An ode to *not* doing it all
This morning I had coffee in bed, showered, washed my hair and shaved my legs, folded laundry, tidied up the kitchen, fed the horses, cows, goats and sheep, and rescued a newly born lamb that somehow ended up on the other side of the fence and couldn’t find its way back to mama. And all that before I had to leave for work at 9am!
But the to-do list in my head was a mile long, and everything I didn’t do flashed accusingly before my mind’s eye: the pots I meant to clean, but didn’t; the stretching I wanted to do, but didn’t; the bed I meant to make, but didn’t; filling up the goats’ water bucket; making myself a healthy lunch to take to work; feeding the puppy.
I know that I don’t have to do it all, that my husband can feed and water and clean the pots. But my first impulse is to think that I should. The expectations I set myself are stupidly high, and while it would be easy to blame my parents, society, or a combination of the two, it’s me doing it to myself.
So, I had a choice to make: I could celebrate everything I had done this morning - or I could beat myself up for what I didn’t do.
My usual choice has always been the blame game. I've done it all my life, and I'm very good at it. I suspect that you are, too. But honestly, it's getting old. Life is hard enough without us making ourselves feel bad about trivial stuff, and is there anything more trivial than dirty dishes? Not much, my friend.
But it's easier said than done. The movie that's playing in my head on an endless loop is not so much anymore about what I think others expect of me (progress!), but what I want my life to look like.
Turns out, I'm a harsh taskmaster and a cynical critic, and it's about time to let that shit go.
We can't have it all. That's a simple fact of life. Even Samantha from Sex and the City had to realize that fact after being defeated by something as mundane as the flu and window drapes, and the sooner we make peace with it, the sooner we can move on.
I would love to have a house that's always clean, but in order to have that, I would have to cut back on my writing time. And reading time. And having coffee in bed with my husband time. Or I would have to get up earlier, and if there's a choice between more sleep and cleaning, who in their right mind would ever choose cleaning? Not me, that's for sure.
So the house stays a bit dustier and dirtier than the movie in my head tells me it should be, but you know what?
The great news is that you don't have to change your behaviour - you can change the movie in your head.
Instead of striving towards wanting to be the woman who has a clean house, eats healthy meals and has her shit together at all times, I'm learning to be okay with not having the cleanest house. And having a slight sugar and carbs addiction. And rather staying in bed, with messy hair and unbrushed teeth, laughing with my husband, instead of "getting ready" for the day like the movie in my head tells me a grown-up should.
It's all about choices in life, and we can all choose to care less about the unimportant stuff, and more about what really matters.
We won't remember the days when we left the house tidy and orderly.
But we will remember the laughs we shared with our loved ones, the way the puppy threw her huge paw on our shoulder and licked out face, and the one morning in May when we rescued a newborn lamb.
Here's to changing the movie in our heads, to laughing in the face of perfection, and to celebrating the little victories - like shaving our legs, and making salad for dinner when we had a delicious, sweet cinnamon bun for lunch.
xoxo Miriam
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Vol. 52