I have a friend who is a single mother of 4 school-age children.\u00c2\u00a0 She cleans houses for a living and has no formal education.\u00c2\u00a0 For more than a decade, she has been overweight.\u00c2\u00a0 The kind of overweight where knees hurt and it’s hard to get around.\u00c2\u00a0 She had never made chicken that wasn’t fried and knew nothing about starches and carbs and calories.\u00c2\u00a0 And then last fall, she was watching The Biggest Loser and decided that she could do it, too.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like that.\u00c2\u00a0 She bought the show’s cookbook and workout DVD.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, 9 months later, she is half of her initial size.\u00c2\u00a0 She finds a way to workout each day — between running 4 children back and forth to 3 schools and traveling all over the city to clean whatever she can get hired to clean — and manages to get a dinner on the table each night that is healthy and contributes to her continued weight loss.\u00c2\u00a0 In losing her weight, she re-learned how to cook, she tried dozens of new fruits and vegetables, and she stuck to her goals.\u00c2\u00a0 I am in complete and utter amazement of her; she is an absolute inspiration.<\/p>\n
There is absolutely no reason in the world for me to not have better behaviors when it comes to taking care of myself.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything from how often I get a haircut or pedicure to when I can take a yoga class.<\/p>\n
Yes, it’s true I do a lot and have a lot going on.\u00c2\u00a0 But I schedule everything and manage to make time for anyone who asks me for it.<\/p>\n
Except me.<\/p>\n
I’ve gone over and over about this for as long as I can remember.\u00c2\u00a0 I get angry at the people around me for not thinking about me — after all, I think about them and anticipate their needs all day long.\u00c2\u00a0 I know that the bottom line is that I have to be the one to make it happen.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’ve tried a hundred thousand times in seventy billion ways.\u00c2\u00a0 It doesn’t work.\u00c2\u00a0 Whatever connection has to be made, I can’t make it.\u00c2\u00a0 Whenever something needs to give, it’s always me.<\/p>\n
When the kids are in school, I want to spend every moment of it working.\u00c2\u00a0 When they are home, I want to be with them — AND this is when I do the house stuff (laundry, cleaning).\u00c2\u00a0 In order for Paul to work his job and work on the house, I have to cover all the bases to allow him to focus on those tasks.\u00c2\u00a0 He gets great exercise and creative challenge from his projects on the house and does a good job of fitting in other hobbies, like juggling with the kids in the park.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know how or where to fit in anything for myself.\u00c2\u00a0 It makes me feel guilty for even thinking about it.\u00c2\u00a0 An hour to take a walk?\u00c2\u00a0 To do my hair?\u00c2\u00a0 Indulgent.\u00c2\u00a0 Wasteful.\u00c2\u00a0 I feel like a mess all the time and I don’t know what to do about it.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know how anyone else does it, either.<\/p>\n
So I’m asking.\u00c2\u00a0 Officially, asking.\u00c2\u00a0 How does a mother juggling a bazillion things manage her own needs?\u00c2\u00a0 I’m very very serious, because it has to get better.\u00c2\u00a0 How do you do it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a friend who is a single mother of 4 school-age children.\u00c2\u00a0 She cleans houses for a living and has no formal education.\u00c2\u00a0 For more than a decade, she has been overweight.\u00c2\u00a0 The kind of overweight where knees hurt and it’s hard to get around.\u00c2\u00a0 She had never made chicken that wasn’t fried and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[67],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4494"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4497,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494\/revisions\/4497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}