Balance

The last 4 years of my life have felt very uNbAlAnCeD to say the least. I have felt like every moment I have is torn between school work, housework, trying to enjoy time with my kiddos and hubby, church callings. You might be thinking yeah, yeah join the club, everybody is busy, and you are right, everybody is, but there was something else. With all the to-do's between school, work, home and church I was feeling like an epoch failure! I could spend tons of extra time on my grading and lesson planning at home and still feel like I wasn't reaching a single student but that took all my time away from being a good mommy which meant I was a grumpy mommy. So I would try to spend less time on school work and things got even worse there and I lived to dread every minute I spent with students in my classroom. That's not at all what I had expected for my career. It felt like a constant battle: make school survivable or keep my house semi livable and make sure my kids got some happy mommy time.

I had to pick. I could never choose everything! Something (or rather many things) always got dropped. I felt like I was dropping every ball thrown in my court. In addition my poor husband was having to fight the exact same battle and I could do nothing to support him because I was too worried about my own balancing act. We kept talking about the light at the end of the tunnel, but living in the darkness waiting for that light was just becoming too much to bear. I hated the person I was becoming and I felt like I was missing the time of my life I had been looking forward to most since I was a little girl!

Finally it just couldn't go on anymore. Thankfully that was about the time Tyler got a job with IHC that would offer benefits for a part time employee. We decided that, while it was maybe financially a bad idea, I had to be more there for my family so I needed to switch to part time. It didn't happen right away, and the process that it took to get there was emotionally exhausting, but it was the best decision we could have made. Yes financially it has been challenging (ummm, that is a massive understatement by the way), but the pay off has been amazing in other ways. Most significantly, we are experiencing something we had only dreamed of... BALANCE!

Balance is an incredible thing (ready for my inner nerd to vomit science on you...) When the forces on an object are balanced the motion of that object remains unchanged, this doesn't mean there are no forces, it just means they are balanced. Take the example of a hockey puck gliding along a sheet of ice. Unless it is hit by something, it continues along its path. There are still forces acting on the puck (gravity and normal force), but it just keeps on moving along... sometimes said: an object in motion remains in motion. And that is in essence what I am beginning to feel. There are certainly still a great deal of demands on me daily, but all in all they seem to be balanced! I am now a little like that calm disc, gliding along the ice, heading in a certain direction and moving at a steady pace. Of course the occasional (or frequent) external force comes along and takes me a bit off course. The big difference, was that before something always had to come first, there was always one demand that could knock all the others out of my plans for days at time, and usually that was school/work related. Now, I feel like I can give priority to everything when it is needed.

The things that I used to put off until summer or long weekends are now a constant part of my life. I can plan healthy meals, exercise, play outside with my boys for hours at a time, hang out with my man (when he isn't too busy), keep up with grading and lesson planning, work on projects around the house, keep up with my church calling, spend time with friends, and amazingly even enjoy some me time. No, I still don't have it all together. I forget things I'm supposed to do, there are usually several unfinished tasks on my to do list at the end of the day, and I still get cranky about all sorts of things that I should probably not worry about. But, I feel balanced and that is enough.