You don't have to be everything for everyone

On figuring out which balls are glass and which are plastic

Last week I went on a trip with my whole family: my parents, my sisters, my brother-in-law, my nephew, my husband, and my daughter. We travelled by boat to Rotterdam and stayed in a little cottage together in Port Zélande. It was a week of chaos and joy, of swimming and eating, of exploring and laughing (and of a few big emotions).

Around the third morning of our trip, I was trying to give my daughter her meds, or get myself dressed, or pack a bag to go to the beach (or probably all three at once), when my mother went to the sink to start doing dishes. I looked up and realised it was all my dishes: my daughter's breakfast plate, the paraphernalia from her first round of medication, my empty coffee cup. I told her not to do my dishes, that I’d get to it in a minute, and she said: “You know, you don't have to always be everything to everyone.”

I could have cried (if I hadn’t been so busy trying to be everything to everyone in that moment, I probably would have done), because that's exactly that's how motherhood feels in this season. I am stretched thin, the threads of my energy are taut and ready to snap.

I can do a lot of things for the people I love, and I can let other people take on some of that load. I can prepare for things to go wrong, and I can live in the moment when things are going right. I can be capable of doing it all, and I can choose not to. Because the concept of ‘being everything to everyone’ is just another way to say “doing it all,” isn’t it?

Some days, when I am in the midst of answering an email and doing the dishes and stirring the pot on the stove, of mentally preparing for a meeting while I bathe my daughter, of tidying up and shovelling laundry into the machine, while saying: “I’ll come and play in a minute, baby,” I get to bedtime before I realise that I never did come and sit down to play. That somewhere in between making sure she has a clean(ish) home, nutritious food, and money to spend on ice creams at the park, I forget to give her connection.

I’ve written before about the guilt and shame that go hand-in-hand with modern expectations for intensive mothering, and this realisation could have been an invitation to burrow deeper into that. I’m trying to lean out of the guilt, though. “You don’t always have to be everything to everyone,” could also be an invitation to sift through my priorities and examine what I want to be, and to whom.

Yes, my daughter is my priority. Always. But if I spend all my time fostering connection with my daughter, the other things won’t get done. And the other things have to get done, to enable me to care for my daughter properly. The groceries need buying, the food needs cooking, the dishes need washing so that she can eat. The emails need sending, the clients need meeting, the work needs doing, so that we can afford our lovely little life. You see my problem?

Which brings me to another conversation I had this week, based on a concept attributed to Nora Roberts. When we’re juggling a lot of balls, we have to understand which are glass and which are plastic. It's not that the one work ball is plastic and the one family ball is glass. Each task that goes into each of those things every day is a separate ball, and some work balls are glass and some family balls are plastic. And sometimes you do have to drop a plastic family ball to catch a glass work one.

Sometimes I have to drop a plastic “sit down and play Sylvanians with me right now” ball to catch a glass “this client can only meet at 4pm on a Tuesday” one, or a glass “it’s ten minutes to teatime and there’s nothing on the stove” one (because yes, domestic and caring work is work). The idea isn’t that the plastic balls drop into the ether. You can go back and pick them up later. But if you drop the glass ones without trusting someone else to catch them, they’ll shatter.

Maybe I need to stop trying to catch every single ball for everyone else, though. Maybe I can take it task by task, day by day. Because my relationship with my daughter IS a glass ball, and the dishes ARE a plastic ball. But will that glass ball really shatter if I was holding it only this morning, and it lands there on the soft carpet? And if I let all those plastic work balls drop, intending to pick them up again later, will I really be able to gather them all up in the hour or two after my daughter’s bedtime?

I may be stretching this analogy too far, but I think you get my gist. In trying to be everything to everyone, how can I also make space to just exist alongside my daughter, let alone space to do something for myself?

While motherhood is an exercise in stretching yourself taut, trying to do it all, it’s also an exercise in patience. “They’ll get there when they get there,” is my refrain in conversations with other mothers, when comparisons begin to crop up, “They all go at their own pace.” So why can’t I trust myself to go at my own pace? Why can’t I believe that I’ll get there when I get there? Part of the issue with trying to be everything to everyone—other than that it’s impossible—is that all that doing leaves me paralysed when it comes to what I need.

I reeled off a list recently of all the things I wanted to do or to achieve, but haven’t. To travel, to write a novel, to do an MA. And my therapist suggested I add (yet) to those dreams. In this season of early motherhood, there is an inevitable amount of "being everything to everyone” that I have to engage in. But it isn’t forever. And I get to choose what I do, and for whom.