A week or so ago, my daughter re-started nursery…part-time. This is a happy solution to our current life situation. She gets to spend time away from us, learn social interaction and have fun with her friends and carers, however her days there are not too long now and I still get to spend healthy amount of time with her. Also cutting her hours means we cut nursery fees, which is something our family budget needed in these challenging times.
Time for self and reflection
This also means I have gained some time to myself. Time to do whatever I want, find a job hopefully, but also time to think and reflect on the recent past just in time for my 34th birthday.
Birthdays like New Years are time when I stop and think about what I’ve achieved in the past year. At first, I was not too satisfied with what I saw when I looked back. This made me feel uncomfortable lately and I was determined to get to the bottom of it. I believe that only if I knew what caused dissatisfaction, would I be able to find a solution to it.
Where was I?
One of the first things I identified was that I haven’t read a single book from the start of this year, which is very unusual for me. In the past few years, I’ve kept a list of books I read in the notes on my phone. This list serves as a reminder of the titles I’ve read, because as with films, I very quickly forget what I saw. I usually average ten books a year; not a huge amount but decent, right? The fact that I haven’t read any books and we are now in early July made me draw a simple yet powerful conclusion that I neglected myself, and in here I refer to mind more so than the body.
Roughly at the same time, by pure accident I discovered the podcast series in Croatian called ‘Lucie’s Little Show’, whose author, Lucia, a mum of three, talks about how to work on yourself and how to be a better version of yourself. I shared info about this podcast on my instagram stories recently, but I have linked it in here for you too as I think listening to this podcast can be beneficial to many of us.
This podcast series helped me realise one more thing: In the past three and a half months I have been so absorbed with full time child care and care about our home that I stopped caring about myself, I stopped loving myself and indeed appreciating what I have achieved while I was 33 years old.
Taking myself for granted
By care, I mean I didn’t create time to think about how I felt or to address my feelings and consequently take action to make myself feel better, like read or watch something only I wanted to see. By love, I mean I didn’t appreciate all the giving I did: to my daughter, to my husband and to the household. I kept diminishing the worth of my efforts at home, just because I am out of employment. This has led to the feelings of insecurity and discomfort I am so keen to get rid of.
Achievements
With the above in mind, I looked back at the past year of my life with a more positive attitude. This obviously required an active effort, energy and focus on positives rather than negatives:
1. The other day, a friend of mine messaged me saying ‘Well done on making it through the pandemic with a toddler at home’. I think only a friend who is a mum can give you this type of credit and I am grateful for these words so, so much because they opened my eyes. Klara came out of the lock down as a happy, confident, chatty toddler. She was well entertained, well fed, suitably educated for her age and surrounded by SO MUCH LOVE. Well done me, next;
2. Last summer, just as I turned 33, I returned to work when my baby was nine months old. I worked my ass off full time and brought revenue to the company that I organised events for. At the end of the year I felt empowered and strong to say ‘goodbye’ to the employer who effectively didn’t see me or the efforts I put into my work from day one. I left confident that a better work place is there and I just need to find it;
3. Finally, I created this blog. As I think I mentioned in my launch post, building a blog was something I never thought I was capable of and only that in itself is an achievement. Further, the process of coming up with the topics for the blog and writing about them can be added to the list of my achievements. Finally, I recognised that content creation for the blog is a vehicle that helps me deal with all the things I write about.
To conclude, all of the above helped me enter the middle aged years of my life as a happier individual than I was a couple of weeks ago. The concepts of caring about myself and loving myself are completely new to me, but I will aim to practice them hoping they will make appreciation of personal achievements easier going forward. Finally, I will try to learn from and find positives in every situation I find myself in. I’ll let you know how I get on.
Thank you for taking time to read this blog post. This is the best gift you could have given me for my 34th birthday.
Love,
Lena