HIDDEN WAYS MOMS OF TEENS WASTE TIME—YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO IT ALL | EP. 9
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number nine.
Hello, friends. As I was first thinking about what I wanted to talk about this week, I was driving up to visit my girlfriend in New York City for the day. As I drove, I had the stretch of time, 60 minutes, to get things done that you can get done in a car.
Call a friend, coach myself, think about my business, think about all of the things I wanted to get done in the week ahead. I think I've mentioned that my boys have started spring break. I actually work at their school, so I have the incredible luxury of also being able to take the next two weeks off.
We have one week at home and the following week we're headed to the British Virgin Islands. So I'm thinking this week, I need to get ready for the trip. And in the world of the pandemic, this involves all sorts of additional hurdles to get through COVID travel restrictions, like COVID testing, additional clearances for every airport and every location where we'll be visiting.
All this on top of all the things I've been putting off or want to get done this week now that I have time. As I was driving, thinking ahead to two weeks off from my job, I was already thinking I didn't have enough time. It's been a mantra of my life to tell myself I'm so busy, I'm so busy, I don't have enough time.
For a really long time, this thought has been an identity for me, an absolute truth of my life. And along with this well-practiced belief that I'm so busy has come a lot of stress and overwhelm. I felt at the effect of time, like I had no control over it.
On the one hand, it's true, we have no control over the passage of time, and we all get only 24 hours a day. Those are just the facts. But it is true that we have control over how we spend our time, although we often choose not to believe it.
I can think of very few times in my life when I thought I had enough time or too much time. I'm reminded as I watch my kids go through high school and the stresses of keeping up with assignments and exams, that when you're a student, there's never enough time. There's never really a time when you've learned it all and that you're done learning.
You come across deadlines and test dates, and eventually you've just run out of time. But it's not as if you couldn't have made use of more time. Like if the teacher gave you another week to study, you would completely use that time to study.
As a student, I often had the feeling that there was always some amount of work undone that was hanging over my head. The bottom line was I never felt like I had enough time. So I remember after I graduated from college, I felt this sense of relief of not having this constant feeling of not having studied enough.
When I got my first job after college, all of a sudden, when I left work, there was nothing else to learn. I was still at the age where I wasn't important enough to take the responsibility of work home with me. Although as I say this, I realize that's a choice too.
But when I left work, I was done with work. Then I had time to be able to explore New York City and hang out with friends. I always make use of my time, but I don't remember thinking at the time that I didn't have enough of it.
When I first met my husband, it also felt like we had time. We would sleep late and eat brunch at 11 or 1130 on weekends. I was working as an investment banker, so my work week sometimes approached 80 hours or more.
I often wouldn't leave work until three or four in the morning. But even though I worked these long, excruciating hours and often worked on the weekend, I still felt like I had time. Looking back, I realized I had the luxury of not having many responsibilities.
I had to go to work to earn money to support myself. That's pretty much it. Of course, I had to eat, sleep, and pay bills.
But ultimately, my responsibility was to work and keep myself alive. I wasn't responsible for other humans. I had so much freedom, or I perceived that I had so much freedom, to spend my time outside of work in exactly the way that I wanted.
Now I have the same amount of time as I did then, literally 24 hours. But in my mind, in my current life, my responsibilities are significant. I have a long list of things to do and a long list of people to care for.
In my 20s, other than work, everything else felt like a luxurious choice. Go out to brunch with friends or hang out with my boyfriend. Stay in bed a little longer.
Every once in a while, I had to grocery shop, but in New York, that's relatively convenient. My now husband's brother and sister-in-law had twins. At some point, my brother-in-law told my husband, I don't even remember what we did before we had kids.
Of course, we came to understand all of this for ourselves when we had our first child a few years later. I definitely don't mean to imply that the only reason you could ever be busy in life is because you have kids. There are any number of circumstances that could make us think we had too much to do and not enough time to do it all.
It's not only about kids. It's the responsibilities of life that seem to creep up on us. In your 20s, you don't own a home yet.
You're not that important in your job, so no one's really looking to you for a significant work product. But as we grow up in our adult lives, we take on new challenges. We move up in our career or we build a home.
We create a homestead. We might decide to have children. Over time, we perceive that more is expected of us.
We have beliefs about our responsibilities in terms of keeping up our home and how we take care of our children. Our time begins to not feel like it's our own anymore. Look, I've been a stay-at-home mom.
I've worked full-time. I've worked part-time. I've been a consultant with a lot of flexibility.
But since I've had children, I have never felt like I've had enough time. Here's the bottom line. We spend all of the time we are given.
And so it's interesting to question, what are you spending your time on? Have you ever really thought about mapping out your day down to the minute, down to the half hour? How do you spend your typical day? How does that 24 hours look like in your life? Of course, you sleep. That's already six, seven, eight hours, maybe more. Roughly one third of your time is spent sleeping.
You have to spend some amount of time in the day eating, getting dressed, taking care of your basic needs. That's easily another three hours throughout the day, give or take, depending on whether or not you're cooking your food and how long it takes you to get ready. Then there's time in the car, driving your kids to school, commuting to work, running errands, getting wherever you need to go.
There are appointments, meetings, dates you have scheduled. You could have a job that requires you to be working for a certain period of time, or you might have volunteer responsibilities. Then there are the responsibilities you have at home, cleaning, laundry, paying bills.
You might work out or have a regular regime of self-care. And there's also time spent with friends and family outside of these tasks and activities. What do you do during your downtime? What this list looks like for you is entirely your own.
No judgment about how you should be spending your time, but I want to invite you to notice how you are spending your time. When you tally up the amount of time you spend doing each of the activities in your life, what do you notice? Does it total 24 hours? Are you surprised by how long you spend doing some things and not others? If you haven't accounted for a full 24 hours, what are some of the things you do to fill up that time? When I did this exercise for the first time with my own life, I tried to account for my time and found some really fascinating things. I was spending three hours in the morning getting ready for work.
I had started getting up earlier to be sure I could find time to work out. So I was waking up at 4.15 in the morning. Yes, 4.15. And don't worry, this is not going to come with a recommendation for this lifestyle.
So stay tuned. I would wake up at 4.15 in the morning and I would come downstairs, grab a cup of coffee and journal for half hour or 45 minutes, during which time I would have a second cup of coffee. At least the second was decaf.
I would then work out for 45 minutes to an hour, but a lot of that time would be spent walking on the treadmill, certainly not doing a 45 minute intense workout. And then I would go shower and get dressed, get my food ready for the day and get the kids in the car to drive to school. So from 4.15 in the morning until the time we left around 7.30, that was three hours and 15 minutes I was spending in the morning to work out and pull myself together.
So then I would be at work until 4.30, five o'clock and I would typically have to drive my boys to various activities or I'd be waiting for them to be done so that we could go home. Once we got home, I would spend those next few hours at home cleaning up our mess that we brought home with us, doing various chores, cleaning up the kitchen, getting dinner ready, ordering dinner. If I'm honest, I don't cook dinner every night, but I would try when I felt like I had the time By the time we finished cleaning up after dinner, it would be 8 or 8.30. My husband and I would typically try and sit down and watch a show before bed.
But because I woke up so early, I tried to get myself to bed by 9.30, the latest. So sometimes I'd get through this whole evening routine and we wouldn't have time to sit down for a show. Either way, by this time in the night, I would feel like I had been running all day without a break.
I left one job to come home to a second job and it all felt like it was happening to me. It felt like Groundhog Day and like I had no time. So many responsibilities and so many tasks left undone, notwithstanding the fact that I was working all day.
There were still so many things that I felt like I hadn't gotten to. There was an endless number of I should haves and I didn't get tos. Stepping back as I really began to take a close look at how I was spending my time, I was astounded to realize that I was spending over three hours in the morning and another three hours in the evening doing a relatively short list of things.
Basically journaling, working out, showering, getting dinner organized, and some organizing and cleaning up here and there. Six hours! Somehow the time would just fly by and I couldn't even really account for what I'd been doing the whole time. Like the list of accomplishments did not seem that long.
Seriously, I wouldn't always cook dinner and when I would clean up the kitchen after dinner, it's not like I was cleaning up the floors and reorganizing my refrigerator. As I looked at my typical workday week, I would be amazed that outside of my workday, I had at least six hours during which I thought I was busy doing something important the whole time and yet I still ended up each day thinking that I hadn't done enough. So during this course of time when I was waking up each morning at 4.15, by the time Wednesday and Thursday rolled around, I would be exhausted.
I was only giving myself about six or if I was lucky, seven hours of sleep a night. By Thursday, I would crash even earlier. I found myself getting short with the boys.
All I could think about was getting to the weekend when I could finally relax. Except when the weekend finally came, I then had a long list of things that had piled up that I hadn't had a chance to tackle during the week. Piles of laundry, grocery shopping, stuff on the counter.
Then the kids of course have weekend activities. They want to go see their friends. Here I was with more time on the weekend or so I thought, but I was still feeling overwhelmed and busy without time.
All week, I would be mentally looking forward to the weekend. It would be the carrot to get me through. Just get through the week and then you can relax.
But then on Saturday, I would tackle my to-do list of chores and obligations and errands. I would tackle those first almost in order to earn my reward. Like once I would get done all of those things, I got to have time for myself.
But I almost never got to the end of the list. It felt like I never could get it all done. So then I would get to Sunday night and I would find myself feeling disappointed that I hadn't enjoyed the weekend as much as I would have liked.
And here I was cleaning up after dinner on a Sunday night, dreading the week ahead when the cycle would just start over again. You might have your own flavor of a crazy schedule, driving kids to activities, supporting their dreams, helping them with homework or college searching. You might manage your own professional projects or run volunteer programs.
You might be caring for a sick parent or a loved one, working through a divorce, buying or selling or decorating a home, whatever the responsibilities of your life. I find so often that we carry these burdens like an albatross on our backs, like a burden we can't rid ourselves of. Often our own needs fall by the wayside.
Self-care and finding time to work out feels like a luxury. When I began to really look at how I was spending my days, I realized I had made the intentional choice to get up at 4.15 a.m. because that's what I thought was required in order to find time to work out. It felt like such an important investment in my self-care that I was willing to wake up at this ungodly hour to make it happen.
Some might call it discipline. At the time, I think I had a bit of pride in knowing that I had gotten up at 4.15 in the morning, but now I look at it as a bit of insanity. I was sacrificing time I needed to sleep for my workouts.
My base assumption was that it wouldn't be possible to find 45 minutes at any other time during the day to fit in a workout. But looking at my full days, which already seemed to be packed with responsibilities and obligations, the only solution seemed to be that I had to wake up at 4.15. I was proud of myself for doing it. I thought for sure that working out regularly was going to make me feel healthier and even help me lose a few pounds.
But in fact, not sleeping was making me exhausted at the end of the day and also sadly causing me to overeat in the afternoons to keep my energy up. I share this part of the story to offer that you don't need to sacrifice one important need for another. In fact, if you have a new habit you're hoping to find time for in your life, you don't actually have to sacrifice anything.
And this includes support of our kids, family, your partner, and cleaning your home. When we think about the craziness of our schedules and how we're so busy that there's never enough time, when we view our life through this lens, we can't imagine there is any other way that there's any way to fit one more thing in and certainly not something for ourselves. I remember my coach first saying to me, why do you think you have to do all of these things? She went on to suggest that I didn't have to do any of it.
I'll be honest, I've struggled with this concept because doing the basic things of life, caring for your kids and your family, cleaning your home, earning money, these things don't feel optional to me. So when my coach would say, you know you don't have to do any of it, it felt a bit like blasphemy. Like, well, I do have to do these things if I want to be a good mother, a good wife, and a productive member of society.
This is who I want to be. I don't want to let my family down and I don't want to live in a house that's a mess. The next phase of this line of reasoning is, after considering that you don't have to do all these things on your long to-do list, is that you recognize that you are choosing to do these things.
Okay, so I'm choosing to go to the grocery store. I'm choosing to drive my kids around. I'm choosing to get dinner ready or clean up the house.
Okay. But there are a few implications of the shift of language when we talk about things we are doing. The first is, when you say you have to do something, it implies that someone's forcing you to do it.
When you think of it this way, I agree. No one's forcing me to do anything. No one's holding a gun to my head to make me fold the laundry.
But still, it feels like life is kind of forcing me to do these things, right? I signed up to have children, so now I have to take care of them, get them places, make sure they eat. And we don't have staff running around our home cleaning up after us. Somebody's got to do it.
It's easy to get back to the have to, that I have to do these things because it just feels so true. But my exploring the shift from I have to to I choose to, and believe me, this has been a challenge for me, but when we begin to understand that we are choosing, we begin to take responsibility for the choices we're making in terms of how we spend our time, what we put on our list each day. If you take it one step further and ask yourself, why are you choosing to do these things? Or maybe even more to the point, why are you choosing not to let some of these things go? For me, I choose to go to the grocery store because I want to have food at home for us to eat.
I don't want us to eat out every night. That's expensive. And I enjoy having the foods I like to eat accessible to me at home.
I choose to drive my kids around because I want them to have the activities and the experiences that they choose to have, whether that be taking lessons or being part of a sports team or just spending time with their friends on the weekends. I choose that for them. I want to support that.
I'm also choosing these things because I don't want to accept the consequences of letting them go. I'm choosing not to let go of grocery shopping because I don't want to choose having an empty fridge. I don't want to choose telling my kids, no, you can't see your friends because I don't want them to feel left out, to not be able to have fun experiences with their friends.
I don't want to choose to quit my job and lose access to the income and opportunity. I choose not to let my house be a total mess because I don't want to live in a dirty house with dirty clothes everywhere. But when I go down my list, there are so many things I choose.
So whether I'm choosing to do it or I have to do it, the bottom line sometimes feels the same. Even when we take responsibility for our choices, it can still feel like a burden, like we wish it were just a bit easier. And getting back to the issue of time, I would still feel like I didn't have enough time for all of the things I would choose.
Even on my weekends, I would work so hard to get ahead of my list. I would hold out the possibility of downtime and relaxation until I got all of the things done, all of the things I chose to do done, but I never quite got there. Or what would often happen would be I would finally carve out some time for myself or with my family.
We might go out to dinner or go out to see a movie on a Saturday night, but instead of being fully present and in the moment, I would be holding onto the fact that I hadn't quite gotten it done and there was still some time tomorrow to fit it all in. It was as if I didn't quite deserve the downtime because I hadn't gotten it all done. So what is it all for, all this busyness? And I don't even mean what is the purpose of life, although it's a valid question in this context.
I guess what I mean is when we say to ourselves, I don't have enough time, what is it that you don't have time for? Honestly, on one level, we can think of it as we don't have enough time for the have-tos or the choose-tos on our list. On a whole nother level, do you ever even consider what doesn't even make your list because it's a want-to or it would be a nice-if-I-could, the wish-I-coulds? What is it that you imagine that you would feel if you completed everything on your have-to list? If your children were exactly where they needed to be, your house was clean and organized, errands done, professional and personal projects completed, if you could check everything off your list, what do you imagine you would feel? Probably proud, accomplished, organized, at peace. We think that if somehow we get to this magical space of perfection in our lives, that we'll get to feel proud and accomplished and finally at peace because the job is done.
I don't know about you, but have you ever noticed that those chores are never done permanently? The kitchen is always messed up again. Laundry always gets dirty again. The kids always need to go somewhere.
There will always be new assignments or projects. It's endless. The to-do list is literally a self-perpetuating list of have-tos and choose-tos.
When thinking of it this way, it kind of starts to feel like insanity to try and achieve a space where the list is complete. I'm trying to think of an analogy. It's like an escalator that never reaches the top.
What if we could just come to terms with the reality that the list of have-tos and choose-tos is never going to end? It almost takes the urgency off of it because if you can accept that when you clean up the kitchen today and it's just going to get messed up again tomorrow, is it really mission critical that it gets done right now? Can you begin to give yourself the grace of knowing that these tasks are always going to be available to you? It's always going to be an opportunity for you to choose to do that thing. And look, I'm not telling you to not clean your house or not pick up your kids. You get to decide what you choose to do.
But what if we stop chasing this perfect state of having it all done, doing it all ourselves? Because we recognize that's not even a possibility. How would you make different choices about how often or how seriously you take certain tasks if you knew that they were self-perpetuating, that there was never a time when it was going to be all done? And also know this, if what we're really hoping to achieve by completing all these tasks is to arrive at a feeling of peace and accomplishment, the knowledge that we're good, loving mothers, I want to offer you that it's not the completion of these particular tasks that gives you these feelings. There are people who find peace in a dirty house.
There are people who feel perfectly accomplished only working a few hours a day. There are people who believe they are good mothers even when they say no to their children or find somebody else to drive them. Again, I place no judgment on how you prioritize your list, but I invite you to begin to question what you make it mean about yourself when you don't get things done or if you even consider taking some things off your list or delegating responsibilities.
Here's an interesting thing. What we desire is a feeling of peace and accomplishment and that we're good mothers. But our thoughts about having to get everything done, notwithstanding the repetitiveness and the breadth of our to-do lists, our own thoughts about why it's so important for us to get it all done creates so much stress and overwhelm.
When we tell ourselves, I have to do this and I don't have enough time, and we imagine the negative consequences of us not doing the things, these thoughts actually rob us of peace and accomplishment, the exact opposite of what we want to achieve. These thoughts make us feel like we're bad mothers, not doing enough, or even selfish for not being happy about the drudgery of carpooling and cleaning up after teenagers. So imagine for a second, just imagine, what if it was really true that there was absolutely nothing you had to do and that you could even question the choose-tos? What if getting the list entirely done wasn't even a goal, that it absolutely wasn't a problem that it didn't get done, or that only so much of it could get done for right now? Can you begin to open your mind to the possibility that finding peace in only taking on a reasonable workload is possible? Because let me remind you that this list is self-perpetuating.
It's actually never going to get done. So even that moment when you look around and you see the laundry put away and the house is clean and the kids are where they need to be, even that moment of peace is fleeting if you require those circumstances to be in perfect alignment for you to achieve it. If you wait to feel peace, if you wait to allow yourself to know you were a good mother until you experience that one moment of perfection, the very next minute, someone's going to come into the kitchen with a dirty dish, guaranteed.
So I invite you to begin to contemplate that we are choosing to take on this list of obligations for our life, but also that we are choosing to only allow ourselves to feel peace for the precious minute when we have it all done. That peace is so fleeting unless we begin to open our minds to the possibility that nothing has gone wrong if it's not perfect all of the time. We create the feeling of peace in our mind with our thoughts in the way we interpret our circumstances and what we make them mean.
The other thing that happens when we hold out peace as if it's something we have to earn is that we don't ever create time for the things in life we really want. We're so focused on this hamster wheel of life that we don't even stop to consider that we can find time because when we really think about it, we're so unintentional about the way we invest the precious hours of our day. We don't even give ourselves the freedom to begin to imagine how we would spend our day if we could use it in exactly the way that we want it, without judgment, without guilt, without having to do anything.
And guess what? You actually can do this. You are a grown adult. You can choose every minute of your day.
So often we just go through life on autopilot. Could you take a moment and be curious about whether you are investing your time as if it's a precious resource? When I got into the details of how I was spending my time and I really took stock of what I was doing for the three to four hours after I got home from work, I realized that I was spending a lot of time trying to make myself feel better, rooting around the refrigerator for snacks, listlessly cleaning up the kitchen and scrolling on social media. I was trying to escape the hamster wheel of the day because I felt so overwhelmed.
When you're not intentional about your time, about the way you invest your time, time just goes by. We fill it with activities, but we often don't even give ourselves credit for what we accomplish. Do you ever intentionally think this is what I want to create today? It's a practice and I want to invite you to do it for just one day and see how it feels.
Rather than focusing on the to-do list, what if you could really decide what you wanted to create with that day? Would you decide that you wanted to create a clean house? Would you decide you wanted to create a list of errands done? Don't get me wrong. There are some days when I'm so excited about cleaning and organizing my home, sometimes it's a beautiful way to spend time, but would I choose that every day? How often do you choose to invest in your own self-care? How often do you choose ahead of time to cherish the moments you have with your family? Even cherish the moments you have with them trapped in the car as you drive them to an activity? What if instead of looking at some of the things on your list as have-tos, you were focused on the results you wanted to create? What different decisions about your day would you make if every single day was a precious gift? You get to choose how you spend your time. You do.
You get to invest your time, the precious gift of your time, in exactly the way that you want. You get to choose. You get to decide what it means about you that you've made those choices.
You can create peace and accomplishment and be a wonderful mother. And you can do this right now, in this moment. You don't need extra time.
Until next time, my friends. Thanks for listening to The Small Jar Podcast. Please visit us at www.thesmalljar.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Small Jar Coach, and subscribe to this podcast.
Remember, you are the author of your story.
