How to do Things You Really Hate & Are Objectively Shit at
With advice from five other working mothers
This clip of Reese Witherspoon advising her 30.4 million followers to forget our dreams and instead chase our talents was delivered to my iPhone screen around midday this Tuesday. Watching her explain the logic, I couldn’t help but see its wisdom. Be guided by what you’re good at, not by what you wish you were good at. Her sound argument offers a valuable and welcome antidote to the manifested delulu which so pervades our times.
Yet over the rest of this week, as I’ve reflected on this eminently sensible message, I’m forced to admit that personally I am not following this guidance at all. In fact, I’m constantly doing things that I am not talented at. Things that I derive scant, if any enjoyment from. Things that end in substandard results. Things that I wish/dream I was good at and could manage and excel at, but I just can’t. Many of the aspects of motherhood, for example.
Over the last nine days I’ve been looking after my kids while my husband has been on a business trip to New York. Solo parenting is a historic area of weakness for me. The kids freak out when their dad’s away, forgoing sleep and inevitably developing an on-off temperature. A few days in, I find myself supremely toasted. I need breaks to regulate my nervous system while parenting or I start to creak, so by a week of breakfast, lunch, dinner, bed, bath, school bag, 5am wake up, ear infection, early pick-up calls from school, I start to struggle to form sentences. Catatonic at my laptop at 9.03am. I’ve tried and tried to deny it, because it makes me feel both pathetic and that I’m being tone deaf to single parents like the one who raised me. But we can only work with what is real and not what we wish things to be, ergo, I have to face the truth that I’m not temperamentally suited to solitary parenting. Does it mean I shouldn’t have chosen to be a mother? Should I have focused more on my talents than my maternal dreams?
