For peace of mind, we need to resign as general manager of the universe.
—Larry Eisenberg, actor

Raising loving, emotionally healthy children takes a tremendous amount of energy on all levels—physical, mental, emotional and spiritual—particularly when our children are very young. This can leave us with a limited amount of time, energy and resources to devote to other areas of our lives.

Shortly after having my son, I realized that my expectations of having a clean house, serving healthy, home-cooked meals, managing my career coaching business, nurturing my relationship with my husband and being my son’s primary caregiver were simply unrealistic. They would require more energy than I had available (even with a very involved and supportive partner).
 
Something had to give; I couldn’t continue to operate in my “business as usual” fashion.
 
As background, throughout my twenties and into my early thirties, I was overburdened in my career with perfectionism and the need to feel in control. I was constantly raising the bar one more notch for myself. If I secured media coverage for a new PR client on the front page of the Dallas Morning News, I barely paused before I started pushing for a story in People or The Wall Street Journal. Ambition isn’t bad, but the pressure I put on myself was not physically or emotionally healthy.
 
I was stressed out most of the time, anxious, overly focused on what others thought of me and never satisfied with my results. I felt nothing I did was ever quite good enough.

The beauty of focusing on your self-care practice is that you’ll start receiving all kinds of side benefits. For me, one of these benefits was the realization that my perfectionist approach was the root cause of most of the stress in my life. No one around me was asking for more from me—it was all coming from the demands I was placing on myself!
 
I slowly came to realize that the kindest self-care action I could take was to release critical thoughts and judgments about myself. And relax about my expectations, particularly those around parenting and motherhood.

When my friend Andrea shared with her mother-in-law, Sally, what she was working on in her Personal Renewal Group—taking time for self-renewal and reconnecting with her desires and needs—Sally’s eyes welled up with tears. She told Andrea, “I wish I had taken time for myself when I was raising my boys. Honestly, I just felt so overwhelmed by all the expectations I placed on myself during that time, it was hard for me to focus on much else. Because of all that, a lot of the time I was depressed and unhappy.”

In that first year after Jonah’s birth, I changed the way I approached a lot of things, including implementing a creative, flexible work schedule, limiting volunteer involvement, only spending time with friends who fed me emotionally and spiritually and eliminating a lot of extracurricular activities. But, more than anything, I changed my attitude from I want everything to be the best it can be to the healthier and much more human mantra, good is good enough.

And for the first time, I really started enjoying the things in life that were most important to me.

When we explore this theme in our Personal Renewal Groups, it’s always a favorite topic. “‘Good is good enough’ gave me the freedom not to be so obsessive about whether my house was clean or not,” shared Paula. Nina said, “Releasing the need for everything to be perfect gave me the freedom to have friends over, but with ease—hosting themed potluck dinners or informal pizza parties. I’ll never cook a five-course dinner again.”
 
Part of being able to relax into the mentality of “good is good enough” is understanding where your priorities lie. We have a finite amount of energy to devote to what’s really important to us. If your relationships need extra nurturing or your child is going through a period in which he or she needs additional emotional support, you may need to live with a messy house, decline invitations to take on volunteer/work assignments or eat frozen dinners or scrambled eggs for dinner. Or if you choose to bring dinner to a new mother and her family, they may get a store-bought roasted chicken and “salad in a bag” rather than a homemade meal. And that’s more than okay.

A therapist once told me, “Your emotional well-being is of paramount importance; nothing else is more important. What are you willing to do to preserve this?”

Would you rather continually strive for perfection and feel like you’re a slave to your to-do list or have your child remember moments when you dropped the vacuum cleaner to come and read her favorite story to her one more time? Or stopped working on the computer to go outside and watch the thunderstorm roll in and observe the green lizard on the window screen?

One of my favorite quotes pretty much sums it up: “Life is not a business to be managed, it’s a mystery to be lived.”

The next time you begin something new or feel like you’re in the center ring juggling more balls than you can handle, pause. It’s completely up to you as to how you approach your task or commitment. No one’s asking you to be Martha Stewart, and trying to accomplish tasks as a perfectionist typically means your self-care or your family’s well-being may suffer.

When you’re a parent and have children who need a lot of your energy, a “good is good enough” approach is often just the mantra you need to maintain your sanity and sense of well-being. The popular Southern saying sums it up: “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!”
 

Author:  An excerpt from The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal: How to Reclaim, Rejuvenate and Re-Balance Your Life, by Renee Peterson Trudeau. Visit www.reneetrudeau.com to start/join a self-renewal circle using the Guide, receive monthly self-renewal and life balance tips or order the book. Trudeau is a career/life balance coach and president of Austin-based Career Strategists.

Allison Allen is Founder of WomenBloom, a web community inspiring and supporting women to make the most of midlife.