Opinion: When Doing Too Much is a Good Thing

It’s become a common phrase, tossed from working women to stay-at-home mums, a thoughtless label that is well wrapped in the disguise of coming from a place of love. Every woman I know has heard it: “You’re doing too much.” Sometimes it’s better packaged—a simple: “You’ve got a lot going on. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

 

These phrases usually come from a caring place, from people we love, which is why they can be so misleading. They’re usually the end result of confiding in someone, in trying to find release from the mounting list in your brain. We try to carry the motherload, if you will, usually without complaining and most certainly without breaking, but it can all be too much on those days when said motherload threatens to crack the threshold between your everyday and your end goals. And who wants to be a martyr anyway? Not me. Not one bit.

 

So what’s the answer? How do we get it all done? How do we juggle the basics and still accomplish something outside of ourselves, if that’s what we desire?

 

Most people say, you’ve got to give something up. Sometimes that’s the answer, sure. You can’t have it all, really. Most of the time you’ve got to be able to bend, to give, to be comfortable with the pace of slow and steady in order to win your race. For our family, this means being apart most of the year—my husband’s company is based across the country, while our farm is nestled firmly in the east. Picking up and moving was an option, but we would have had to sacrifice family, quality of life and the legacy of the farm that we’ve worked so hard to acquire. People still believe that families should look a certain way, so that’s a question that I get a lot—where is your husband? Why would he leave you here to do all of this? Or—why would you do all of this if you’re alone?

 

I smile at these questions. I have never needed anyone to validate who I am—as a kid, I was a bit of an oddball—a hardened foster kid lucky enough to be adopted before I stopped being cute, raised in an affluent English community where most parents believed that I was the bad egg (let me tell you—I took the rap for a lot of rich white kid’s misdeeds). Even then, I had an idea. It was mostly focused on freedom and what that would look like for me. Safety, liberty, away from the weight of the masses—away from the considerable heft of opinion.

 

Opinions kill me. I love critique—it helps me grow. But the opinions. The pursed lips, the narrowed eyes, the shoulder shrug. In my life, so far, I have seen humans do the most horrendous things. I’ll talk about it one day, when I’m brave enough, but that day is not today. So the opinions of relative strangers have never held stock to me. And likely never will. Thank goodness for that.

 

I’ll say this: If I hadn’t been the kid that was willing to do too much—to carry a heavy weight, to smile when the sky looked like it was about to crack open over my head, I might very well be dead. My instinct—to survive—has always pushed me to be too much. To fight harder. To grit my teeth and dig in a little deeper—to lean hard into the negativity—to let it give me leg up. Just so I could turn around and say, with a grateful grin, “Thank you.”

 

Take those opinions and stack them up. Use them like phone books—tear a page here, and there. But keep piling them up. And then just climb right up to the top and enjoy the view.

 

Because you can do it. One step at a time.