At what point does a person stop feeling the need to do everything? Because I am soooooo over it. Growing up in a Sicilian-American family meant I watched my nano work two full time jobs while my nana had dinner on the table at 5pm sharp every day. The house was thoroughly cleaned daily and there was one clothes hamper in a home that housed seven people because the laundry was done immediately. I admired the work ethic that both of them had, a standard set by generations past; they had their role and they executed routinely, without question, and without variance.

This is essentially what I was trained to do: family comes first above all, bring pride and honor to your role in the family, and the condition of your home and home life is a reflection on you as a woman and your ability to take care of your family. I’m all for a family’s decision to have a person who stays at home, so long as that role is viewed as equally important by the partner who doesn’t stay home. It’s easily a full-time job to clean and cook daily, transport kids wherever they need to be, ensure homework is done and run any other errands that need to be done. But nowhere in the Handbook for Domesticated Sicilian Women does it describe how to do all of this AND maintain a full-time job. Not to mention an executive-level job for a small company in the tech industry that often requires work hours outside a typical work schedule.

I find myself in this state of worrying about what I need to do for work when I’m at home and worrying about what I need to do for home and my family when I’m at work. Is there ever a time I can just be completely present? No, instead I make countless to-do lists to keep my thoughts and time in order; getting it down on paper is one less thing I need to keep in my head. More than once, I’ve had “make a to-do list for xyz” as an item on my to-do list. I’m not proud of the craziness, but I do own up to the fact that I live and die by to-do lists and calendars.

I’ve recognized that on any typical day I have too much on my plate and need to off load some in order to keep my sanity. But with each thing I try to let go off comes an immense amount of guilt. There’s a stubborn pride associated with being able to do it all. No matter how illogical I tell myself that can be, I still find myself resorting to the belief that if I let go of something, I’m failing my family, that it’s a shortcoming on my end to not be able to do it all.

A couple of years ago I reluctantly gave in to getting a housecleaner. I was tired of cleaning all weekend, every weekend; as soon as I had somewhere to go on a Saturday or Sunday, it meant I was playing catch up the rest of the week. Plus, I had this crazy thought that it might be nice to actually have some time to relax on the weekend. My partner does help out, but he too has a full-time job and gets home late, doesn’t help consistently and his idea of cleaning doesn’t always match my own (all I can say is DO NOT open the cabinet above the phone in the kitchen). The housecleaner comes once every other week to do the bigger cleaning, yet the night before I catch myself running around the house pre-cleaning out of guilt over how untidy I feel my house is. I can’t have the housecleaner come over and see what a mess I have going on! How embarrassing!

But why is that embarrassing? We are a family of 5 living day in and day out in a home. We’re two adults working full-time, a young adult working 30 hours a week, and two little ones under the age of 10. Most people never even blink an eye over the state of our home (except my mom), matter of fact I get compliments over our home and often here comments like “How do you keep your home so clean?” But I still find myself apologizing if they come over and see a pair of shoes or a toy on the ground. It goes back to pride and my experience growing up. My grandparent’s house was immaculate day in and day out. And that’s the standard I hold myself to, if Nana did it so can I, and I can’t seem to factor in that taking care of my home isn’t my only full-time job. I operate under the belief that my home is the biggest reflection of myself and my work ethic; it’s a mis-guided value that is leaving me in a perpetual state of exhaustion.

A typical day for me is to wake up at 6am, get dressed, wake the kids up and get them dressed and ready for school, take them to school, go to work, pick one child up from school and work for another hour in the car while waiting for the other child to get out of school, squeeze in an errand while driving home, make sure the kids put away their stuff and change out of school clothes, corral them to the kitchen table to help them with homework while simultaneously cooking dinner, straighten up the kitchen and the house, continue with homework help, turn back to my own work if there’s anything that needs finishing up, play and talk with my kids, pack school lunches and iron clothes for the next day, make sure the kids get ready for bed and read them a book, then sit and watch a little tv while lamenting on how I should exercise but I just can’t seem to find the energy (mind you it’s about 9:30pm at this point) and eventually fall asleep on the couch. I’m tired just typing that. And if anything varies off the path…the guilt swoops in. If I don’t get it all done, I feel lazy and like I’m not upholding my part. And it happens to be an off day where my fuse is short, and I don’t have the patience to hear the same drawn-out story from my child or play “teacher” with them? The mommy guilt eats me alive.

At some point I need to be nicer to myself and cut myself some slack…without the guilt and negative self-talk that usually comes along with it. Because what’s the point of giving yourself permission to not address every single thing in a given day if you just end up feeling shitty about that decision? It must truly be embraced; I’ve taken on more work than what I was taught to handle, and I need to adjust the routine, the pattern, the flow, the expected outcomes, before failing at everything. It’s ok to change things up or get some outside help to accommodate the new additional variables. If I were treating this like a work issue, I’d be recognizing that I need to add additional resources to maximize efficiencies and stay on target. Identifying that there’s a bottleneck in the flow of work and applying resources to remedy it before it grows into a bigger problem is viewed as a win at work – successfully managing production to ensure we meet the company goals. Yet in my personal life it feels like a big fat failure, a testament to my inability to handle it all. I’m still trying to find a way to navigate truly guiltless permission to not be perfectly on top of everything while honoring familial values that I’ve grown up to appreciate and believe in. Once I figure it out, I’ll be sure to add it to the Handbook.