footie pajamas!

I snapped these pictures this morning while it was still dark out, and the boys were stumbling around the house trying to get themselves dressed. That explains both the bad lighting and the fact that my kids went off to school with un-matched socks. Yes, sometimes I am That Mother. But at least That Mother can say she got some adorable shots of a jammies-clad sitter-upper baby!

Read more about how I’m surviving (barely) the back-to-school shuffle with five kids at largerfamilies.com.

My nephew Jack is very enthusiastic.

Even when those…

around him…

Are not.

Sometimes I think we could all stand to learn a little from Jack.

You know how when you see guests on those 24-hour news network programs? Do you ever wonder if, prior to that segment, the guest in question:

• Arose 2 hours earlier than usual
• Prepared her kids for the arrival of their grandmother
• Dressed, fretted over her hair, fretted over her makeup
• Came dangerously close to having her outfit ruined by a blowout diaper
• Waited to be picked up by a car service
• Loaded the baby and big brother (official baby-holder) into the car
• Rode two hours into the city
• Rushed to Starbucks to get something to eat before the segment started
• Realized that the food options at Starbucks totally stink
• Breastfed in the TV studio’s bathroom (I am not a bathroom-nurser generally but NOWHERE ELSE TO SIT)
• Got all rigged up to microphone, headphones, etc
• Waited around for 25 minutes trying not to get too nervous

Just to share about 15 seconds of her thoughts?

Well, now you know. Sometimes, that’s the way it goes.

After the Writers & Editors One-on-One conference, followed immediately by BlogHer, I had some major catching up to do in my personal life. And by that, I mean that after being away from home for two weekends in a row, the mess around here had gotten completely out of control.

So imagine my excitement when I was contacted by Bissell last week, letting me know I’d won their BlogHer drawing for a Healthy Home Vacuum, ProHeat 2X® Healthy Home Deep Cleaner, and a $250 SpaFinder.com Gift Certificate.

I am ridiculously excited. Not only have I not used a vacuum that cost more than $75 in, like, ever (and, yes, it shows) but I NEVER win drawings. I was the kid who sat through every church and school raffle choking back a lump in my throat because I never, ever, ever won anything.

But my losing streak is over, baby! Yesterday, FedEx delivered these to my door:

And, of course, a gift certificate for spa goodness.

Now I have some important decisions to make. Vacuum the whole house, then steam clean the carpets all at once? Or go a room at a time?

And then on to the pampering. What do I choose: two massages and a facial, two facials and a massage, a facial-pedi-massage? And where to go in the southwest Michigan area?

I’m going to have fun deciding. Feel free to jump in with suggestions…or just go read some of my latest posts on The Happiest Mom (I promise, they have nothing to do with awards or vacuums).

If you knew that I had all five of my babies with midwives (three underwater, two in a freestanding birth center and two at home); that I breastfed them on demand, or that they have all slept in my bed along the way, you might draw certain conclusions about my parenting style.

And you might be right. Or you might not. Either way, I’m not putting a label on it.

In a recent post I mentioned an alternative parenting community I used to hang out with when I first went online, and the cruelty and judgment that went on there. I think that behavior was outside the norm: I don’t see this kind of blatant meanness and cult-like behavior going on much on the web anymore (though it’s possible I’m just not looking in the right places).

But being both on the giving and receiving ends of judgment, I’m savvy enough to recognize it even when it’s subtle. And one of the ways I think judging gets perpetuated is through this need to define ourselves with neat little labels that sum up our beliefs, parenting practices, or whatever we are into these days. Because you know what? Once you’ve stuck that label firmly it place, it can be pretty hard to shrug off when it no longer fits.

I really do understand the urge. When I was a newer mom especially, I tried so hard to make some sense of this motherhood thing. One way to do that was by figuring out what kind of mom I was going to be, and then throwing myself into it, heart and soul. Labeling myself was a way of fitting in and exploring who I was. Giving myself a label (“natural”, “attachment parent”, etc) was comforting in a way.

Of course, there was the rotten downside:

* By labeling myself, I limited my options. If you go around calling yourself this or that and then you want to change things up a bit, it’s easy to start worrying about whether it fits with the label, rather than whether it’s the right option for you at the moment. What happens when something on the laundry list no longer works for you?

* By labeling myself, I allowed other people to make assumptions about me. If another mom had had a bad run-in with a rabid “crunchy” group online, they would sometimes assume that I was like that too. Based on experiences they’d had with other people who wore the attachment parent label, they might also assume I a) was extremely permissive b) never left my kids—ever—even to go to the bathroom c) extremely judgmental d) pathologically obsessed with everything my kids e) had given birth alone in the mountains with only a cat as my midwife, and then the cat and I shared the placenta with fava beans on the side.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with labeling techniques or approaches. I think that attachment parenting is a legitimate and lovely parenting style and one that I identify with more often than not (though I really believe it was meant to be a parenting style for babies and very young children, and has become in some cases, twisted and mis-applied by well-meaning folk…but that’s another post for another day). And of course, this isn’t just an attachment parenting thing—I just use that as an example because that’s where my personal experience lies. On the other side of the fence, you could, say, use Ferber methods without being a “Ferberizer”. See the distinction? One word describes a technique. The other slaps a label on a PERSON.

At the end of the day, not that much has changed about the way I parent now and the way I did when my first child was a baby. I still believe strongly in birth choices and favor out-of-hospital birth and midwives for myself. I am very supportive of breastfeeding. I like carrying my babies around. I avoid over-using medications.

But I no longer define MYSELF by the kind of mom I am, or the kind of mom I want to become. And you know what? I’m way better off for it. More flexible, more compassionate, more confident. Definitely a whole lot happier. And maybe even a better mom.

(But not better than the rest of you, of course. )

This entry was inspired by a recent post by Caitlin at Chicago Moms Blog. It’s an edited version of a post I put up about a year and a half ago.

Today’s Mother’s Day, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my own mother, who died going on ten years ago, when I was still far too young to appreciate her. Mom and I had a complicated relationship, but the older I get–and the further I get away from the more dysfunctional aspects of her life (time has a great way of sanding away the bad and leaving the good) the more I see the many gifts she gave me. Here are a few.

Gift: The knowledge that people are more important than money or things, and that family is everything. My mother’s greatest wish for my siblings and I was that we would stay close as we grew up. We all get along very well today, which I think she’d be happy to know.

Gift: Making do. No, better than making do–being truly content with what you have. My mom re-used everything, but not in a sloppy pack-rat kind of way (when she died, her home had remarkably little clutter for us to go through). She simply used everything within an inch of its life, and felt no need to rush out and buy knick-knacks or a new sofa or curtains in the latest style. I don’t ever remember feeling deprived, even though I was acutely aware that friends of mine had more toys and new clothes than I did. Sure, I would have loved a few more pair of acid-wash jeans in Junior High, but not always getting what I wanted did a lot to help me be more appreciative and content with whatever straws I draw in life now. And it’s the memory of her resourcefulness that makes me feel a huge twinge of conscience whenever I’m being wasteful or lose perspective on how very materially blessed I am.

Gift: She wasn’t small-minded. My mom wasn’t college-educated, and she didn’t hang out with an artsy or intellectual bunch. Yet I grew up on a media diet of classical music, Harry Chapin and Fiddler on the Roof, NOVA and Masterpiece Theatre, Sesame Street and Peter and the Wolf in addition to the piles of books we brought home from the library. Mom didn’t read celebrity magazines or tabloids or watch vapid morning shows…ever. We had conversations about history, music, religion. I think my mom recognized that life was too short–and the possibilities for learning important things too endless–to spend much time indulging in petty entertainment, a lesson I would do well to remember more often.

Gift: Body-un-consciousness. My mom never dieted. She never commented on the size of her thighs or butt. More important, she didn’t comment on the way other women dressed or did their hair, or make remarks about my friends’ looks. She didn’t force me to clean my plate or hover over me to make sure I didn’t eat too much junk. She kept the house fairly free of unhealthy food (we weren’t allowed to have sugar cereal, for example) but wasn’t about to tell me how to spend my own money if I wanted to go to the corner store for Little Debbies. As a result I grew up with a remarkable absence of body-image issues. I’m not going to say I never moaned over my flat chest when I was a teen, or that nowadays I don’t notice that everything’s heading southward, but I feel like I’m able to notice these things without letting them take over my life. In fact, I wrote an essay about her comfort in her own skin, which I’ll put up in a separate post.

What gifts did your mother pass on that helped make you who you are today?

When my oldest kids were very young, I went through a very, very judgmental phase. I hung out at a website geared toward uber-natural radical attachment parents, the message boards (now defunct) of which were often used to attack anyone who dared 1) not to have a home birth, (unassisted home birth scored you extra alterna points, and holy cow, if you had an unassisted outdoor home birth and then ate the placenta you were THE COOLEST) 2) not to breastfeed, exclusively, without bottles or pacifiers or extended separation of any sort (”extended” meaning, to some, as little as a few hours) for years (the longer the better) and 3) to use child care–whether occasional or often, any frequency of “other-care” was frowned upon (yes, that included family members, and sometimes even fathers). I still remember a woman being lambasted for admitting she had a good time going out for an hour to meet a friend for coffee–without her 10-month-old.

(attention attachment parents: if you are ever befuddled about why anyone would think AP-ers are judgmental, it’s because of sites like that one. )

Anyway, some time spent as a single mom when the boys were preschool-aged did a lot to knock me off my shaky self-built pedestal, and since then (and adding my third child and beyond) I’ve chilled out quite a bit. I still breastfeed, exclusively, and for a pretty long time, but I don’t feel negatively about people who don’t. I have arranged my work life so that I’m available to my kids a lot of the time, but I understand why many moms can’t or don’t want to. I still have out-of-hospital natural births but your choice of where or how to give birth is of no consequence to how I view you as a mother or person. As long as your kids are fed, clothed and you aren’t beating them with sticks, we’re good. Live and let live, mother and let mother, that’s what I say. In theory.

I say “in theory” because I’m still human, and as much as I’d like to think I’m never guilty of judging another mom, of course I do. Oh sure, I don’t judge on the big issues anymore–I got that out of my system years ago. But I still make knee-jerk assumptions without even thinking about it sometimes–usually about really dumb, unimportant things–and allow myself to indulge in the dirty, low-down satisfaction of a moment (or two) of self-righteousness.

Today my fifth-grade son Jacob was involved a track meet. A big deal, apparently–the kids would be running on the track at the high school with kids from neighboring schools, and Jacob had been talking about it for weeks. With all his excitement, there was no way I was going to let him be the odd man out or in any way compromised on his exciting day. I bought him new shoes when his skater-style sneaks turned out to be inappropriate for running. I had him wear track pants. I made sure he had a big breakfast and gave him a carby snack for energy. Parenting-wise, I was all set. Right? I was feeling pretty darn proud of myself when I showed up at the meet, ON TIME mind you, with the two younger boys and the baby in her Ergo. Jacob looked confident and comfy as he bounced up and down at the starting line waiting to run his first event. He ran with determination and finished second. I was so proud.

Next to Jacob, I noticed another boy who did not look quite so confident. He was wearing jeans and looked uncomfortable and awkward. I felt a twinge of pity for him, and though I didn’t take the time to form a coherent thought, if you had put words to my feeling at that moment it would have been something like “Poor kid. Guess HIS mom didn’t even know about the track meet!”

Two seconds later I saw another group of kids walk up. Was that–

Yes. Isaac, my third-grader.

In jeans. Tight jeans, the Sears Rough Riders his grandma buys him because they have the double knee and the lifetime guarantee, and that she always buys in a size slim. You’re getting the mental image, right? Stiff, tight, double-kneed jeans. The sort that make running painful and running fast nearly impossible.

“Isaac!” I called over the fence, trying to keep my voice bright. “I didn’t know you were running today!”

He shrugged.

“Are you comfortable enough in those clothes?”

Another shrug.

What I really WANTED to say–what I wanted to make abundantly clear to his teacher, the other mothers around and heck even his classmates as they stood nearby–was that I’d asked him, repeatedly, if he was running in the meet. He assured me that he was not; that only certain kids had been chosen to run and he didn’t make the cut in part because his shoe flew off during the qualifying run. (Honestly, I should know better than to trust the kid who assured me, before his last field trip, that the teacher insisted they NOT pack their lunches in plastic bags. In fact, what she had requested is that they ONLY pack their lunches in plastic bags. I guess he got the entire sentence right, except for the most important word.) (as it turned out, the flying-off-shoe contributed only to his being left out of the relay. A single race in a day packed with after event after event. All of which he’d be running. In Rough Riders, double-kneed, slim.)

I wanted to turn around and excuse myself. “Really, had I known he was running, he’d have been wearing shorts or track pants just like the other kids! And running shoes and little cushiony, absorbent socks! And maybe one of those terrycloth headbands like joggers used in the 80s! And I’d have carb-loaded him! I promise!”

But nobody was looking at Isaac’s Rough Riders. Nobody cared. And if anyone in the bleachers was thinking quiet judgmental thoughts toward me, they didn’t give themselves away by looking in my direction or shaking their heads in pity. The amount of shame I was feeling over something relatively minor (Isaac didn’t seem to care or even notice that he was dressed differently from most of the other kids) was directly related to the fact that, not one minute earlier, I’d harbored (even brief) judgmental thoughts toward another faceless mother who wasn’t even there to explain herself.

Maybe that mom works two jobs and is exhausted all the time and forgot. Maybe she’s in the hospital with a sick child. Maybe she’s involved in a bitter custody dispute and her ex is deliberately sabotaging her by stealing the school calendar when it comes home in her son’s backpack. Maybe she just got laid off from her job and can’t afford a pair of running pants. Maybe the mother is dead and the brave widower is muddling by as best he can, trying to do a decent job at all the things his wife was great at. Or maybe, like me, this is simply a child who couldn’t care less about the track meet and didn’t even bother to tell anyone he’d be running in it.

It doesn’t matter. This revelation was about me, not the other mother. Yet one more lesson that the minute you start feeling smug about your kids’ angelic behavior at the grocery store or the fact that your lunches are a little healthier than the ones the other moms pack, that is the day your child will throw a tantrum in aisle 3 and you’ll have to flee the store, leaving you without the organic apples and sprouted wheat bread you were GOING to pack in your third-grader’s lunch the next day, so you have to send him to school with a bag of Chee-tohs and some corn-syrup-laden fruit snacks left over from Halloween.

Not that I’d know from experience or anything.

A few years ago I wrote an article on the “mommy wars” and came up with a step to help stave off knee-jerk judgment: find something positive. When you look at that kid with the snotty face sneezing all over the produce or throwing a tantrum in the cereal aisle and find yourself starting to judge his mother, try to direct your focus to something good instead–maybe she takes an extra moment to make sure the strap in the shopping cart is secured tightly. Maybe she gives him a special smile or talks to him about how you can tell when a plum is ripe. There’s almost always something good to notice if you look hard enough.

It was a good tip, and one I’ve tried to live by, but I’m human…sometimes I forget. And honestly, judging gives a self-satisfied little buzz that can be more pleasant than admitting to yourself I’m not a better mother than the rest of the women in here. Maybe not even that mom with the snotty-nosed, tantrum-having, dirty-kneed, foul-mouthed kid.

So I have to thank my son Isaac for being both clueless and unenthusiastic about track and field. It turned into a powerful reminder that judgment doesn’t just apply to the hot-button issues, but the little things, too.

For the record, I asked him if the jeans were OK when he got home, and he said he didn’t care at all.

Most likely, the other kid didn’t, either.

Or keep your dining room table clear. Or sweep under your dining-room table regularly. Or make sure your dressers aren’t overstuffed with clothes so they don’t shut all the way. The point is, all of us have that one thing (or half a dozen things) that drives us crazy. Whether yours is crumbs on the counter or rooms where half the lightbulbs are burned out, taking care of your biggest crazy-makers (BEFORE they get to the point of making you crazy) sets the whole mood for the day.

For me, that one thing happens to be making my bed. I used to roll out of bed in the morning, look at the rumpled sheets and blankets and think “eh, what’s the difference? I’m just going to be messing it up again in 15 hours.” But I spend a lot of time in my bedroom, even during the day, and I found that every time I went back in, the sight of that unmade bed made me feel…slumpy. It made the house feel messy even if the house wasn’t particularly messy. It made me feel disorganized. And every time I sat on the bed (like I am now with my laptop) I would feel like crawling under the sheets and going back to sleep.

I’m far from being a neat freak, but I began to realize that I require a certain level of cleanliness in order to function. I spend most of my day in my home, and if it feels too messy or cluttered I just want to retreat and watch bad TV instead of being productive. I also realized that it pays to stay on top of mess by constantly straightening up instead of saving it all for some mythical 2-hour stretch when I’ll be able to do a big clean. So four or five years ago I started making my bed every day, as soon as I could after waking up. What a difference. It took a couple of weeks to really get into the habit, but soon I found myself looking forward to making my bed–it feels like tearing out a fresh sheet of notebook paper, clean and crisp and full of possibility. Now, no matter how the rest of the house looks, my bedroom is a neat and pleasant retreat. When I go to bed, it’s so satisfying to pull back the smooth covers instead of climbing into a tangled mess of sheets. And it really makes a big difference in my mood.

I have other “must do” chores, too. For example, I really like my bathroom to look clean (with four boys this means wiping down toilets at least daily) and it’s important to me to have a clean kitchen sink (which I realized after doing FlyLady many years ago). I also Can. Not. Stand. to have couch pillows and throw blankets all over the living room so I stop a few times a day to toss pillows back on the furniture and fold blankets. I call these things my “triggers”—I’m actually crankier to my kids and anxious when my sink is messy or there are sofa pillows on the floor. So I try to stay on top of it through the day—and it all begins with making the bed.

One note, though: I have my older kids do a lot of chores, but I almost never put them in charge of my “trigger” tasks. It’s too important to me that they’re done right–not to mention promptly.

Do you have housecleaning “triggers” that can make or break your mood? What are they? How long did it take you to figure them out?

Day 9 of the NICU, with just two more full days to go. Saturday and Sunday were the “scary” days, before we really knew what was happening. Monday and Tuesday were stressful and frustrating, as we tried to get used to this new routine and figure out exactly what Clara’s diagnosis will mean for us. Wednesday through now have been mostly just…boring. There’s not a whole lot to do in a hospital, and Clara can’t go anywhere. If we were at home, I’d be up and about a bit by now, toting Clara around as I helped my boys with their homework or did the dishes or ate. But I can’t bring food into her room, there’s no bathroom in the unit, and I can’t really sleep in here. Many of the things I have to do in order to stay alive have to occur outside of Clara’s little world. While I’m with her, all there is to do is sit in a recliner and wait for her to wake up. (Though watching her sleep has a fascination all its own. She’s awfully cute, and smiles in her sleep more than any of my other babies. Like this:

Maybe it’s the phenobarbital).

Because of all the waiting (and the fact that Clara still sleeps away most of her days) I’ve actually had quite a bit more time on my hands this week than I generally experience as a mom of many, so I’ve been reading a lot. Today I finished a book my sister brought me called This Is Not Chick Lit. It’s a collection of short stories by emerging and well-known women authors, and it is one of the best compilations of short fiction I’ve read in the last several years. The stories are alternately funny and heartbreaking, with a couple downright odd ones thrown in for good measure. Definitely good for new-mom reading, as many of the stories are short enough to finish in one marathon nursing session or while trapped under a sleeping baby in a plastic recliner in an NICU all day while machines beep all around you. Or, you know, while you’re hanging out on your couch at home. Good read either way.

I also thoroughly enjoyed this essay at Literary Mama by writer Barbara G.S. Hagerty, about how mothering her four children, rather than hindering her from writing, has enhanced and maybe even bettered her writing. An excerpt:

From time to time I fantasized what my life would be like if I did not have the responsibilities and encumbrances of a family. What if I did not have to cook meals for six on a daily basis, settle sibling disputes, sit through long games in the gymnasium, call out vocabulary on flash cards, or find someone else’s missing shoe or lost jacket at 6:30 a.m.? What if each day were a luxurious tabula rasa on which to paint words, eat a carton of yogurt for dinner, sleep whenever, read for hours at a stretch, talk to fellow artists, daydream, or entice the muse? What would it be like to be able to call one’s time wholly one’s own?

Oh, yes. I find myself doing that, too. If only I had hours and hours each week to myself, I catch myself thinking, I’d have finished that novel long ago instead of adding a chapter or two each year, when I happen to have time and am in the mood. Or, I tell myself, I’d dabble in playwriting or poetry, things right now I don’t feel I have the brain space to explore at all. But she goes on:

To my surprise, I found that I missed — ached for — the messy complications of life, the interruptions, and the human encumbrances. In a word, I missed my family. I’d underestimated the ballast that they were in my life; I’d not understood how they enhanced, rather than subtracted from my work; I’d not realized that through being part of a family, I had fundamentally changed.

Yes yes and yes. Motherhood limits and reconstructs my time–absolutely–but when I had endless amounts of time, I can’t say I was a better or more productive writer, student, worker, or human being. Kids have anchored me and given me both fodder for my work and a sense of urgency about getting it done. I can no longer delude myself with the idea that I’ll have all week to finish that story, so what’s the hurry? Now I know that a moment of quiet or a nap time must be seized and used while it lasts. And I actually have something to write about, something that goes beyond my narrow little view of the world and my own self-interest. Perhaps I’d have grown out of that self-interest either way, but in my case, having kids definitely bumped me in the right direction.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I have a stronger need to write now than I used to. Writing is my work, and it keeps me sane amid diapers and feedings and squabbling kids. But when I was untethered, I didn’t need to write to keep sane. I could also spend my days shopping or watching daytime TV or laying around gabbing with friends…all time-sucking distractions that kept me from writing. Now I look forward to finding snippets of time to write, and when they come, I am grateful for them and jump on them. Even now, while in the midst of a hospital floor and at the tail end of a pretty traumatic experience, I’m finding ways to fit in writing. It’s not the best writing I’ve ever done, clouded by a touch of sleep deprivation and a general brain fog…but it’s something. How could I stop? This–the balance of mothering of and writing, of typing away while nursing a baby or thinking up snippets of prose or article ideas while I’m changing a diaper–is just what I do. There have been times I’ve felt guilty, like I’m not giving mothering my full attention; but then I realized it’s just the opposite. Keeping my mind working makes me a better, happier, less frustrated and likely more interesting mom. Caring for my kids makes me a more efficient, and in many ways more empathetic, writer.

If you’re a writer and a mom, has motherhood changed the way you write for better or worse?

I’ve always been a magazine lover, so I have a funny way of internalizing whatever the catchphrase of the day is. For example, when I was a teenager, I was quite well-versed in the concept of “quality time”–a popular parenting term at the time–from reading my stepmom’s issues of Ladies Home Journal and Redbook.

Lots of other faddish magazine terms have made their way in and out of my consciousness since then. For a while, “gams” were “glam”, and when it came to new shades of shadow, the “eyes” always “had it”. As I moved into parenting mags I became aware of “tummy time”, “mommy wars” and “cry-it-out”. But above all the rest, one word in particular has managed to endure over the last decade or so, infiltrating all kinds of publications from parenting mags to women’s mags and beyond.

Balance.

We’re supposed to aim for balance by penciling “me time” into our day-planners (sorry, was that a really antiquated reference there? I meant “plugging me-time into our personal digital assistants…”) scheduling date nights with our spouses, pursuing our passions, simplifying our lives by purging and hiring experts to help us…

I don’t know about you, but to me this “achieving balance” thing sounds kind of like a lot of work.

Don’t get me wrong, I think balance is a great thing. And overall, it’s important to me that my kids, my work, and myself each get enough attention. I’m just not sure if “a balanced life” is possible for a mom, especially a mom of young children, to achieve. And I wonder if it actually adds to all the stress and guilt and “shoulds” moms sometimes feel when they are faced with the (inevitable) truth that their life is out of balance.

I can’t control my kids (not really) or the weather. I can’t control how much my editor loves or hates the story I just turned in and when she may require a revision. I can’t control checks going missing in the mail or my transmission blowing up on the toll road. So the best-laid plans to get my butt to yoga class sometimes get thwarted by a virus or a flat tire, the day I planned to spend with my kids is postponed because of an unexpected last-minute work need, the morning I planned to spend reading is interrupted by a kid who woke up earlier than I expected, or the date I planned with my husband gets canceled because he has to work late or the babysitter cancels. All I can control in any of those situations is my reaction and outlook. And if I let any one of those very very likely scenarios wreck my sense of balance, then the balanced life I thought I had created was really pretty superficial.

Some days I work 2 hours, then blow off the afternoon to go to the children’s museum with the boys (ahem-yesterday-ahem). Some days I work 10 hours, use the TV as a sitter a little more than I should, and toss a little steamed broccoli alongside the ramen noodles so I don’t feel like a total loser mom. Some days everything goes haywire and nothing gets done at all, for me, or anyone else for that matter. And some days, things just fall into place and we float through the day with the perfect balance of my needs, the kids’ needs, and the needs of the rest of the world being met.

Thing is, it’s not always possible to predict ahead of time which days will be which. There’s just no way to plan out balance on a day-to-day basis.

As authors Devra Renner and Aviva Pflock of Parentopia say, “Balance is BS”. Since something will always come up to tip the scales–leaving Mom feeling inadequate if she’s too hung up on the idea of balance–it’s not really an attainable goal, they point out. Instead, Devra and Aviva recommend giving yourself permission to adjust priorities as necessary, whether you need to do that monthly, daily, or even moment-to-moment.

So instead of balance, I personally aim for flexibility. It won’t sort my life into neat, equal compartments, but it helps ME feel in-balance even when my life is out of balance. (As it pretty much always is, for all the reasons I stated above.) Flexibility might mean deciding at noon that it’s time to knock off work for the rest of the day and enjoy some time with the kids. Or it may mean deciding that today, this deadline really needs my attention more, and not feeling guilty about a temporary lack of focused attention on the kids. It may mean deciding at the last minute that I really need an hour to myself at the bookstore or coffee shop, even if I already had an hour to myself earlier or let the boys play too many video games so I could work, just because I really want to. Or it may mean deciding to skip an outing I’d been planning because I’d just rather hang out with the kids or because they seem to really need it. Like Devra and Aviva said, it’s all about deciding which need has priority in the moment, and making a decision based on that.

If I allow myself the flexibility to make those decisions in the moment without feeling mom-guilt or its equally-evil cousin, “I-should-be-paying-more-attention-to-my-own-needs-guilt”, or any kind of should or regret at all, a funny thing happens. My life is still just as chaotic and unpredictable as ever, but in the midst of it all, I feel strangely…well…balanced.

What about you? Do you go for the “wing it in the moment” approach? Or do you believe it’s possible to balance your life…and if so, why aren’t you on Oprah making millions?