Contact Me

I would love to hear from you: ReadyToWait@gmail.com 

Get Ready to Wait in your RSS Feed:
Get new posts delivered to your email!

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Follow Me
Our Family Read-Aloud
  • The Hoboken Chicken Emergency
    The Hoboken Chicken Emergency
    by Daniel Pinkwater
I'm Reading...
  • Your Five Year Old: Sunny and Serene
    Your Five Year Old: Sunny and Serene
    by Louise Bates Ames
  • Book of Days: Personal Essays
    Book of Days: Personal Essays
    by Emily Fox Gordon
  • The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (La Leche League International Book)
    The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (La Leche League International Book)
    by La Leche League International
  • Gilead: A Novel
    Gilead: A Novel
    by Marilynne Robinson

Entries in Struggles (1)

Wednesday
Jan202010

Doing it all

We cannot do it all. 

Say it with me, ladies (and gentlemen, if you are out there, chime in too). Seriously.  Stand up, throw back your head and let’s whoop together in our outside voices:

We cannot do it all!

I say “we” because I know that we have this struggle together, this struggle for a life that is full of the things we love and need to do, the things our children and families need and love.  Our marriages.  Our work.  Our desire to be fully human and humane and participating in the world.

But we cannot do it all.

This is a realization that I come to regularly.  About twice a day.  Easily.  And I say this hanging my head with a due degree of shame… each and every time I discover it I am just as surprised as I was the first time.

My morning dose of this reality came as I was standing in my underwear in the gym locker room, looking into a gym bag that contained no sneakers. 

I can do quite a bit.  I will not bore you with the list, but I actually did do quite a bit today before foiling my own attempt at squeezing a workout into it all.

The second dose is coming right now as I sit here beside a sniffling boy who started the day with some sneezes, which then progressed slowly to glassy, baggy eyes and listlessness.  I am looking at him and sighing deeply and thinking about how this is the afternoon before I have a busy, booked-every-second kind of day at work.

I cannot do it all.

But there are things I can do. I can hold the door for that woman struggling with her stroller.  I can tuck my sniffling boy in and bring him tea. I can be kind.

And I can stop for a bunch of budding willows at the corner store.  I can bring a little bit of beauty into our home.  Something to gaze at just now, to remind me that at the end of this winter there will be spring. 

This is just a season. 

It is always just a season and there will always be spring.