My New Years Resolution for 2020 is.....to Change Nothing.

It’s that time of year again. Starting afresh, setting goals, aiming high!

 Well, you know what? This year, I’m taking a slightly different approach.

No starting afresh. No setting goals. No aiming high. My resolution in 2020 is to coast. Coast along at the same pace, doing the same stuff, and most of all…..

Just bloody well enjoy what I’ve got!

A close friend, @thenotsotogethermum (Not Another Supermum, and The Not So Together Mum…..you can see why we get on!), posted an Instagram post this morning about being content with what she has. After years of aiming high, working her backside off to build a business, a family, a life, she acknowledged the fact that she has finally convinced herself that what she has, and what she is at this very moment…..is enough. 

I’m hearing you sister!

Every year, I spend New Years Eve trying to come up with a really brave, courageous, life changing resolution. I wrack my brain trying to determine the kind of promise to myself (which I never end up keeping anyway), that will raise the bar. Some years it’s deep and self reflective, pushing myself to be a better person. Some years it is threaded with mother guilt, an attempt to alleviate the constant niggle in the back of my head, reminding me to try harder to manage the delicate balance between mothering and working. 

Last year, it was about self care. I will take more time out for myself. I will meditate, or go to yoga or do one of the million other hippy things that the internet tells me that, as a working mum, I should be doing to keep myself sane. The irony with this one, was that the constant pressure to take up things in an effort to prioritise self care (or at least what the internet defined as self care) drove me to a new level of guilt and anxiety. Constantly being bombarded by the message that if I didn’t put my own self care first, I would fall in a heap, actually caused me more stress!

In the end, self care for me was to stop worrying about self care!

And so this year, I’m changing my approach.

My New Year’s resolution for 2020 is to…….change nothing. 

I am happy with where things are at. I’m happy with my family life. I’m happy with my career. I’m happy with my personal outlets (my alternative name for self care, and which have nothing to do with listening to rainforest sounds and sitting perfectly still - so not for me!). 

And so….I am changing nothing! And that’s ok.

I have spent years striving, challenging, moving forward, working out the next step...and ultimately feeling like I am not enough. Proving to everyone around me that I was enough, even though I constantly felt like being enough was always just out of reach. 
But now, in 2020 (or close enough to), I look around and have realised that my resolution is not that I think I am enough. It’s more that I think, who cares! I’m happy and my family is happy. This year, let’s just rest in that. Let’s just enjoy being happy, and being ok with exactly where we are. Let’s stop reading the articles that tell us how we should be mothering, ‘teenagering’ (a word? Probs not, but let’s go with it), ‘wifeing’, living, self reflecting, looking after ourselves…...and let’s just live the life we have, enjoy the people we have become and just rest in the everyday world that we have created around ourselves. 

So for me, it’s time to stop looking forward. 

It’s time to sit here, right now, and just enjoy! 

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