Best Birthday Gift Ever
Key Insights:
We don’t talk enough about how hard parenting can be
Create moments for yourself to get a break from doing it all
My husband gave me the best birthday present I can imagine. A weekend to myself. He is taking two of the kids to our cabin in Whistler. My son is with his dad this week. This means an empty house for me. Sleeping when I want to sleep. Writing when I want to write. Exercising when I want to exercise. Eating what I want to eat. Ask any parent – being able to do whatever you want to do for 48 hours straight is magical.
So here is what I did with my 48 hours. I first took my 8-year-old out for dinner and ice cream on Friday evening. It was a warm, sunny day, so I took him to Deep Cove for dinner with a view of the bay and mountains. I asked him what he wanted to do on our vacation in the Netherlands. “I don’t know,” he said, “but do you know I now have 16 Lapras Pokémon cards? My new one came in the mail last week.” Right, Pokémon versus vacation, that is a clear win for Pokémon. I decided to keep it simple and make the vacation itinerary myself later in the weekend, and explain it to him on the flight.
On Saturday, I wrote for five hours, went for a 6k walk, and got the house ready for my friends. I had planned a ladies’ BBQ night for my mostly mom-friends. My idea was to give all my girlfriends a break from whatever they needed a break from. I felt a bit of guilt thinking about the collateral damage of my plan, as it meant that five husbands now had to deal with two or more kids on a Saturday night on their own. But given that none of my mom friends even blink at the thought of putting two or three kids to bed by themselves, I felt that the husbands could probably manage for one night.
My takeaway from that evening was that mothers are amazing. One by one, each of my mom friends shared what they were going through. And how they kept going, because there really was no other option. They talked about how they cared for kids with autism who woke up for hours in the middle of the night, kids with severe allergies who sleep for only 20 minutes on end during the first five months, having your child diagnosed with diabetes type I, a sibling consistently yelling at his baby brother, and losing a pregnancy while taking care of two young kiddos. These women were sitting in my backyard sharing stories without bitterness. There was a communal feeling in the air. No judgment. Curiosity perhaps. A “what does your shit look like?” type of curiosity.
We don’t talk and write enough about this shit. I’m hoping to continue my blog in the spirit of that evening - showing what parenting can look like by sharing failures and successes. But most of all, I’d like to share how to stay positive and happy (on most days) during this juggling act. One of the strategies my husband and I use is giving each other time off (hence this bd weekend). We all sometimes need a moment to feel ourselves again, and not mom, dad, husband, wife, employee, or all those things at the same time.
On Sunday, I started the day with a swim and wrote a speech for my dearest friend’s upcoming wedding. I checked in with my husband and told him to come home so that he could get a few hours to himself. It turned out that 48 hours to myself had been a beacon that pulled me through the last two busy weeks of juggling work and a teething toddler while my husband was traveling. But once in it, I didn’t really need 48 hours to recover. I have energy for a few weeks of asking my son for the sixth time to come out of the shower, of cleaning up the half-eaten food that my 1-year-old has thrown over the dinner table, and of finding a new strategy to entice my stepson to eat three bites of his breakfast.