Forget Balance. Find Your Brand of Chaos
Life is unpredictable. It’s also beautiful.
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Just before New Year’s Eve 2020, I bought a Cricut machine. If you’re not familiar with Cricut, it’s basically a printer for crafters that draws and cuts instead of printing. You can make iron-ons, vinyl decals, cards and a whole bunch of other things. I’m more a dabbler in the crafting world than anything close to a crafting pro, but I knew I needed a creative distraction and this machine was calling my name.
As parents of an infant, we weren’t sure we’d be awake at midnight. Still, we invited our parents over for dinner and tried our best to keep our energy up. In my typical “last-minute creative idea” fashion, around 11am that day, I decided a craft was in order.
So I asked everyone to come up with a word or phrase to sum up what they were hoping for in 2021. Then I created decals with those words and transferred them to wine glasses.
Mine said “find your balance”. Our daughter, Ayla, was almost nine months old and I was exhausted. I returned to work in August post-maternity leave with ambitions to accomplish all the things I had time to do mentally and physically before becoming a Mom less than a month into a global pandemic.
Oh, and we only had help with Ayla two days a week at the time.
I was desperate for balance by December 2020. I don’t think balance was the right word, though. Maybe “embrace the beautiful chaos” or “find the right kind of chaos” would have been more fitting. Because the to-do list never ends, but there are so many rewarding moments in the middle of the craziness.
When you’re a parent and you have big career ambitions, some level of chaos is inevitable. So you may as well make it your own and enjoy the ride. Or in my case, embrace it so much that you leave your corporate job to build your own content consulting business while also parenting a toddler.
What’s your brand of chaos?
