A Perfectly Balanced Day

There it was. Staring in my face as I wiped a second little butt in 15 minutes during dinner. I was going to have a perfectly balanced day. To do that, I needed do something for myself and that was attending an event on women & ambition in the context of motherhood (of all topics).

Admittedly, it was weird to have such a realization while staring into the abyss of a toilet, wiping Buddy's butt. However, ideas and revelations have always come to me in the bathroom. Perhaps it's because the bathroom has always been a place of 'down-time', so to speak (aside from the bedroom … but then I'm asleep and can't remember any idea or revelation).

I've always struggled with work/life balance. It's not a post-baby issue for me. It's not a post-marriage issue for me. It's just an issue I've had all my adult life. The problem was most pronounced when Buddy came along and I went back to full-time work after a 3-months maternity leave.

That was five years ago. Only last year did it occur to me that I hadn't been thinking of my life as one thing but rather a bunch of compartments. The initial inkling of that was when Buddy asked whether I still loved him when I left the house to teach Pilates. My response to that heartfelt question from a then-4-year-old Buddy was that we play many roles as one person. That response settled him but unsettled something in me. That 'something' was an yearning to define balance in my context and integrate my roles into my whole person. I've always known that I functioned best and am (or feel) the most productive when I have 2 or 3 things going on in given day or week. But, having had a corporate job my entire career before moving to Singapore, I hadn't given a lot of thought to intentionally designing for that kind of 'work/life'.

As I embarked on my Pilates teaching journey, I started to intentionally design (i.e., block out specific time windows in my calendar) for the kind of week I wanted … the kind of week where I feel fulfilled in motherhood and teaching practice. Over time, about a year, Wednesdays have become an important day of the week where I spend the morning moving my body and teaching, and the afternoon with my kids. The fact that it's exactly in the middle of the Monday-Friday week is intentional. It's part of my 'slow down, recalibrate and take stock around what I've accomplished at the start of the week and what else do I want to accomplish with the remaining two days before heading into the weekend' tool-set.

Most Wednesdays (and actually most days) I don't go out in the evening. Like any other day of the week, I'm wiped out by the time both kids are in bed with lights out. However, Wednesdays always feel close to balanced because I spend majority of the afternoon with Buddy and Little Guy. That makes me happy, which is possible because I get to move my body and teach in the morning. On this particular Wednesday, attending an event in the evening (where I actually changed into something besides t-shirt/shorts or work-out clothes and dabbled on some mascara & lip gloss) was a bonus for a perfectly balanced day!