Work your weak muscle.
Field Guide for Moms Lesson 22
We go to the gym of motherhood every single day, where we learn to build muscle others don’t have, learn when to flex, to build resistance, how to lift more than we think we can. But as with many things in life, we can unknowingly focus on what we’re good at, we do the things we know we can do. We settle into familiar workouts of comfortable routines and resources. This drill is the only way we manage to get to school on time, these are our favorite things to do at home, these are the meals I’m good at making that my family will actually eat. We’re often making our strong muscles stronger.
I recently went on a really big international trip (another lesson for another day on all the reasons to take the trip! You deserve it.) and I was so excited for the trip but I also was surprised to find that I was extra anxious about being away and far away from my daughters. I didn’t expect this, sure I don’t leave my children all the time for work or pleasure, but I have certainly left them before. I’d left the oldest for a 5-day international trip a few years ago, I even last year went on a short international getaway and left them both, but I realized it had been almost a full year since I’d left them for more than one night. I was out of shape, I had a muscle that wasn’t being worked.
For some, your weak muscle might be traveling and leaving your children for five days like me. For some, it might be being with them for five days straight without help, also like me (and maybe last week’s snow week for much of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast unwillingly worked your weak muscle). Neither is weaker than the other, it’s just a matter of which one you have to flex more.
And this is the case with working your physical body, with learning new skills at work, with any growing family relationship, but especially in motherhood. It’s about frequency and development, building one iteration on top of the other. The only way to get more comfortable with something unfamiliar is to do it, to get your reps in.
I’m not prescribing that you leave your children more often or to take longer trips (but do take a trip and please go somewhere warm). Whatever your weak muscle might be…leaving them with a new babysitter, handling a whole weekend solo parenting, getting out of the house with your older child and your newborn, work it. Set yourself up to practice doing the thing that feels hard or that you don’t think you can do, and do it in small doses to work up to something larger. Just a little bit at a time. It’s like not wanting to go to the gym or do the workout, but then being so glad you did it.
Keep going!
Love,
Michelle