1.

It was August, and I was seven months pregnant. I was walking by myself, out where the street turns into a county road and climbs a little hill so there’s a nice view of both the sunrise and sunset. At that moment, though, neither was to be seen. It was the middle of the day, and there was a line from a Tim Grover book rattling around in my head. 

“Everyone plays with pain.”

I don’t always know why things hit me when they do. But I knew, the moment I read that line, that it was why I was rereading that book at that moment in time.

A Note: Tim Grover primarily works with professional athletes, and that is why he used the word ‘play’ here. It’s not a work/play thing; it’s a life is a game and we’re all players thing.

And everyone plays with pain.

It’s easy to want to wait to start playing until the pain eases. Until life and I are in a better situation. It’s easy to assume the people I see playing feel better than I do.

But everyone plays with pain.

This is not to say you should Always Power Through. Rest is vital. There is such a thing as doing hard things for the wrong reasons. But if I wait to play until all my struggles and aches are gone, I will never do anything. 

Motherhood is an easy example of this. I still have as many aches and desires as I did before I was a mother, maybe more. I have been puking-up-my-guts just plain sick and I have been everyday-grind death-would-be-kinda-cool exhausted since I have become a mother. But even then, I could at least feed my baby and make sure someone else was taking care of her if I could not.

If I wait to be a mother to her until I no longer hurt, until I lack nothing, she will grow up without me.

And it also helps to remember that everyone plays with pain.

I don’t get to tell myself I’m an under-appreciated heroic martyr because I still showed up despite my pain, because guess what: so did everyone else. My husband. The women who work for me. My friends. My clients. Even my baby, who cut two teeth and learned to walk in the past two weeks, and still greets me with a smile more often than not.

Their pain doesn’t make my pain not matter, but it’s important to acknowledge that both exist. People who spend a lot of time feeling under-appreciated are not usually very good at appreciating others. Even the ones whose favorite martyr complex is the belief that they appreciate everyone but no one appreciates them.

—

2.

It was probably my husband who sent it to me, or it could have been a friend. That part I don’t remember. I remember the reel itself though: it was a guy talking about how he thinks mothers are the most efficient humans on the planet; that the amount of work a mother gets done in the slices of time when her child is asleep or distracted is more than most people get done in an entire day.

I have no empirical evidence for this statement, but it sank into my spongey gray brain and I decided to embrace it. I needed something to embrace after my full-time nanny quit and I was faced with the prospect of figuring out how to take care of myself and my marriage and my baby, and also run my business and my house.

It helped to imagine I was capable of much.

A Note: It also helps to delegate. I don’t do everything by myself. Even when it’s tempting.

“I think 90% of time management is just focus,” I said to my husband the other evening.

The other 10% is having a plan. A very clear, very limited list of priorities for the day. Shout out to the power list.

And it turns out, yes. I can get an amazing amount done in those minutes when my baby is taking a nap or playing happily with something that won’t kill her. But I had to learn to pounce on those minutes and gobble them up with intention.

—

3.

It was 6 in the morning, and I was just about to leave the house when it occurred to me that I would enjoy having one of my husband’s weird protein shakes to drink on the drive to my sunrise walk with a friend. So I grabbed one, and as I walked out of the door, armed with it and my phone, water, car keys, and the knowledge that my husband and baby were peacefully still in our bed, I was body-slammed by the feeling that I have an excellent life.

And I was surprised – not that I felt that way, because I’m convinced that I do in fact have an excellent life. I live with my two favorite humans and I enjoy at least 96% of what I do on the regular. I worked to make it that way.

But I was surprised, because feeling that way made me realize how rarely I had felt that way recently. And why?

“The thing about happiness is that I have to pay attention to the present moment in order to feel it, because the present moment is the only time that happiness actually exists,” I wrote the next morning. 

I’ve been practicing being present for several years. You’d think I would be better at it by now. My main issue is that I get lost in my head. Going over my plans and to-do lists. Debating and philosophizing. 

I found it helps to name the things that are excellent about my life in the present moment. Sometimes I write them down, sometimes I’ll just do it mentally. 

Right now, I just got off a zoom call with one of my bookkeepers and two of our clients. I’m feeding and rocking my blue-eyed baby in her white lace romper. In the kitchen, my husband is putting together bowls of ramen for us, and I know from experience that it’s about to be delicious. I am writing, because I can always find time to do things that are important to me. 

I have an excellent life.

—

4.

The coffee shop had blue velvet seats and walls patterned in gold. My friend had a coffee and I had a raspberry milkshake, and we were discussing the concept of making a second child.

I am not ready for any of it, I said, but when I think about pregnancy and childbirth and mothering an infant, the birth looks like the most attractive part to me right now. 

She found this remarkable. We discussed it, and discovered that while she’s done physically difficult things since then, she felt that giving birth was the first really hard thing she’d done. But it was not the same for me. Birth is the hardest physical thing I have done so far in my life, but I had already done some hard things.

I don’t perceive myself to be a particularly fit person; I’ve been inside of a gym twice in my life. I’m not especially proud of this, but clearly I don’t really want it at this point. I see it as a stage of my character development that I haven’t unlocked yet.

But in the three years before I got pregnant, I completed 75hard twice. I climbed a 11,402 ft mountain. I finished a full marathon. And from the end of month two of my pregnancy on, I walked daily, so that I averaged over 37 miles per month. 

I didn’t do any of these things in stunning, record breaking ways. But I did them. Slowly, persistently, consistently, I did them until they were done.

And when I did them, I taught myself that I can do hard things. I taught myself that when I decide to do something, I am capable of seeing it through to the end.

And in order to do them, I learned how to stop negotiating with myself, how to disregard what Andy Frisella calls the inner bitch voice, how to focus on only the present moment because you can almost always endure the present moment.

This was enormously helpful to me during 55 hours of labor. I don’t remember even considering giving up or thinking I couldn’t handle it, because what would be the point of that? It was extremely hard work, but I had chosen this and I had expected it to be hard.

And the thing about me is I can do hard things.

I knew I could.

I had done them before.

All the way til the end.