There are a number of excuses I hear about why you don’t prioritize yourself. I hear it over and over again, “I’ll just wait until they are in school.” It breaks my heart when I see a mom put herself off in the name of being a “good mom”.
It’s my life mission to bring systems to you so you don’t have to feel compromised anymore. You need to understand how valuable every part of you is. Know you’re not alone in the journey to making yourself whole while serving endlessly as a wife and mom.
Listen below for the entire episode on The Systemize Your Life Podcast
Motherhood Was Once Not On My Path
For most of my life, I was very adamant that I would never have children. Our hearts change; clearly, I have two kids, and I love them to pieces. I really thought for many years that I would have to choose motherhood and nothing else. Most of us probably still feel that way but I just wasn’t going to settle for that.
I knew that I was called to have a really grandiose life. To me, that looked like doing my very best work in everything that I showed up to. Everything that I felt I was supposed to do, I would show up with my very best. I didn’t know what that looked like as a wife, mom, or someone determined to have a successful career. My plans surrounded wanting to make money and have skills and passion for something I could only do. I wanted that to flourish and I thought that would be robbed of me when I became a mom.
Motherhood Doesn’t Rob You Of Your Other Dreams
I know a lot of you are reading this feel that in your motherhood. It’s not anything that I am a stranger to. There are so many ways that this creeps into our lives. I think it is the enemy trying to bring us down and weaken our ability to be the moms we are supposed to be. From thinking that we can’t work out because our kids are too little, we let our bodies go downhill. They could look a lot better than they do if we took care of our bodies and the food we put in our mouths.
Even in Motherhood, You Need to Prioritize Yourself
I’m not just talking about becoming a massive success story, I’m talking about the need to start prioritizing you. Instead of eating your children’s scrap food, make yourself a plate of food and eat it. Then guess what happens to your kids when they grow up. Your kids will learn that their wives need to eat at the table. Your daughters will grow up to learn that they can tell their kids, “Mom needs to eat”. These are the simple ways that we learn to prioritize ourselves.
Most of us never saw women do this. My mom did the classic 1950s housewife stuff. I try to do it because I really love the idea of being in a servant role. The reason that I love that is because my husband and I are both in that. That is something we strive to give each other. I’m not just doing it because I feel like serving is what I’m supposed to be doing, and it’s one-sided. We don’t think that way in our house. Whenever I am serving in endless capacities, my cup is filled because my husband is returning that favour, and I’m teaching my kids to return that favour to me. That is how I want them to grow up and view relationships.
“Whenever I am serving in endless capacities, my cup is filled because my husband is returning that favour, and I’m teaching my kids to return that favour to me.”
Show Your Children How to Prioritize Yourself
I want my children to grow up and know how to serve and how to give in order to say thank you to people that are serving them. That is how we build mutual relationships. Children these days have turned into blood-sucking, ungrateful, unappreciative, rude humans. There is a tendency to make our kids happy that we have to feed our kids with these silver spoons constantly, I think a lot has to do with technology and keeping up with the Jones’, and making sure that our kids always have something good and positive about us to say, to brag. There is this competitive nature with kids in schools and on social media, and they see what other kids are doing, so we try to give our kids everything they want to make them happy.
We have lost touch with this idea that our kids need to learn. Our kids are learning the skills to make them happy for later in life, that is exactly where this topic comes from. We have to start prioritizing ourselves in motherhood so that our children, our husbands, and the people around us can see what it looks like to be a healthy and whole woman that has been called to serve in motherhood, as a wife, in her home, with other skills and passions too. What that ends up looking like when we have come from generations of women that have been taught that everything goes on the back burner the second your husband walks through the door is we have to start reframing our mindset.
Take Care of Yourself First
When Blane gets home from work, do I try to ensure the kitchen is picked up? Do I try to make sure we greet him at the door with a smile? Do I try and make sure that I’m dressed for the day? That my hair is put together? That my makeup is on? Do I try to do those things, yes, because that is what I would have done if we were dating. Not because I don’t want to disappoint him but because I truly do try my very best to honor the spirit of the woman that I was when we were dating.
I want to give my best self as often as possible to everyone. But I start with me. I start with what giving my very best self to me looks like, and that looks like Bible study in the morning. That looks like I’m feeding myself healthy food, it also means that I am not getting lost in over-exerting myself to the point where self-talk becomes excuses and negative. Having these negative conversations with yourself and putting things off until the kids are older. The world needs more of who you really are.
There is Always Enough Time to Prioritize Yourself
There is a very sneaky heavy energy that wants you to believe that there is not enough time and energy in you, that you would be a bad mom if you didn’t give to your kids endlessly. The funny thing is, I see a lot of women serving in their churches because they are dying for a way to use their skills and their passions, and they believe that that is the only place where they are allowed to give of themselves. I do believe you should if that is where you are called to serve. Then I see many moms guilt themselves when they want to start a business or even just a hobby.
How Asking For Help Allows You to Prioritize Yourself
These are hard conversations to have. It means you are going to have to ask other people for help. You will have to ask other people to support your dreams and goals. You are going to have to explain to your kids why they have mismatched socks on when they go to school because Dad couldn’t get the matching ones. Or because they couldn’t figure it out.
It also means you are really going to have to be organized. I think that scares a lot of you because it’s really hard. It feels like now, in order to do this thing that I want to do, I have to put this other thing on my plate of getting my act together. I will say that’s another way the enemy tries to creep in your ear because you don’t want to do the hard work to get organized, you don’t want to do the hard work to lose weight or change your eating habits, or have the hard conversation with your kids that are older than expected so much of you because you know it’s going to be a battle to get them to do their own laundry or to show up and help you cook one night a week. You would rather just not have the conversation.
What Happens When Your Kids Are Raised?
Ask yourself: what does it look like for you at the end of eighteen to twenty-five years of raising children? What does that look like for you? Does it end in divorce? It did for my parents, it does for a lot of parents. Blaine and I are passionate about it because we both watched it happen in our families. Our parents loved us deeply but didn’t love each other deeply. Maybe they wanted to, but they didn’t know how. They tried. No fault of their own, it’s just how it ended up.
Blane and I learned some decent lessons from that, and we learned from the environment we grew up in, and I want you to be able to do that too. I want you to be able to give your very best to you so that you can pour deeply into your husband, your home, your kids, and the other things you were called to do. You truly do not have to wait until your kids are older. Now do you have to be wise? Of course, you do.
When Frankie was little, I had to work, I didn’t have a choice, so I was outside of the house a lot. I remember that killing me. For those of us that are work-from-home moms that are reading this, there is this really good feeling as moms for us to be able to be with our kids as much as we can. Some moms really love and thrive dropping their kids off and going to a job and coming home, that is where they thrive. I love that about those moms too. We all have that place where we have been called, and being a work from home mom is not for everyone. That’s ok.
Learn Where Your Sweet Spot Is
I love getting out of the house, we all love getting away from our kids occasionally. But there is some of us that has been called to be work-from-home moms. We love this notion of being able to be with our kids, and some of us even homeschool our kids. Some of us, due to covid, realized how much we loved this and would have never given ourselves the opportunity to. Through that process, we have all come to realize that there is a sweet spot where we can live with how much we can give to our kids and how much we can give to ourselves.
I loved for you to learn where your sweet spot is. This can change as your kids grow. I wanted to be with Frankie 24/7, but I also wanted to find the right person to help me care for her alongside Blane. There are times when both of us would be working and I really wanted to find the right person. We found preschool, three half days a week and that works for us. It’s been a new season for us.
We are in a new season with Frankie Jo where I want to be with her as much as I can. She’s homeschooling and I love it. I love pouring into her that way and figuring out how to prioritize me when I do feel that calling is really the tricky part for a lot of us.
Prioritize Yourself Through Your Fundamental Needs
That is where our fundamental needs system and time blocking comes in. You can learn how to prioritize yourself through your fundamental needs. That is why I created this blog. To teach you how to do what I started doing several years ago, prioritizing yourself while you are doing all the other things.
That is when Blane and I came up with the great eight. We call it our fundamental needs system, which you can recreate in your own life to make sure that the most important things that fill up your cup are happening. This system allows you to do what you need to to feel as though you are meeting the mark in every area of your life.
These are not random self-care things. These are things like making sure I get to the grocery store so that I can feed myself the food I need. Making sure that I care for myself before caring for others. One of those things is making sure that I have personal time. I have chosen to use all of my personal time to grow a business instead of hanging out with girlfriends. There was very little time for me to connect with girlfriends in this season of life. I connect with them in other ways, I get together with them about once a month. That is what I decided was best for me and what I needed. It was a really hard decision. You will have hard decisions that you have to make whenever you start prioritizing yourself too.
Prioritizing Yourself Allows You to Truly Care For Your Family
The one thing I don’t want you to do is continue to use the excuse that your children should be the only thing you will focus on to be a good mom, to be successful, and to meet the mark. That does not raise the type of humans you are hoping to raise, and it doesn’t leave you whole and healthy at the end of the day. It doesn’t leave your marriage healthy and whole, either.
Pop over inside the Facebook group and show me your fundamental needs. I want to see them! Make sure you do planner audits every Monday so we can focus on how you prioritize yourself amongst all the other things you have to prioritize throughout the day. You can also check out The Systemize Your Life Academy, where we dive into all the systems so you can learn and grow in all areas of your life!
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I find the time to prioritize myself?
If you need help trying to squeeze in the time for that self-care routine, you can listen to Podcast Episode 3: Learn How to Time Block Your Fundamental Needs to Reduce Stress and Anxiety. If you would like even more resources and support, why not see what Systemize Your Life is all about?
