Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success. ~Swami Sivananda
Working from home is tough. Working from home and caring for a kiddo is really tough. Caring for a kiddo, working from home and running your own business is incredibly tough. It’s just plain hard. Working from home, caring for my child, caring for my husband, and running my own business is the hardest thing I have ever done. I try to accomplish all of this while pretending I have time to workout. Ha, well that is simply nuts.
Today I Will Be a Great Seattle Photographer
In order to keep a semblance of my sanity, I recently decided that I can do one thing well a day. I spent the last 3.5 years trying to do it all. I’m here to tell you it’s a lie. We can do it all, but we can’t do it all well. Something has to give. There is always a cost benefit ratio.
I don’t believe a messy house makes me a good mom so it’s a priority to keep it clean. Even if it means I have 6 episodes of Game of Thrones I am not watching. There’s a priority order of operations: son, husband, business, house, healthy food and exercise. It’s not in that order, much less in that order every day, but you get the point. With my new resolve, I choose one to be good at each day and I rock that one thing while running my business. I know no other way. I love what I do and I work really hard at it.
One of my biggest passions is supporting other women. For some reason, women have the uncanny ability to tear each other down so I have made it my goal in life to build other women up, to empower them as humans, mothers, wives, daughters, business owners, whoever they may be. The other day I found myself in a situation where another mother questioned why my child wasn’t my job. I was shocked, and may have stuttered my way through whatever came out of my mouth. It hurt. I felt judged. With just a few words, I felt like I had failed. I felt guilt. But then the truth, my truth, came skipping back to me.
We moms often refer to children as our jobs as though we have to justify why we spend years of our lives entrenched in the camps of motherhood, tending to the needs of another being. But motherhood is no more a job than being a wife or a daughter or a friend. Is it more work than all of those relationships combined? Hell yes. But it is a relationship. My job is my business, and I am damn proud of it. My job is the place I can retreat and engage myself when I start losing pieces of my mind or myself in all of those relationships. I don’t need to justify the time I spend on my job any more than I need to justify that my child is far more than a job to me.
I may have hustler’s guilt, but it’s okay because I love to work. I love my job. I love working hard at something I feel good at. I’m not less of a mom. I’m just a different mom. Truth be told, we’re all different moms because we’re all different people hustling to take care of whatever it is we call our business, whatever that one thing we decide to be awesome at is each day.
Some people dream of success… while others wake up and work hard at it. ~Author Unknown
