I have become increasingly frustrated that our weekends are spent packing in all the “stuff” we can’t get to during the week.  We Real Women play beat the clock filling our two days with things like laundry, groceries, cleaning, yard work, sporting events, family obligations, civic duties, errands…. the list is endless.  It seems so very unfair that we work so hard all week at our jobs, then spend Saturday and Sunday working just as hard at everything else.   It leaves me wondering, what happened to the fun?  Where’s the leisure?

A few months ago I was having a heart-to-heart with one of my dearest BFFs, and she was sharing with me that she was feeling completely overwhelmed with everything that is heaped on her plate.  That she was getting pulled under by the enormity of the “gotta do’s”, and was losing her sense of self, and it was being replaced by stress and unhappiness.   My advice at the time for her was to start small, and take just ONE thing off her list each day or each week. ONE thing that truly didn’t HAVE to be done… and keep going until she could realize that it really is ok to let some things slide, to simplify, to not be 100% perfectly on top of EVERYTHING all the time.

This weekend I decided to take my own advice.  I picked one thing to take off my list. It had to be something that was fairly substantial, a conscious decision – not something that just happened to fall off the list due to lack of time or energy at the end of the day.   So this weekend I did not clean my house.  This is a big deal for me.  Unless I am out of town, I spend a chunk of every weekend cleaning.  Does it bother me just a little that it didn’t get done?  Sure it does, and I know darn well that I will be chipping away at it a little bit every night this week to catch up.  But was it the end of the world?  Nope. Are my boys bothered by the fact that I didn’t vacuum, dust, sweep, etc.?  I don’t think so – as a matter of fact, I don’t think they have even noticed.

By taking this one thing off my list, it gave me the time to take my son to go play some tennis with me for the first time.   Then I sat in the sunshine and read a book.  I even snuck in an extra walk with Juke the Dog.  And those activities felt great.

Tonight I won’t be walking across shiny floors, or using gleaming fresh-smelling bathrooms.  But I feel just a little bit calmer and less exhausted — because I finally had a taste of a little bit of weekend in my weekend.

p.s.  Many thanks to BFF Maria for the visual I’m using on this post — she created this for me because she too is a Real Woman.