One Little Word: “August” & “September”

This year I’m participating in Ali Edwards’ One Little Word workshop. My word is “clear.” I got behind on my prompts from August-October with the chaos of moving, so I’m jumping back in with a prompt every 1-2 weeks to finish up the year. All of my OLW posts are here.

As I work through the second half of this year’s prompts in more rapid succession than they’re really designed to be done, the real benefit of doing them on schedule becomes clear. A month is enough time for things to happen and change. When I’m doing a new prompt only a week or two after the previous one, I’m finding that I am much more likely to be stuck in the same phase working through the same issues.

Nonetheless, I’m continuing onward and over the last couple weeks I did the August and September prompts. August was about struggles and celebrations, and I doubt it will surprise any of my regular readers to see that my struggle was with toddlerhood — something I’ve written about here a couple times already. (And I’m cautiously optimistic that Charlotte and I are over the hump in that department.)

September was more interesting to me, particularly the focus on rest and pace. I tend to cycle through periods of getting less and less sleep until I reach a breaking point and commit to going to bed earlier. This ties in quite appropriately with the idea of pace, because it’s my trying to maintain an unreasonable pace in life that usually gets me to that exhausted breaking point.

I was talking to a manager at work several months ago and she said something that has stuck with me since then. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like: “Life as a working mom often feels like going down a road and instead of staying straight, you’re just bouncing back and forth between the curbs, hitting one and then the other again and again. But really, even if you hit some curbs, most of your time is still spent in the middle.”

It was oddly comforting to hear someone very high up the chain say something that felt so true to my own life as well. I’m going to have missteps. I’m going to poorly balance rest vs. activity. I’m going to attempt breakneck pace and fail. I’m going to hit a lot of curbs.

But then I’ll course correct.

And most of the time, I’ll be in the middle.

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