Jeff stopped me the other day and asked me what I needed right now. Today. Right now. This second. I stopped and slowly some of those salty tears just started streaming down my face. I said ” you don’t want to know”. 

I felt embarrassed. I felt weak. I felt like I was a bad mum. Selfish even. 

A yoga class, a manicure, a hair cut, an hour alone at a coffee shop, a hot bath, a date night, a moment to stop and just be present doing something. 

I’m finding that some of my awake time with Agatha is spent worrying, maybe not worrying actually, more like waiting. Waiting for the cue that she needs to sleep, needs to eat, needs a diaper change. You’re constantly on call. In your head you’re calculating times, your guestimating how long something might take so that you know how much time you might have. Does anyone else do this? 

It got me thinking about what I need in the big picture. To be a good mum, to be a good friend, to be a good partner, but most of all, to be me. I found this excerpt from Jane Riley’s blog and it’s sat with me for a long time: 

“Articulating what it is that you truly want, deep down inside of yourself is not an easy task. Henry tells me what he wants out of life all of the time, “I’m going to go to space. I’m going to take all of the bad guys to jail. I am going to have lot’s of animals and roller skate everyday.” It’s easier for him to spout off a million things in 5 minutes that he dreams of doing than it is for me to say 1 thing in 2 days. As adults we are so out of practice. We wonder if what we are dreaming of is too big… or maybe not big enough? Or maybe too selfish, or maybe too self sacrificing? and then we say things like, “YOLO!” and then we question what YOLO even really means anyway?! Then we start to think about what others will say if we fail. What will they say? What will we say to ourselves? How are we ever going to know what to do?”

It can seem impossible sometimes to really let ourselves go to our big dream place. You’ve got too much work, you’ve got a steady job, you’re family lives close by, you’ve got a baby, you’re pregnant , you’re trying to have a baby….the reasons why we shouldn’t do things are more often than not the longer list. But why shouldn’t we dream big? Why shouldn’t we rip everything off a wall in our home and start a visual list of the things we want – the things we need??

Last night I asked Jeff when the last time he was truly happy at work. The answer? The year we met in Berlin, giving bicycle tours around the city. It didn’t surprise me, I knew the answer before I even asked him. But here’s the hard part, asking yourself what made that ‘job’ so good for your soul? Was it the city? The people? The energy? It’s hard to tell but it’s usually a combination of everything. When there is good energy around you it seeps inside of you and helps you to feel more alive, more a part of the world.

So I guess the bigger question is, what do we have to do to get back to that positive space? How can we satisfy what we all want and need? I truly believe it can’t be just this one time in our lives that we felt like we had balance, like we felt nourished and full of life. I have to believe that it’s possible to find a way to create that feeling for ourselves again.