I spent a weekend recently on an AMAZING trip away to New York
City. It was exactly what my spirit needed in this crazy middle of life. I
needed to be away to get renewed to come home and be a better mommy, wife, and
human.
I was recharging a VERY empty battery. Not until I was away
did I even realize just how soul crushingly tired I had been. I would have told
you I was that tired, but until I was really starting to recharge, I didn’t
even grasp the full magnitude of the problem.
As I was recharging, I was thinking about what I needed to
do to not get to that place again, because, really, mommy can’t just run off to
the city very often! The goal becomes staying charged up to a healthy level all
the time. I think this is where we could have a long talk on self care
routines, but that isn’t the point here because I realized something else as
well.
Part of knowing more about your battery, is knowing what is
draining it. When our cell phone battery is continually draining quickly we start
to charge it more. This is a good practice, but to really solve the problem we
actually need to know why it is draining so quickly. There is a part of the
phone that shows how much of the battery is used by each app and we learn that
not all apps use the same amount of battery. Ah-ha! Our lives are like this as
well. Not all our roles use the same amount of battery. Some things just take a
lot more out of us than others. Honestly, I think we all get that on some
level, but there is a part of it that women really seem to struggle with.
Here is the biggie….not all apps drain all batteries the
same. I have an example. My aunt’s phone battery was draining fast, so she
checked the battery usage and found a particular app draining the resources. I
had the same app on my phone and it wasn’t doing the same thing. Interesting.
Same app. Different phone. Different battery drain. See where I am going with
this? In our lives we look around and see someone else doing similar things and
they are not feeling like their soul is sucked dry so we think “I am weak
because this is killing my spirit.” NO! Our souls are all individually wired
and have different capacity for different things. Maybe one woman is amazing
with several kids, while another mom is at her limit with one. Maybe one woman
finds housework a joy, and another it is the hardest part of her life. Maybe
some women just have an oversized capacity in general and can “do it all” with
grace. We just can’t compare. It does no good. My aunt comparing her phone and mine
does no actual good to her battery power. If she wants more power, she has to
deal with the battery she has and the apps she is running.
So goes our lives. We need to be assessing within ourselves,
without comparison, what our battery usage looks like, what is draining it, how
quickly it recharges. All without judgement on ourselves or others. It is quite
possible that you just have to delete an app. It takes too much energy that
isn’t worth it. Maybe it is a change in lifestyle. Maybe it is cooking less or
outsourcing cleaning. I firmly believe this is why some women do better with
working full time and having their kids in some kind of child care (that kid
app can be exhausting if it runs all.the.time!). It could be giving up the
dream of homeschooling because that one certain kid is a battery drain. The
only one who knows is you. No one else.
I have been taking this week back home to think about some
of these things. Where is my drain? What does my recharge look like? How often
do I need to plug in? Back to self-care for a minute, what charges my battery
in different amounts of time? All of these questions I am still answering for
myself are going to be the key to keeping my soul at a healthy level of charged
so I can be the thriving person I want to be.
