Busyparents have a superpower. I wish I still had mine. Whilst busy doing all the little things that keep young humans alive and relatively happy, they plan. They prioritise. Ruthlessly. The plans are centred around the next microbreak between all the highly necessary things that fill their days. Do you remember the story about the lecturer filling the jam jar with golf balls and asking their students if it was full yet, then showing them it wasn’t by adding successively smaller things? The analogy is often used in time management but let’s be honest, us non-busyparents tend to leave lots of air gaps in the jam jar of productivity. Busyparents are all about calmly the filling the already full jar with water. They use every scrap of wakefulness for something productive. They know precisely how much time is available, and which thing to do next. They are exceptional when it comes to prioritising, although perhaps with the exception of self-care and fully appreciating their awesomeness, but that’s a whole other topic.

I used to have a friend who ran her own business (you’ll see why I use the past tense in a mo). Around the time that my children were young, but self-dressing and self-feeding, we had a conversation. She said that she would never employ a woman of child bearing age because of the time off required for looking after kids and their various illnesses blah blah blah. Not long before that, I had enjoyed a surreptitious pub lunch as a lunch break with a professional colleague. Our children were a similar age. We discussed this bad reputation that working mums have. At the time, she had just finished covering a colleague’s role whilst they were away. As a busyparent she had cracked on with work like someone who has limited time because *school run* and had got such a hard time when the ‘can work until 5pm quite happily’ non-parent woman returned because my friend had ‘shown her up’. Yes. Quite. And another thing… the busyparent in the workplace usually, depending on the workplace and whether they are unfortunate to work for or with either of two of the women described earlier in the paragraph, really appreciates the break from all those necessary activities around nurturing young humans.  

It is my lived experience that busyparents are productivity ninjas. We all need to find our own balance in life. One of the most important life skills to master is living without guilt or shame. I am so sad when I witness wonderful busyparents, giving to others in so many ways, but living with guilt and shame because of the warped way our ‘modern’ Society consistently fails to appreciate their contribution and their wonderful kids. The intense years of bedtime stories and broken nights are a really slim chapter in life – all too soon you’ll be back to air gaps in your jam jar, perhaps failing to even add enough sand, just like most of the rest of us. In many ways, the life of the busyparent is the richest life of all. So live fully in your enoughness, take pride in the matching of the washed socks and really appreciate how you rock your next microbreak, because: 

You are awesome 

You matter