When I start getting stressed I make to-do lists. When I’m not stressed, I will most likely loose my lists. When there is a lot going on, I get out my notebook of lists.
I’m mostly a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants gal. For example, when traveling through Europe with my husband in our younger pre-kid days, we hopped an overnight train to Budapest – not knowing much about the city, what we would do when we got there, how long we would stay or where we would sleep the next night. It was fun. That’s how I like to roll.
In college when life got too busy I dreadfully succumbed to buying a planner. I always said I would never be so scheduled to need such a thing. I was in my last semester of journalism school, working at a weekly newspaper where I was essentially serving as the arts editor, and planning our wedding. Time management was of the essence. Looking back at the pages inside my big black planner, I have no idea how I even found time to sleep.
I was a theater minor and one of my mentors was a theater professor. During a conversation when I shared my discomfort with feeling so scheduled and needing to have a planner, he said something that has stuck with me all this time.
“I keep a planner so I can be sure to have time for the people who are important to me,” he said. He was a wonderful professor, inspiring and supportive of young students with big ideas.
At the time his response hit me like a ton of bricks. That’s what planning should be about. Today, it could not be truer.
Every year October sets off a world wind of crazy that doesn’t stop until January 2. Between those months all my girls turn a year older. There are birthday parties to plan, Halloween costumes to sew, Thanksgiving to think about, Christmas, shopping, crafting, cooking, traveling plus other family birthdays too.
This week I got out my notebook to start making lists.
Saturday marks the first birthday party of the season. It will be a backyard movie night with 20 girls. And I’m trying not to loose sight as to why I’m doing all this.
Sure it’s a good time to get the yard cleaned up, pressure wash the patio for the first time in the seven years we have lived here, and so on.
Since May we have been in a constant mode of moving, switching up, cleaning up, and regrouping as every new page gets turned in our journey of living through major renovations happening to our house.
But when I woke up and found this in my notebook of lists, I was reminded of exactly why I am doing all this. It moved me in a big way! 
You see, this exact time last year I was spending all my free time writing a weekly column for our daily newspaper. It was a journalism gig, nothing to do with mothering or natural living.
I spent at least one evening a week away from home, doing interviews or sitting in a coffee shop trying to meet a deadline. Each day I was juggling four separate to do lists. One for the newspaper, one for my volunteer and activism work for the birth center where I served as secretary of the board, one for this blog (a brand spanking new venture at the time) and one for my family.
I wanted so badly to be a journalist again, working from home, and showing my daughters I wasn’t just a mom at home baking bread. I felt like I needed to be more.
The girls and my husband got excited to see my byline and my photo in the paper, next to the weekly column I wrote from May until October in 2011. It was a community news gig and very different from the work I was doing before I had kids, reporting from the Georgia State Capital for a bi-lingual Latino newspaper where the Governor knew me by name.
But at least I was doing something, a mom kind-of-gig.
Then I dropped ball. I had too much on my plate. I made a few mistakes. And I got fired. Fired! Via a two sentence email! I had never been fired from a job in my life. I was devastated, for months. That was almost a year ago.
I knew for a while that it was something I really didn’t need to be doing anyway. The writing job was putting added stress on my family. And after paying for childcare a few hours a week for my toddler, the meager amount money I was being paid was a wash. Really, being fired it was a good thing.
“I just want the old mom back,” my oldest daughter begged one day when I told her I had to leave that evening to report on a story.
It was a wake up call and it still weighs heavy on my heart. All those to-do lists and things I thought I needed to be doing were running my life and hurting the people who were the most important to me. Part of the reason I wanted to work again was to show my daughters the stronger side of me, to be a working role model (part-time at least). To show them I could do more than be a homemaker, and that they could too – when they grow up.
But really they just wanted the old mom back, whose main goal was to paint with her kids, let them lick the dough of the spatula and be happily covered in flour. With no lists and no planners calling the shots.
Like many people I assume, when I start writing lists it makes me think of more things to do, more errands to run, more stuff I think I need. Once it’s on paper I feel like I have to do it, like a meeting I suddenly have to schedule. Then, checking things off that list validates some sort of accomplishment for the week.
But in all honestly, that fact is far from the truth.
This week my biggest accomplishment is that my daughter appreciates all I do for her. She feels loved, that I’m there for her when she needs me and I understand that turning 8 is a BIG deal. We are on to bigger kid music now, bigger books, different styles and oh my – a new sofa in her room!
When my girls are home from school it’s all about them. The computer stays off, the lists lay quiet, and emails don’t get returned.
I’m trying to be more selective about what gets added to my lists, and not be afraid to shred them up or wipe them clean from my dry erase board. If it is something I really need to do, I will remember to do it.
If I forget, life will go on.
