I have read it and heard it a hundred times.  When you become a mom, it’s important to take care of yourself, your marriage, your prayer life, etc.  Make time for prayer, make time for date nights, make time for friends, for fun, for alone time, on and on and on.  It’s safe to say that when I thought about my new life as a mother, I wasn’t really worried about this.  While I am by no means perfect at it, I have prided myself on self-awareness and my ability to draw boundaries as needed to avoid burnout.

What you won’t be surprised to hear is that this is so much harder than I expected.  But what may surprise you is that most days I do not feel like I’m burning out.  Honestly, I don’t understand it.  Before becoming pregnant one of my primary struggles was taking time for prayer.   I tried everyday to take that time and when I did I saw the difference that it made.  Once pregnant, a lot changed.  I found myself so sick that the thing I struggled to do the most was eat something.  My exhaustion made my nausea worse, so sleep become the other priority.  If I didn’t sleep, then I had less ability to work.  My prayer became offering my suffering for my daughter and my family.  I actually had a great deal of peace about this.  Even after my daughter was born, in the confessional priests have told me to be easy on myself – my life is radically different.

What I’m experiencing now is something I could not have expected.  I always thought that I would absolutely need my morning prayer time to avoid burning out.  But I’m still going.  I thought I would need date nights in order to fuel my marriage and I thought the hardest thing about going out would be entrusting my daughter to a babysitter.  But I’m finding that this is not the case.

Yes, especially working outside the home full time, I miss my daughter when I’m not with her.  I like being with her on weekends, so I can’t say I’m anxious to drop her off with grandma.  But there are other things that are hard about leaving her.  Breastfeeding is important to me, so before going out I have to express breast milk.  I hate pumping, I really do.  I find it tedious and even a bit stressful.  My daughter also doesn’t sleep well, so routine is important and affects her future sleep.  So knowing she might not sleep as well without me (and therefore I won’t sleep as well later) is stressful, too.  It’s not just about attachment.

I love spending time with my husband, as well.  I love that we get to have dinner together every night after K goes to bed.  We eat and then talk until I’m too exhausted to keep my eyes open.  I even get annoyed when I realize my nails need to be trimmed…again.  Yet another thing to do!  My husband is extraordinarily gracious.  Most days I seem to have no time except to go to work and care for our daughter.  The only chore I still manage is laundry.  While I’m caring for K, my husband is caring for me and our home.  I almost never make dinner and only sometimes do dishes.  He’s managing, almost on his own, all kinds of projects around the house that used to be my projects.

Each day when I get home from work, K and I go out for a walk, so this is my primary reflection time. I realized how content I was with everything, but felt some outside pressure that I should be doing more, more prayer time, more date nights, do more to make what is most important a tangible priority.  After all, someday K will leave the house and what will be left if I do not invest in my relationship with God and my husband?  Not only does it make me sad to think about my little one leaving, I felt these thoughts robbing me of my contentedness.  I later asked my husband about this: was he as content as I, or was I being neglectful?  He affirmed that he was happy, too.  He knows this season in life is short and he is content with how things are today.

This isn’t to say that I don’t have to work on keeping God and my husband as my priorities. I’m still looking for good ways to have daily prayer and date nights are still important. But, I’m not going to chide myself in the meantime for being happy with the way things are. Life is too full of challenges and failures to add to it harsh self-criticism.  And K will only be 8 months old for so long.  I’d rather, and I think God would prefer it, too, if I soak up all the blessings he has bestowed on me, trusting my self-care to him.  I think he can do a better job of it, anyway.