You ruined last week’s date with your husband arguing over whether or not your son should quit baseball (it’s too stressful! he has to have those opportunities!).
Just to come home with the exact same practice schedule in place (plus another vague “I’ll try to make time to take him” promise).
There goes another “fix the family calendar” idea down the drain….
Every time you try to make a concrete change in your family, show up as the “leader,” and advocate for what you want, it gets shut down.
It’s like your husband and kids are stuck in a rut, and they will do ANYTHING not to get jolted out of it.
(Or rather, make YOU do anything to avoid having to change.)
And by now you are sick and tired of THEIR lack of personal responsibility – but you’re one against three.
All you’re trying to do is quit wasting precious time with your kids – to really BE there with them growing up – but they haven’t clued in yet that this takes TIME!
Not “read a bedtime story” so I can check off my “good parenting” to-do list time.
You’re talking actual SPACE in the daily family schedule for connecting. Hearing. Belonging.
Not another whole list of parenting chores to cross off.
But the catch is, you have to have enough room in your OWN daily to-do list for this.
- Cue: how many hours am I working with my clients, and what do I do about my monthly revenue if I pull back.
- Plus: I can’t be responsible for each and every single thing around the house, or I WON’T have time to hang out at Starbucks on a mom-and-daughter caramel macchiato date.
- And: I’m going to need someone else to help with the parental taxi-cab-ing – it can be grandma, or dad, or carpool buddies, but I can’t prep organic, whole food suppers AND create websites AND spend 2 hours in traffic. Something’s got to give.
You’ve got this inner urgency – your son is 12 now, not a chubby-cute 3-year-old, while your daughter’s already in high school – and your internal clock is counting down the last few years with both of them at home.
‘Cause these high school years with your daughter are too fleeting to waste time living at suboptimal levels of client call stress and sports game hustle.
And the way you get enough time with your kids – those precious, precious, growing up too fast kids – is to get better and better at your delegation.
It’s the only way.
(Short of quitting your business, devoting every spare hour to THEIR activities, and feeling cramped and confined in motherhood again. Which neither of us wants for you.)
So when you hire me, I’m going to pinpoint all the places in your biz AND your mom life where you COULD be delegating – and then hand you the age-graded outsourcing list (plus the “send to VA” handoff list) for each one.
Believe me, I’ve tried to handle ALL the homeschooling and ALL the parenting conversations along with ALL the food prepping – on top of present wrapping, present BUYING, and cross-town schlepping…..
It’s too much.
But your current family calendar is like an invisible backpack pressing down on you, just with the WEIGHT of all the schedule juggling and commitment balancing you’re doing.
And you KNOW the next three years don’t have to be this way.
But to ditch that invisible backpack, you need to make like eight different changes to your weekly schedule….
Which brings you full circle to your “stuck in a rut” family members and your lack of agency.
But here’s the secret: all it takes is one person. You.
- You raising your rates and dropping one client spot so that you’ve got the same MRR coming in, but more time to spend on your teenagers.
- You choosing to do the fun parts of parenting (Starbucks macchiato, anyone?) instead of the laundry and groceries part (those can get outsourced).
- You deciding that you’re not going to do all the practice taxi-cab-ing anymore, so how your son gets there the other half of the time is up to him.
Once you make that decision, set those new “not doing this any more” boundaries, and (here’s the kicker) stick WITH them….
You’ve already course corrected for the rest of high school.
You’ve made that space to be WITH them, not checking off your to-do list AROUND them.
And yeah, it may take your husband and kids a while to respond to the cascade of schedule and chore and availabilities you just shifted….
But it’s already happening.
You did it all by yourself.
So let’s find that next right move for you so that you don’t have to waste time flailing about.
Because it’s not fun for you to sit around and have to figure it all out – and I’ve got the shortcut when you’re a short-on-time mompreneur.
DM me when you’re ready to recover oodles of time in your work-at-home week.
