“What Did I Do Good Today?”

“What did I do good today?”

This is a question my son asks every night as part of his bedtime routine. Each night as I pull the curtain on the day, I allow my son to take one final bow as I recount everything I feel he did well. I must be honest, though, I am also frequently his hardest critic, as I will make sure to let him know what he could improve upon as well.

Then one night, instead of asking what he did good, he turned it around and asked, “Mommy, what did you do good today?”

Within seconds the entire day, all my frustrations, feelings of failure, and the constant overwhelming sensation, flashed through my mind as I searched for a single thing that I felt I did well during the day.

As mothers, we juggle many balls, often too many, throughout the day.

For me, personally, on a daily basis, I juggle my professional life as a teacher while also trying to manage my second career as a writer, along with being a mother to my two children, a wife to my husband, a daughter to my soon-to-be live-in mother, and a good housekeeper, cleaner, and overall manager of daily things in everyone’s lives.

There are days where I feel as if I am at least on top of things, managing to split my time and keep all the balls in the air.

Yet, I can’t keep my mind on one thing too long; otherwise, I start dropping the other balls.

It’s impossible to give one thing 100% because if I do, the rest fall.

And to be honest, I don’t really like that feeling. It leaves me feeling as if I didn’t do anything to the best of my ability – something I tell my own children and my school children to do every day.

So how do I fix this? (because, as mothers, that’s what we do)

I told my son that night that I did everything that needed to be done, which is true. While I didn’t feel I did anything to the best of my ability, I do feel like I did everything I could possibly do. So, later that night, I thought about how I could get to a place where I could feel as if I was doing my best.

Scheduling

First, I realized that juggling is hard and honestly unnecessary (side note: I don’t actually know how to juggle). Instead of keeping each ball in the air at one time, I could focus on only one ball at a time. It’s easy to hold a single ball, right?

The trick is to make sure you get to each thing a day.

When juggling, you are forced to constantly switch between many different things, while if you are holding just one, you have to make the conscious decision to switch to another thing.

This involves scheduling.

Scheduling that time to devote to my writing.

Scheduling that time to devote to my children.

Scheduling that time to clean the house.

Asking for Help

The second is to ask for help. When I schedule that time to write, I need my husband to take over with the kids because we all know that is one ball someone always has to be holding. When I schedule that time to clean the house, I make sure my children have their own ball to hold (i.e., cleaning their rooms). I’ve found that I can even ask my children for help and let them know, “I have time set aside to devote to you, but right now, I need to do this thing.” 

By doing this the last few weeks, I’ve learned that I can get that satisfied feeling. There were days I didn’t get to everything, but the things I did, I felt good about. So good, in fact, I could put that ball aside for a few days to have more time to pick up another one.

When I made the conscious effort to focus on one thing 100% for a set amount of time, I found that each thing was getting more attention than it ever got when trying to juggle it all.