As much as I love that week between Christmas and the new year for dreaming dreams and making plans, the best time of year for thoughtful goal setting is mid-August. This is your moment, Mama. What is your dream? How are you going to invest in yourself in the season to come?
I’m not talking about filling fine lines or plumping your lips. I’m talking about what’s going on inside that head of yours. Maybe this is the season when — for the first time in several chaotic, busy years — your house is quiet because everyone got on a big yellow bus. Or maybe it’s the one when your last baby goes to college. Or maybe they’re all still at home all day, but you know that you need to fill your cup because you’re perilously close to running dry. The thing about mothering is that every season is a season of change. Children don’t stay in one place very long, either geographically or developmentally. They grow. They change. And so, my friend, do you. That’s very good news.
The question is whether you are going to look up from the tidy piles of freshly laundered plaids and polo shirts or the ever-growing, sprawling-into-the-next-room pile of dorm room essentials and make a plan for you. They’ll be off learning something new. They’ll be discovering themselves — what they love to do, what presents a challenge, how to navigate the good and the bad. They’ll be questing after more — eagerly pursuing the opportunity to know.
Will you do that, too?
The very best way you can support their learning is by learning yourself. Get curious. Ask questions. Read books. Go down rabbit trails. Take a class (or a whole course). Hire a coach. Pursue a passion. And do not for one moment apologize for the time you make to tend to your brain — and your heart.
Your family will learn that, while you remain interruptible if they truly need you, you are also independent of their beings. You can think complete thoughts and carry on entire, intelligent conversations. You know how to twist yourself into a pretzel trying to please everyone and meet all the demands, but you choose instead to pause. You choose to be thoughtful and assess exactly what it is you truly need before you try to serve from a place of depletion.
You recognize that it is not virtuous to make yourself available to everyone’s needs but your own. People-pleasing actually bears no good fruit in relationships. It’s the rotting compost where resentment grows in the people pleaser and ungrateful egocentrism grows in the one who is always being pleased at someone else’s expense.
Do you want to raise excellent students who are wholehearted and open-minded and eager to learn? Do you want to raise compassionate human begins who understand what it takes to set a goal and accomplish it and then to use what they gained for the greater good?
Let them see you learn. Give them a front-row seat to your pursuit of personal growth. Show them that challenging ourselves is so important that you will make time for it. When they hear you dream out loud and then see you research how to make that dream a goal and then accomplish the goal, they know that dreaming isn’t like wishing on a star. It’s more like hearing God’s still, small voice and going obediently in the direction of its calling, with patience and perseverance and self-discipline and service.
Yes, service.
Because when you learn to make time and space for your own growth, you discover that you serve others better than you could have ever imagined.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
