Monday, June 15, 2009

Where is the balance?

I am looking for a way to balance the work life family thing.  Everyone has the same advice.  You need to prioritise and make decisions as to what is important.  But I say sometimes everything is important and all at once!  How can one manage parenting two active boys, a toddler and a pre-schooler and work a professional job that demands "facetime" and after hours work? I am a casual law lecturer for two Universities.  
In addition to parenting and lecturing  I am also supposed to do all of the following:
a) exercise 30 mins at least 3 times a week (although I have also read 1 hour a day every day - what is with that?) or I will get fat and die of health failure
b)  have sex with my husband twice a week or his mental health/our marriage will suffer.
c) continue legal education so I don't accidentally lecture from the stone age
d) keep a clean, decorated, renovated 40 year old house (it needs more cleaning, more decorating and basically a new houseworth of renos)
e) cook healthy nutritious family meals on a budget (admittedly generous) but if anyone knows how to cook a meal that both a toddler and a preschooler will like on the same night please let me know.
f) Everything else a woman is supposed to do.
All of them seem hugely important all the time.  
So far my polciy has been to sacrifice vast amounts of so called metime and sometimes sleep to manage it all.  
I think I had better stop blogging and get back to marking.  2 papers down and 105 to go.  Or something.  

4 comments:

nzforme said...

I know the feeling -- and I don't even have kids!

I'll tell you one thing, though -- don't sacrifice the "me time." You'll start to resent doing things for everyone else and nothing for yourself. Set aside some amount of time each week to take care of YOU -- it'll put you in a better frame of mind to balance everything else.

(At least, that's what works for me.)

Elen said...

Hmm - it is just so easy to skip doing things for me...and wasting time on the net instead of doing either productive stuff or metime stuff!

belsum said...

It's frickin hard. I haven't figured out b) with 2 kids yet. And I feel bad that my sex drive is so low thanks to nursing. And since I'm pumping twice a day at work that means I'm not going to the gym.

Elen said...

I have all this stuff to help me exercise and...never do it.