Recharging Me Mode

Nikki Lamberg reflects on a recent week she took off from work: a week spent filling her cup.

As a mom, I’ve come to realize that perhaps we are the ones with the greatest opportunity and need to recharge and refocus. I’ll be the first to admit that I am the last person to take time for myself. There are days where I feel like I am giving my everything—literally as a nursing mom and figuratively as I am constantly doing things for everyone else. I am not complaining here—please don’t get me wrong. Having a family has been my dream, and my four kids are my greatest blessing of all. However, I do struggle with ensuring that my cup is being refilled, so that I can continue to pour it out to all.

Working full-time, my vacation days are usually spent on a yearly family camping trip or kid’s appointments and activities. Anything left over is usually saved for unexpected sickness or snow day in the winter months. I realized though, that somewhere in the mix of being wife, mom, friend, and employee, I needed to take time for me again. And although it would have been fabulous to take a weeklong trip somewhere to rejuvenate, I recently took the opportunity to take an entire week off to work, to do things just for me.

I don’t mean that I took a week off to catch up on the daily maintenance of household living, I mean really drilling down into what makes me happy. I became very intentional about what was putting stress on me, and focused on the potential resolutions. I’ll give you an example. I work from home, so I see everything that I am “not getting done” on a daily basis or feel like I am falling behind on.

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I took an entire day to work around the outside of our house: weeding, planting flowers, and mulching. This was a time-consuming task that has a small window of opportunity due to our Wisconsin weather and very full family schedules. We were still getting snow in May this year! But it felt so great when I was done, and now every time I pull into our driveway, or I look out my office window, I smile at the work that I was able to put in to making our outside come alive again.

My week off was so liberating that it made me pause and really think about how I can incorporate the things that make me happy, that fill my cup, more often.

Some questions I started to ponder are:

Why do, as moms, we feel like we need permission to give us this pause?
Can we give this to ourselves or are we waiting to be given permission by someone else?
What is our breaking point, and do we have to get there before we allow ourselves to be recharged?
What are the factors that we can and can’t control?

Identifying where we are at in our current state, where we want to be, and the barriers in between is powerful. Realizing that we don’t need to ask permission to pivot, whether big or small, is liberating. Identifying how we can apply those pivots to our life is an integral part of helping us to achieve the kind of wife, mom, friend, employee that we want to be.

Click to tweet:
Don’t wait for someone else’s permission to seek your happiness. #CatholicMom

Here is what I am continuing to work on now: Don’t wait for something bad to happen before you realize you need to have time for you too. Don’t wait for someone else’s permission to seek your happiness. (If you were, here is your permission! Go get it, girl!) Don’t get caught up in the weeds of trying to change, ensuring everyone else is taken care of before you. There will always be something that causes a bump in the road, but if you keep taking that next step forward, that next chance, YOU can become the leader in your own life.

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