The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Women
The best-laid plans of mice and men…
These words couldn’t ring truer for me this week…well actually the last two days because it’s only Wednesday.
The last thing I do every Friday before hopping offline is plan out the next week, factoring in priority tasks for my clients and time for growth strategies for my own business. If you want to grow your business this is a MUST…but anyway, I digress.
I was feeling pretty great about my plan for the week. I have some pretty significant projects coming up with some of my clients, and I’m building something amazing for my Automation Savvy community, so I was impressed that I had managed to pack so much into 5 days AND allow for the flexibility that is totally necessary when you have 6 kids. Well, at least that’s what I thought.
Oh was I wrong…
Monday started off as planned…knocked out a couple of coaching sessions, had a great strategy call with an ongoing client and then BAM, my mobile starting ringing. I didn’t even need to look at the number to get a sinking feeling in my stomach. Do you ever get those…like a mother’s intuition that something is off? I get them…strongly. And if I get one of these feelings there is NO WAY that I can ignore it because my intuitions always prove to be on the money.
When I took a peek at the number I knew that things were about to go into overload and I was right. One of my daughters had been injured quite seriously after fainting while walking down a flight of stairs. She’d fallen from the second top step and tumbled (unconscious) down the rest of the stairs…about 10 in total. She came to with a crowd of people standing over her and quickly let them know that she’d hurt her ribs, back and neck. So the call I got from the school was please get to emergency ASAP because she’s in an ambulance on her way there now.
As a parent, one of the hardest things to see is your child in pain, and when I walked into that emergency room it was pretty clear that pain was an understatement for her. She was in a neck brace, strapped to the gurney to make sure she didn’t move and was crying out each time someone checked a different part of her body to determine what was broken. It was heartwrenching for me and I was terrified about the potential injuries.
We spent the next 10 hours in the emergency room where she underwent numerous tests, scans, Xrays to pinpoint what was happening in her body. She needed to be given HUGE amounts of pain medication, which made her sick. So she was given HUGE amounts of anti-nausea medication to stop the sickness. Which plunged her heart rate down to 30bpm…this had us all on edge watching the lines on the machine and jumping every time the alarm went off to indicate that her heart rate had dropped further.
But…long story short, after 10 hours she was given the all-clear for breaks and fractures, she had some ligament damage and some pretty full-on bruising to her ribs…but we were able to take her home.
Now, if you’ve ever been in a situation like this, you know how draining it can be for everyone. My hat goes off to emergency staff because the state of being on constant high alert is exhausting. So as soon as we got home, we all pretty much headed to bed…
I had high hopes that I could be head down first thing on Tuesday morning and try and recover some of the time I’d lost that Monday.
Tuesday morning…I hadn’t even managed to turn my computer on before the shit hit the fan. I’d taken one of my other daughters to school, and as I walked in the door after that trip I was met there by my Mum who told me that one of my sons had just been hit by a car on his ride to school. Fortunately, it hadn’t been really serious…but he was hurt. Someone had pulled out of their driveway quickly, failed to give way to him and he had been thrown over the bonnet of their car and landed hard on the cement pathway. He smashed up his bike, scraped up his arms and legs and had some pain happening in his stomach.
The thing was…the person in the vehicle did nothing to assist him.
Protective Mumma kicked in so we called the police, who called the ambulance…and then we had him at the doctors to get him checked out again…
And just like that my day had disappeared.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge needing to take time away from my business to be with my kids…the opposite actually. I started my business because of my kids, because I wanted to be available to them any time they needed me and for any situation.
The reason I’m sharing this is to simply say “I get it…being a Mum and an entrepreneur is so hard sometimes. The juggle is real”. You can think you’ve planned for everything, but in reality, that’s impossible…and it’s okay.
I’m so fortunate that I’ve built amazing relationships with my clients, who are all mums too…they get it, they understand that sometimes life throws us a curveball and there is nothing we can do about it.
Having that community around you is so important.
When shit goes down and it becomes so clear that keeping 100 balls in the air at once is just not possible, I hope you give yourself permission to let something drop. Give yourself permission to throw your hands in the air and simply say “what the hell”, to not have the answers right then, to just be present in whatever situation is pulling you away from your best-laid plans.
Well, that’s it for this week lovely – no automation tips, or productivity hacks…just the “what the actual fudge” rantings of a mum who gets that the Juggle is Real.
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