When nothing is certain, anything is possible.
There’s a reason why Googling this quote yields more than a billion results. (Seriously.) Its optimism in the face of uncertainty — or even adversity — suggests that things can be dramatically different if we want them to. Like, if the hamster wheel of 2020 (sleep, eat, work, repeat) isn’t serving you, then all you have to do is open the door to change.
And, to some extent, that’s true. The first important step toward any transformation is opening your mind to new possibilities. But it’s equally important to follow up this inspiration with the hard work of making the changes you want a reality.
Goals vs. Priorities
Working toward a goal is something I think most parents can relate to. Whether in your career (hello, medical school!) or your family, life can be deceptively clear-cut sometimes. Why deceptive? Because so often the real things we want in life don’t follow a straightforward path.
Take my life, for example. Becoming a doctor — something I decided on when I was in high school — required a pretty direct if challenging set of boxes to tick. Grades, entrance exams, applications, medical school, residency, and then presto! I was a doctor.
But other challenges, like paying for said medical school, required more circuitous solutions.
When my husband, Scott, and I started married life, we also started graduate school. Both of us. At the same time. I can’t really tell you what we were thinking. We absolutely took the loans seriously — we ate big-box-store samples for lunch practically every Sunday during those years and lived in subsidized, un-glamorously cramped student housing. But I think we also figured that, as a doctor and a physical therapist, we would be making good money when all was said and done and that we’d be just fine.
More than a decade later, I was a seasoned practitioner and Scott was the director of his physical-therapy clinic. We’d paid off some of the debt. But as the loan bills slowly (so slowly!) decreased, other bills (childcare, mortgage, etc.) began to rise.
It was soul-crushingly untenable. But we slogged on. We knew that our finances were not ideal, but at the same time, we weren’t really clear on what we wanted (beyond being debt-free) or how to get there.
Then, one spring morning it came to me. I was immersed in a beautiful, peaceful moment of motherhood. My sweet baby was wrapped up tight on my lap, her little legs folded against my belly, her head resting on my chest. And I suddenly realized that, even with that small human being pressed tightly against me, what made that moment so precious was its freedom. I craved the freedom to choose, broadly speaking, how I lived my life and spent my time. I wanted the freedom to truly live according to my priorities. This wasn’t about setting one goal to attain or delete something in my life. This was a realization that the way I was living my life needed to change.
Be the Change
After that trip, Scott and I completely reimagined our lives. We moved into my parents’ house for a year and rented out our own home, saving thousands of dollars a month in the process. We rearranged our work schedules and our childcare situation to drop nanny hours. We committed to staycations and big box-only grocery shopping for a year. We put every bonus dollar we earned toward loan repayment. In the end, we paid down over a third of our debt and set ourselves up to continue working toward financial freedom.
We got there, Mama, but it wasn’t easy. It required a new set of priorities, conscious decision-making, teamwork, and commitment. But the point is this: If you want change, you have to figure out your priorities and live according to them. The inspiration is everywhere, but the change is within you.
The First Steps
I go into more detail about this experience in my upcoming book, The Working Mom Blueprint: Winning at Parenting Without Losing Yourself. (Due out this spring!) But as we look toward 2021, we owe it to ourselves to take the time and do the work of determining what we want in our lives.
Like I said, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. But here’s how you can get started:
1. Create a centered vision for your life. Imagine how you want your life to look in five years. What is your family life like? Your professional life? What’s in it? What’s not?
2. Surround yourself with your people (even if you have to do it virtually). You need a squad in your corner who can dream alongside you!
3. Make space in your life for the good things to come to you. If you want to start a new business or make a new start, you have to make the space (emotionally, physically, time-wise) for it.
This is a subject I’m passionate about. It affects so much of modern parenthood, because too often we confuse sacrifice with necessity. Helping other mamas figure out how to architect the lives they want is a huge part of why I developed Modern Mommy Doc and its many resources. My Mama Reset Self-Care Retreat (At Home) dives deep on this. And my upcoming live retreats will take that experience to the next level. (More on that in the next few weeks!)
The annual reckoning that accompanies New Year’s Day feels more electric this year. As traumatic as 2020 was, our hopes for 2021 can feel equally intense in a weird, inverted way. If this past year was one of our worst, isn’t there a law somewhere that says the new year needs to be one of our best?
There isn’t. But there is something better: the power to shape your own future. It’s time to figure out where you’re going.
