what if....

Do you ever have those days when no matter how many cups of tea or coffee (pick your poison) you drink, you just can't seem to get it together? Those days when the dishes pile up, the laundry gets ignored, groceries stay at the store, the gas tank runs low, emails seem too much to answer, work seems impossible and the notion of being able to put together a complete, intelligent thought sounds like an insurmountable task? Those days where you wish you could just sit down and watch TV for a few hours and forget all that looms over you?

I am having one of those days. It is 12: 50pm and my major accomplishment of the day was running the dishwasher. I have so much to do and so little energy to do it. So as I sit here, I am wondering, what would it be like to just give myself permission to not roast the chicken for dinner, make the cookies, finish the laundry. What would it feel like to just sit down quietly while the baby naps and rest myself? Could I turn off my mind, ignore my need to always be productive, to somehow prove that I did something with myself for the day? Could I just be? And if I let myself do that, could I then muster up some energy to finish the day?

What if we all gave ourselves permission to just embrace how we are feeling instead of trying to run away from it? Our value is not determined by how clean our homes are, how quickly the laundry gets folded, or how lovely of a dinner we make. We are valuable just as we are. If we actually stopped to fill up our own tank, either with a nap, a book, a conversation with a friend or even with a little TV, we might not be sputtering through the day like a car about to die on the road. Children are masters at pausing, they often are able to stop and take stock of what is around them and what they are feeling and if we don't listen, they meltdown until we do. What if we could pause on this path of motherhood, before we had a meltdown? If you could take a break on the path, what would you do?