Balance – how do you find yours?

Sarah Wheatley - 13 Nov 14

The other week I realised that I wouldn’t blame my husband if he succumbed to the attentions of someone else – he had been getting so little from me. The demands of starting a business I care passionately about, looking after two children and ‘managing’ to look after the house had left little time for us to connect, and I often found myself barking instructions at him from behind a computer screen. Things were WAY out of kilter and I realised I was missing him badly.

So since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to find the holy grail of balance. I definitely want some more of it, and I’ve been speaking to other parents about how they try to achieve it in theirs. It’s easy to be confused by the all the conflicting ideas about different ways of living and prioritising.

As a mother or father, whether you work or stay at home, there is always the question of ‘what is enough’? Am I paying enough attention to my child, my partner, my work, my family, my friends? Am I paying enough attention to wider issues such as the environment, social issues, what’s happening in the world? And am I paying enough attention to me?

Growing up involves learning how to achieve some kind of balance in our lives. As we become more responsible for our own lives and the lives of others, we start to realise the trade-offs that we make. We have important realisations such as: if we get too little sleep we might struggle more with work the next day, or that large family gatherings can be much more fun if you haven’t been out drinking late the night before!

As new parents, often we become ‘unbalanced’ again, because being a parent means that there is often much less leeway. Having a lazy day in bed to recover from a challenging week is much harder to achieve. Staying on late at work to ‘just get it done’ becomes much more complicated if you need to go to pick up your child from nursery before it shuts. And going out for an impromptu drink with your partner now requires finding someone else who is willing and able to look after your child.

As everyone in the family grows, their needs change too and the equilibrium is continually shifting. It can be difficult to keep up. I sometimes find myself surprised when things have changed and I had’t yet noticed. Sometimes we carry on in a situation that feels very uncomfortable for a while before we actually realise that we are uncomfortable and decide to do something about it. And we might not know what to do about it. But through giving ourselves space to mull over the situation and by letting others know what we’re finding difficult, things can often start to change.

When I’m feeling as though things aren’t ‘working’ in my family – the kids are acting up, or I’m being grumpy with my husband – I often find that it’s good to make time to start thinking and talking about what seems to be going on. Sometimes there is a real “Eureka!” moment, and sometimes the realisation is much slower, but often just acknowledging the situation can move things forwards.

The paradoxical theory of change states that you are most likely to change when you accept yourself. The same can be applied to our family lives – when we really accept the situation we are in, things often start to change.

And that’s crucial to balance – our ability to change with the situation we find ourselves in. It’s a bit like standing on one leg: our muscles are working continually to make lots of adjustments in order to keep us in one position. Sometimes we don’t manage to hold our balance and have to re-position ourselves. And sometimes we need to rely on a bit of support from somewhere else.

So how do you find your balance? Is it something you find relatively easy, or do you find it can be a struggle at times? If you’ve got any great ideas for what helps you achieve balance within your family, I’d love to hear them!

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Sarah Wheatley

Counsellor, wife, mother, bee lover. Lives beside the sea in Edinburgh. Works with pregnant and new parents to help them not just cope but thrive.

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