Do we have more bad days than our forebears?

Or, as we are so often told, are we ungrateful beggars who just need to think happy thoughts?

Angela, mother of three children under 5, caregiver for her mother, Accounts Manager for her husband’s business and oft-time babysitter of her sister’s children, tucked her hands under her legs and apologized for chipped fingernails!

Some cultural ideas can throw us over the cliff!

“I haven’t had time to do them,” she said, shame-faced.

She talked tearfully about feeling inferior, depressed and overwhelmed.

Angela’s feelings make sense in a culture where the HUGE amount of good she does can be overlooked and she can be judged on “chipped nails”!

Mothers are set up by the “Too much/Too perfect” ideas of our times so that they feel “never good enough.”

There is little honor or recognition of the huge workload they pull each day.

Did our great-grandmothers have a tougher time?

Well, they may have had less materially, but they fewer tasks demanded of them.

People’s homes and lives were allowed to be ordinary.

Aside from Sunday Church their time was pretty much their own.

In the 21st Century we live very close to the chaos abyss. We are driven there by having too much to do.

We have our time crammed full with so many responsibilities that one small thing (dog bite, extra bill, the measles) can tip us into chaos.

There is no slack left for when reality bites!

If we stumble, we are only one small step away from “too much” cliff whereas our great grandparents were ten miles from it!

If people got sick they stayed in bed until they got better.

They didn’t get up, don a suit, send a tweet, FB post and 5 emails to explain being late, grab the baby and the 5 year old, drop them at daycare, fight the traffic 45 minutes and do a full day’s work before they got a “lie down!”

Instead they had concepts like the “wash day.” This was the “to-do list” for the whole day!

If you accomplished this the culture said you were a “good person.”

In contrast the modern person is encouraged to feel inferior if even one wheel wobbles.

One step away from disaster!

We feel as if we are always failing and we are always just one step from the chaos cliff. When things go wrong we think we are to blame for falling into chaos.

In truth, modern mothers, dealing with modern day demands, know a lot about what REALLY can and can’t be done in a day.

If we live in the wisdom of THIS knowing, rather than what the “too perfect” culture “tells” us can be done, we can begin to chill.

Imagine what would happen if we set up our lives to have the luxury of time!…… or at least small slices of it.

If we blacked out one day of the week, 2 hours of each day, this or that afternoon… just as slack time!

But I am too busy you may say.  To get the slack you could drop….

Having your nails done…
Boot camp…
That new craft your friend does…
Coffee with that person who drives you nuts…Doing whatever is the latest craze…
Helping on that school committee…you get the drift.

This year here’s a novel idea: Be a wild child! REALLY break cultural rules!

Here’s how:

Use a big red pen to slash across your diary and schedule time for doing N-O-T-H-I-N-G…that’s right NOTHING!

Then you can moodle, sit on your backstep, spend an afternoon pottering, meander….

When someone comments on your chipped nails you can smirk as you remember the good novel you read in your hammock.

Life “glitches” will be less upsetting because you will have some slack time in which to sort them. You won’t even have to think a happy thought to do this!!

At year’s end, you will be RICH because you will have bathed yourself in the greatest luxury of all…

The luxury of your own TIME.

Photo Credits (in order): c. Depositphotos/iordani;morrbyte; estebande;gregepperson; monkeybusiness.