My Mommy’s Place is giving away copies of The Motherhood Manifesto on DVD.  Go, leave your comments on “Balance”  here to enter.

Remember the guy at the circus who would spin plates on top of sticks.  He’d start one after another and when he got to the end he’d rush back to the beginning to re-spin each one before it toppled.  I used to think that achieving balance in your life meant that you finally got all the plates going.  I thought it meant that nothing was crashing and breaking.  On top of that as an American I have been so brainwashed to do/have/be more that I thought the best example of balance was to have more plates going at one time than anybody else.  Can you be a spouse?  Yes.  Can you be a mother to two kids?  Yes.  Can you work part-time? Yes.  Can you be a partner in a start-up retail business?  Yes.  Can do all the books and such for your husband’s company?  Yes.  Can you teach childbirth classes? Yes.  Can you be a doula?  Yes.  Can you volunteer at church?  Yes.  Can you do any of it well?  *CRASH!!!!*  And at that realization I started putting away my plates and sticks.  For me, balance means being done with the competition.  Currently I maintain only two plates.  That’s how many hands I have so I have determined that is what I can hold without stress.  I am a wife and I am a mother.  And I am getting better at each of them every day because I have time to think about how to get better and I have the energy to put those thoughts into practice.  This is not to say of course that I don’t do other things just that now those other things are not critical.  They get done when they get done IF they get done and that keeps me balanced.