I’m not Superwoman. I’m Batman.
Well, that’s how my close friends call me. Have you heard of “Bahala na si Batman“? In my younger years (and that is not to say that I am old now), each time a project is about to get started and group members ask each other what each of us would do or how tasks should be divided, someone would always pipe in and say “Bahala na si Batman.” The batman would be me. I take charge. I lead. But I’m not a superhero.
Nor am I a supermom. Na-ah.
People think I have some kind of superpower to be doing the things that I do. I homeschool two of my three kids, I accompany them to whatever activities they get themselves involved in, I run a home office full time, I sit on a school board, I’m on Facebook almost all the time, I take online courses to further hone my skills, I attend workshops, sometimes even conduct workshops, and we don’t have a helper. Some fellow WAHMs think I’m so good at time management. But I’m not!
There are days that I do miss deadlines, but not often, and I don’t make a habit of it, nor do I do it intentionally. There are days that I don’t do the laundry. I just say I’ll wait ’til there’s enough to fill a large load rather than medium. There are days that I skip mopping the floor. There are days that we just eat out rather than cook. We survive our lifestyle not because we manage our time well. In fact, there are days that I intentionally get up late, and days that I consciously make time to take a nap in the afternoon.
We do keep and follow a schedule, but it’s okay to veer a little when we feel like it. Because more than time, it is important that we manage our energy.
We have twenty-four hours in a day. That’s fixed. Yes, we chose the lifestyle we have now. So yes, it is up to us how we are going to put to use those 24 hours. And we choose to manage our energy.
Author Tony Schwartz says that humans have four types of energies that we need to manage everyday: the physical, the emotional, the mental and the spiritual.
The physical energy is about how healthy we are. Are we physically fit to religiously do the things we have committed to do? The emotional energy is about the happiness we feel doing what we do. That’s where I’m really big. If I can’t be happy with something, I won’t even consider doing it, much more commit to doing it. The mental energy is about how well we can focus on something, and again, if I’m not happy, I’m not likely to focus, am I? And the kicker, the spiritual energy, the purpose, the answer to the why we’re doing what we’re doing. Why we chose to live the lifestyle we are now in.
These energies, these are what we manage. Not time. Because we simply can’t manage time. But we can manage our goals, our expectations. We can manage ourselves.
Marge, also known as The Happy WAHM, is a virtual assistant who turned her passion for entrepreneurship into a worthy endeavor of offering complete business solutions to CEOs and business owners around the world. She turned her back on a thriving corporate career to become a hands-on mom and created a lifestyle that allowed her to build a homebased career, homeschool her children, and still have time to pursue her passion for arts and crafting.
She only posts her content on her website, TheHappyWAHM.com. If you see this content on someone else’s site then it is NOT by any means authorized.
