I am a stay at home mom with a six year old in grade R (kindergarten), three and a half year old twins, who are home with me, and a new baby due some time in the next month or so. Balancing their needs (also the needs of my wonderful husband, who is usually more helpful than needy) with my needs is a daily effort. Finding ways to take care of myself, while having three little people who are very good at making their wants and wishes known, is not usually easy.

In some ways taking care of myself is very easy for me. There are a lot of activities I like that are self focused. It could be easy to spend lots of time focused on things that I find rejuvenating and re-centering, but I don’t actually prioritize it that much, partly just from lack of clarity around how much to put these things at the top of my to-do list. Continue reading Self Care: How Much is Too Much? →

For the young exhausted mothers, families who are trying to make ends meet, and providers who bring home a paycheck, I can only say, regardless of the messages from the world, and from your own hearts, “It’s worth it”.

I know I am speaking from another generation and another set of circumstances, but I don’t believe my view is really that different from experiences in the lives of human beings throughout the world. Families are important. I rejoice at the image of a child being rescued from a collapsed building, and I grieve at the sight of a lifeless body being carried from a disaster, no matter where it happens in the world. I know those people are valued and loved, and their rescue or their loss is felt deeply by those who love them. Continue reading Just Compensation →

About a year ago, I was struggling with an overuse of social media and the internet. I was spending way more hours on the computer than I wanted to be and wasting so much time and energy on the silliest of things, like “Can We Guess Your Mental Age? – Take the Quiz!” or “The 24 Cutest Animals of All Time.” I felt discontented with my life and overwhelmed by all the excess of information constantly flooding into my head. How could I even focus on trying to do the right thing when all my extra time was spent online? Deciding it was time to do something about it, I started severely controlling my computer time – forcing myself to use sites like Facebook or Pinterest only once or twice a week, for a limited amount of time. I actually set timers to alert me when my time was up. With my newfound free time, I started falling back in love with activities I had always enjoyed, such as reading, crafting and cooking. I suddenly had so much potential to be useful to more people, because I was no longer wasting hours of my life away on the computer.
Continue reading The Simple Life →

Grief: it’s personal and important and difficult. You have to be present and tough
and vulnerable all at the same time. It’s exhausting and draining and yet essential to
healing. I have been living with grief for 5 years now. My husband of 24 years
passed into the Spiritual World after suffering a massive heart attack in 2011.

The beginning was the worst for me. The shock was numbing and terrifying. The
fear: how was I going to do this thing called life without him? How was I going to
raise our children without a father? How could I be a dad as well as a mom, what
did this mean to me emotionally, physically and financially? Who was I if I wasn’t
a wife?
Continue reading My Experience of Grief →