The Weight We Carry

When I talk about weight I don’t mean the extra pounds we carry around on our bodies, the pounds we should accept as part of the woman we are, that have been added to our bodies by food choices, hormones or disease, and if we are unaccepting of them and they are causing health issues then it may be time to think about what is best for you and your body. I am talking about the mental weight we carry around, the guilt we hold in our hearts and in our heads.

If you chose the path of motherhood you can bathe daily in the guilt that feels like it is drowning you, being a working mother, not spending enough time with your child, not being a working mother, are you setting the right example? Saying No when the other parent says Yes, losing your temper when you feel you are losing your mind, watching other parents seamlessly glide through the seismic maze of parenthood with happy smiling children, while you’ve shouted at yours made them and yourself cry and all this usually before getting to the school gate, in fact Dante should have added an extra circle in the 9 circles of Hell for Parental guilt! But the weight I want to bring to your table is the weight we burden ourselves with as women when we become selfish.

The phases of womanhood allow us at certain times in our life to be selfish, these are the times when we have no responsibility, we have freedom maybe for the first time, leaving home, in these glorious years the core of being is self and so it rightly should be because as we know with age and some wisdom that changes so quickly. These years will be looked back on with fond memories especially when you are sitting in your own home, mortgage, bills, and seemingly everyone after a piece of you that you have no time for you, the days when going to the toilet alone feels like a mini break without packing a suitcase!

Once the phase of tearing yourself into so many pieces begins to pass and you have the time to start putting yourself back together again and learning that saying No is not a selfish word but it is a word of self preservation, you have the time to work on yourself and build the next phase of womanhood. The weight of guilt when you think about yourself and not others is heavy, it can trip you up and sit on your shoulder and whisper to you ‘how dare you take time for yourself’. I so admire the selfish woman, the one who has learned to say No and makes time for herself, the one with no weight on her shoulders and has balance of self.

Lately I have had the weight of time pushing down on me and it has kept me from writing which really does make my heart happy, and when the days and weeks are like that and my creative brain will not let me put my words together and I am torn between feeling guilty for not giving parts of myself to others but knowing that I deserve my time that’s when I feel weighed down. So this week I made a conscious decision to say No more often, share the load of responsibility with those around me and manage my self time as I would my work diary…and it felt good! I wrote (obviously!) swam in the river, picnicked on the beach, watched old ER’s and picked up my crotchet project, all whilst working full time, only made possible by saying No and delegating tasks, my week was full but I felt I owned the time.

So schedule your self time and get rid of the weight of guilt because one day all the things we want to do we won’t have time left to do.

Lou x