In this article, you’ll get to understand – How creating a balance plays a significant role in life. The article includes:
- Why Balancing is difficult?
- My attempts at balancing my life!!
- Is balancing really possible?
- Tips to create balance
Each of my days starts with a list of TO DO Things and every night when lay in bed, my head is boggling with the things to do tomorrow.
Dishes, assignments, Food, Project Report, Broken Tap, unwell maid, ordering diapers, replenishing stock of spices, etc, payment of tax, family get-together this weekend, etc etc etc. There’s plenty of things and limited time to do them all.
DO THEM ALL !!
I sometimes wonder if it’s really possible to do it all. When I became a mother, did the hormonal changes also download in me magical hormones to be a superhuman?
What changed overnight to enable me to take all the additional load and balance it all. I might sound NASTY right now but when someone tells me to balance my work and personal life or learn to prioritize and balance, I feel like punching that patronizing face.
No one can understand how hard a mother is trying to ** balance ** it. Whether she has one child or many, works outside the home or at home or doesn’t work, has a partner or is doing this whole thing all by herself, its a constant act of juggling and balancing.
How I Tried To Create a Balance
I am a managing partner at a leading firm of consultants in New Delhi where I have flexible work hours.
I have been married for four years, have a two-year-old daughter, a loving big family, a caring husband and so many friends whom I desperately want to meet and am a popular daughter in a close family that always has an event that needs to be added to the calendar or an issue that requires attention.
So you see there is always a lot going on. And I am always trying to balance it all.
But I’m not sure what ‘balance’ means to me right now. I feel like I’m always trying to figure it out and the moment I feel that I figured out its magical formula, it seems to fail. So what is balancing one day is im-balancing the day next. It all seems like a wild goose chase.
So What Exactly Means Creating a Balance?
Is it ensuring that everything is equal in your life?
Is it ensuring that you get enough time with your kids/partner/ friends/ work/ self/ responsibilities?
Is it ensuring that you look beautiful, fit and smiling even when you struggle with the household chores?
or maybe it’s not ensuring equality to every aspect of life but assigning the correct proportions to each element of your life.
So right now, for me, the “correct proportions” of my time seem to range from 70% family, 30% work, 10% social gatherings or anything else one week to 60% work, 30% family, 5% self, 5% friends another week and lots and lots of variations in between. It’s always different.
To me, and my life, ‘balance’ looks different each and every week. Heck, it looks different each and every day of my life.
Is Creating a Balance even a Real Phenomenon??
Honestly speaking !! I don’t know.
Exasperated with all the chaos, I read hundreds of articles on the internet telling how me to find this elixir of ‘work-life’ balance and then life will be fine and dandy.
My kindle was loaded with books( Free ones) on how to be a dedicated mother and give time to yourself and family too. Instagram and Facebook were full of my friends managing their social life perfectly with their cute babies and toddlers while I was struggling to keep my hair uptied in a ponytail.
I GOT A LOT OF ANSWERS. BUT NONE OF THEM REALISTIC.
Listen To Your Inner Voice!
You know they always say, seek answers within for what you don’t find in the world.
I thought and thought over. Analysed my issues, thoroughly inspected my problems, weighed my situations and deliberated if the outside perceptions had blurred by the concept of BALANCE.
Maybe that happy Insta pic of my friend shook me to believe that my Life is imbalanced (Honest confession- Seeing her happy and calm made me sad and envious in some little corner). Maybe it’s all about
Embracing what life does look like for me and shedding the outside perceptions of What Life should look Like.
It’s important to recognize that this nascent stage of motherhood and life is a little chaos ( ok fine, mostly chaos).
But can’t life be both beautiful and messy.
Both fulfilling and overwhelming
Both sweet and sour
Both adventurous and worrisome.
Both calming and hectic.
Both tiring and comforting
both crazy and magical.
Both sane and insane.
Both balanced and imbalanced.
I decided to stop forcing myself towards what doesn’t work (even if it should work in theory as proposed by the numerous advice in books and documentaries) and start experimenting with what I think will work and then implementing that.
So now, Balance is something I strive for, but not something I struggle for. Struggling makes me anxious and dejected. Striving is inspiring and energising. I feel my life is beautiful but chaotic.
All those pictures and posts on Instagram or Facebook pages don’t bother me anymore because deep down I know that life with babies and toddlers is insanely busy and overwhelming and tiring and no one escapes this harsh truth. No matter what, It’s a chaotic, messy secret of parenthood.
So mommies, why don’t you all stop obsessing over ‘balance’. Why don’t you focus more on your present and try to live it and enjoy it?
Let go of your peripheral perceptions, let go of your preconceived notions, let go of the age-old traditions of what things should be like and TRY MY RECIPE TO BALANCING.
TIPS FOR CREATING A BALANCE IN YOUR LIFE
INGREDIENT 1: IMPERFECTION
Yes, imperfection. When you strive for balance, not every meal can be a Pinterest recipe and not every cloth can be Instagram perfect, not every time your house is worthy of featuring on Real Estate Brochures and not every time you can deliver the best presentations to your boss.
BALANCING IS AN ACT OF TRYING TO GIVE SOMETHING TO EVERYTHING SO THAT YOU END UP GIVING SOMETHING TO MOST OF the THINGS.
This “Something” itself speaks of an element of *Imperfection*.
Seeking perfection right now is wasteful because your capacity is limited and most of this limited capacity is consumed by parenthood leaving little scope for other things.
So Embrace Imperfection. Its the key to balancing. Whatever you are able to do, you should be happy about that. Perfectly or imperfectly doesn’t matter. Your presence and your role in the lives of your kiddos, family and office matters.
INGREDIENT 2: NO RULES AROUND “US TIME”
The relation between a husband-wife takes the maximum blow of the incoming of children. What was divided in two is now skewed towards one new person.
Where’s the time to be with each other. There’s office work, there are kids, there’s household work, there are kids, there are social responsibilities, there are kids.
Where’s you me -us -together- time. It’s frustrating at times because you both can’t have some moments to even look and admire each other.
In the act of balancing, finding time for your partner is becomes too hard. But why is it so?
It’s not just a lack of time but our rules around the kind of time we want to spend with our partner that stops us from cherishing whatever time we get together.
We always remember how we had such uninhibited time before or how previously we had infinite time for each other or how we could go to the best restaurants or go dancing in clubs and we want similar time again. We wish for that alone time again.
BUT CAN’T ANY TIME BE GOOD TIME. CAN’T SHORT MOMENTS BE THE MOST TREASURED MOMENTS. CAN’T A KISS ON THE FOREHEAD BE THE HIGHLIGHT OF YOUR DAY.
In simple words, alone time need not always be Bachelor-level date nights. It can be those candid times when you can connect one-on-one.
They can range from dinner to a movie on the couch to a hand-holding walk to pillow talk before bed—and everything in between.
It’s just about being together- anytime anyhow anywhere anyways. Just you two.
So, DITCH THOSE RULES AROUND “US TIME” and feel the difference in your relationship.
INGREDIENT 3: FEEDING YOUR SOCIAL NEEDS
Outside our little family bubbles, we are part of this huge ecosystem containing our vital sustaining factors – our friends and our relatives.
But after becoming a mother I was starved of time with them. Keep aside meeting, even calling them became tough. So I applied the same rule as my husband to my friends as well.
Friend-time doesn’t have to be fancy dinners and big parties. It’s a sweet time just to remind ourselves that there are other parts of our identities aside from ‘mom’ and ‘wife’ that are still alive and well.
INGREDIENT 4: TIME FOR YOURSELF
Again, that time to yourself need not be a big event—it doesn’t have to be scheduled and followed regularly/ exactly and it doesn’t have to be a full Saturday or Sunday—it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing, go big or go home mentality.
It can be reading the favourite chapter of your book once again or 20 minutes in the bath with a face mask or painting after the kids go to bed or two yoga classes per week or pulling the strings of your guitar for whatever time is available. But just grabbing that time and dedicating to yourself – your hobbies or self-care time whatever you wish like doing.
YOU ARE THE PIVOT OF YOUR BUBBLE. TAKING CARE OF YOURSELF IS CRITICAL.
These are just the ingredients of the divine BALANCE. Playing with them works for me to a large extent. But as I said before, you need to start experimenting with what you think will work and then implementing that.
So get going my dear mommies. Don’t waste time. From this moment onwards, just take my magical ingredients in whatever proportion you like, roll them up in your style, add your spices to them, put some pinch of your creativity into it and start experimenting.
If you get some time, watch this movie Eat, Pray, Love. It ranks on top of my favourites list. Even if you have watched it, watch it again. I love what Ketut tells Julia Roberts in the end “ “sometimes losing balance is part of living a balanced life”
Indeed a beautiful message. Makes me think that maybe ‘Balance’ right now really means “not balanced at all” LOL. Yeah, that sounds like a hell of wordplay but read it again to understand its depth.
It is all about finding the right beat that works for you and your family.
