This week, my daughter reminded me in her always unfiltered way that I wasn’t spending enough time with her. “Mommy, you are always working, and daddy takes me to the school bus everyday”, she said in her sweet little voice. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that her words cut me to my core. They cut me because she was right. The past few months, I have worked non-stop at my many ventures and while physically and mentally I have been feeling the effects, the impact of an overworked me is never more apparent than when I am reminded by those that love me most. In that moment, I wasn’t reminded that I had lost balance, I was reminded that I had lost perspective.
I make no excuses for a life lived at full speed and I have never been shy about my life unbalanced. I can stare myself in the mirror long enough to know that balance for me is a life jam packed with work, life, family and a never slowing mind full of dreams. I often scoff when people has me how I “do it all”. I have never claimed to do it all nor to I wish to try. What I do want is to do what I am doing with my whole self. That’s the perspective my child gave me this week. She wasn’t asking me to stop working, she wasn’t making a call on me as a mom. In fact, what she was asking me was simple, she wanted me to walk her to the bus. She just started middle school and it has been a big transition and she needed her mommy in the mornings. I am sure through her innocent eyes, the reason I don’t walk her to the bus stop is because I work all the time. She was telling me what she needed, and she was trying to identify the fix. I am committed to being there for my children, to be the mom that creates a safe place for them and my sweet girl was holding me accountable to that. She wasn’t asking me to find balance, she wasn’t asking me to work less or to be like the mom’s that show up for every school event; she was asking me to do what I have always promised, which was to help her in a big scary transition in her life.
