“There’s just so much I want to do,” were the words I muttered through teary eyes as I whisked myself out of the kitchen where Jordan and I were at the start of one of those conversations better had over a glass of wine than mid-morning before moving along in different directions. For the first time I felt limited, and that’s all I could think to say.
Limitations are not something we embrace. As mentioned a couple of writings ago, Comer’s book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry is currently in my rotation, and he speaks of limitations as needing recognition in order to combat the hurry of our day. He even shared a few of his own, and named them Limitation 1, Limitation 2, and Limitation 3. Sounds a little bit like the makings of a Dr. Seuss spin on The Cat in the Hat, just with the characters names being a bit more telling. Or recall with me If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Who knew such a small little mouse could require so much?
Children. For all that they require, the challenges they bring, the attention they demand, children also carry the capacity to inhibit something completely outside of themselves. You. We all carry that super power of influence when it comes down to it, but let’s get really honed in here for a moment. When you become a parent you discover a whole new set of limitations,` both external and internal that require your gaze or otherwise fall prey to your own enslavement of the self. And rather practically speaking, a child is a limitation to that part of you that just straight up wants to tend to something else. Now for the point needing to be made in Comer’s book, I get it. Nothing else needed to be said. Limitation 1, Limitation 2, Limitation 3. For his is not a parenting book, nor is this writing, yet I keep coming back to this question. If indeed I have two limitations of my own, is that how I have come to see them?
In the kitchen that morning I was coming face to face with perhaps a truth I had not yet needed to discover. The church community in which I found myself working was very gracious to allow, some even encourage, my bringing my children with me to what was both my place of worship and my work. Even mid-week meetings often entailed the company of a little one, which, as you can imagine, required incredible intentionality in both tending to her needs while simultaneously giving not only my attention but my contribution to the gathering at hand. The freedom to do so of course meant not being able to give 100% of myself to either, but had become such a part of my rhythm that when my own pastor observed and challenged the balance I sought to summon each week, I was deeply discouraged. Even though a second child had Jordan and I independently implementing a few changes, which meant recruiting a bit of help to continue the day to day child toggling, the outside challenge meant a shift in what I had known, and a shift in the freedom I had so far been given. A freedom that said you can be both: a working outside the home mama with your children in tow. In essence I could be it all, and I relished in that with great joy and confidence.
Yet as I looked at my husband and uttered those weighted words – There’s just so much I want to do – I felt that there was an inevitable choice needing to be made, and it broke me. You cannot do it all. There is no casual on ramp to starting your own business whilst home schooling your kids, both of which I have in my mind to accomplish. At least not without drawing limits on both. For as much as starting a business, no, finishing this writing (as I have both children piled on me as we speak) is prone to be limited by my children, so also does a business plan, or even the laundry, limit my capacity as a parent. We want to do it all and most of the time we just can’t, or we struggle thinking that we can.
Perhaps what we need is a paradigm shift, and one that doesn’t necessarily entail the ability to multi-task or get our hustle on. Some things must be tackled simultaneously, like dinner for instance if you want your family to eat. Though in some moments the whole of yourself is required. Some moments implore you to be a fully engaged parent, like when your daughter insists on her new game of scattering hangers throughout the playroom so that you can find them – not just once, but for the next thirty minutes. Some moments require sitting in a café with a hot cup of coffee and freshly baked pastry, giving yourself fully to create and plan and implement and dream. Otherwise, intentional time with your children might only ever be limited by your workload. Or more commonly, an idea might only ever be limited by your children. Either way, we live in limitations, and so our rebuttal to this suffocated existence is to read biographies or stalk Instagram profiles of people such as Joanna Gaines or [insert do it all hero nemesis of choice] who seems to do it all, all the time, and always well, not so as to mimic their behavior but in order find a flaw and remind ourselves, it’s not just me.
You can’t do it all. Neither can they. There is no need for comparison to be convinced of this, and no one is helped for it. Even when I was “doing it all”, arriving to work with a child strapped to my chest, I could only give so much of myself. Both were limiting by nature of the attention they could have easily required on their own. Although here’s the catch in accepting that you cannot do it all: you will only ever see either work or children as a limit, for we have come to believe that to be effective means to function without limits.
Let me say that again.
We have come to believe that to be effective means to function without limits.
Culturally we have embraced this premise, and meanwhile put a hard exclamation on measurable productivity. So now the one-sided nature of our story comes more prominently into focus: We are not limited by our work, for it has the capacity of reaping immediate results, but rather our children bear the title of Limitation 1, Limitation 2, and so forth, thereby they become merely a hindrance to what you can accomplish.
You’ve heard You can’t do it all. Let’s try something different, but I warn you that the statement comes as a double edged sword: Your children will indeed limit your capacity to produce measurable productivity and your work will indeed limit your capacity as an intentional parent, but what you call limitations should instead be called adaptations or you will only ever see them as a thing to stand in your way. Giving fully of yourself does not mean giving only to one or the other.
While we’re repeating things, hear this one once more.
Giving fully of yourself does not mean giving only to one or the other.
Now here’s the other side of this blade: give yourself permission to not always have to work inside these parameters, because the balance found in the above is a difficult one, and not fully accepted by our work-crazed culture. Ask for help, hand the children over, and sit in that coffee shop with undivided attention towards the part of you that loves to create and conceive. Do the same for your children. Carve out moments where you are giving all of your mind to their whimsical games and fanciful conversation. They are equally deserving of knowing the part of you capable of giving an unswerving gaze. The beautiful thing about children is that they may seek the latter, but they will love you in all of it. At the end of the day my four year old doesn’t point out the moments she got the “full me” or the “limited me”. She just got me, and that’s all she ever wanted. Give yourself the same gift.
EXPOSITION: Do you find yourself viewing your workload as a limit to your parenting or your children as a limit to your work? Have you come to believe that to truly give yourself fully to one or the other means to remove one of those limitations? Have you struggled with the mantra of wanting to do it all, only to feel like you are falling short?
RISE: How might it help to see your limitations instead as adaptations needing your intentionality and engagement? Your willingness to make the shift may in turn reveal a whole new part of you that you otherwise would have never known if you worked exclusively in the mindset that your full self is only uncovered when free of limitations.
DENOUEMENT: The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out. (a Proverb of King Solomon)