that, you know?).

Because I can’t do it all. I can’t juggle everything. And I’m learning to be okay with that because for the love fam, it actually is okay.