The Myth of Work-Life Balance

“Is this going to work? With you now having a family, can you balance it?”

I remembering feeling something snap inside of me when he asked the question. A snap, a break, a jolted shift in my perspective on what life looked like.

I was a new mom, trying to figure out how to navigate the torrential waters of young motherhood coupled with corporate America. This conversation was where I realized how separate others expected me to keep my work separate from my home life.

I wondered how I was expected to clock-out of Mom Life when I clocked into Work Life.

And I did. For a long time. I hustled and bustled and did what I could to keep Mom Life at home and Work Life in the office.

Until I couldn’t anymore.

It eventually dawned on me that I wasn’t able to always give my whole self to my tasks or expectations and obligations of my job, because of what was waiting for me at home. And at home, I wasn’t able to give my family my whole self, because so much of it was left back at work.

It didn’t add up.

There were pieces of me in each area of my life — work life, mom life, even social life — missing at any given moment while I went about my days, because they were left behind where I wasn’t at.

Work-life balance is a myth.

It assumes that the scales of life will be evenly balanced at all times – both sides perfectly balanced. But we drop pieces from one side of the scale all the time, and the scales tip back and forth depending on any given season of life or scenario we are in.

This tipping and constant shift made me realize that I was viewing my life in a very compartmentalized way, and with the belief that I wasn’t very good at any portion of my life… let alone the whole of my life.

Have you been there? Are you there? Where you look at your life in fragments, not as whole and complete despite all the components inside of it?

But I think we’re ready. Ready to pick up the pieces of our rushed day-to-day and mend them back into a whole life.

Read the rest of this (plus the secret to good, whole life) over at The Better Mom.

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