It’s hot in here

The heatwave finally broke. Every time my car read over 100 degrees F I wanted to sigh, but it was just too hot. It feels like a metaphor for the entire year. Every time I thought it could not get hotter or harder in my life, the difficulty finally passed. Many of these things were good difficult things. Like a pregnancy which resulted in our new little 10 week old blessing Bentztion, and the pregnancy of our dog who upstaged me by giving birth 6 weeks before me and birthed our new puppy Coffee.

During this tumultuous time of working on my business, pregnancy and becoming a puppy grandma, I thought the heatwave would never break. I read the book Lean IN and really related to the idea of not giving up or taking a break before I gave birth. There is so much talk about women leaning in, or leaning out and not investing our complete selves in our work. Now Sheryl Sanberg is even recanting some of her original work. However, I have my own impressions about my experience really Leaning In over the last year while growing my family to 5 lovely children and 2 dogs.

I need to lean in to lean out. What does all this leaning mean? Its practically a Passover Seder. What I mean is not giving up on myself during the pregnancy pushed me to pare down, delegate, improve my skills and become more efficient, so I can enjoy my job and my family more. I am in the losing the baby weight stage now, and I started strength training. In three weeks I have gone from struggling through the 30 minutes of exercise with 2 pound weight to completing it with a struggle at 3.5 kilo weight. Its just like leaning in or a crazy Israeli heatwave. We can build our corporate muscles and lift more without giving up on family time or prioritizing our parenting. But we need to build those muscles slowly, rest when we need to, constantly refuel ourselves and our souls.

The real break will come when we stop worrying about how much we can handle and start prioritizing self care and leveraging our skills by delegating the least vital jobs at home and at work. The heatwave is gone for now, but no doubt another one is on the way and just when I think I can’t handle anymore, no doubt I will rise or fail, and add more weight or take more rest.