Earlier this week I posted this on Facebook:

“For the first time in my life I feel like I have no “real” goals. Im not pressed about getting into school since Im done. Not pressed about money. Marriage is great. Have a job I happen to like with a great boss so Im not trying to get to the next career/position right now…. Im just good with where I am. Love where we live… Blogging is good-I do it when I want so I don’t feel pressured and I still see the fruits of it…. Im not sure if that’s a bad thing or not but I do realize that Im coasting a bit through life. And Im kinda OK with it! But it is a little weird tho since I’ve always always been working towards something.. Probably because I spent a good portion of my life in school setting up goal after goal after goal and Im exhausted. I need to let this marinate LOL #RandomThought”

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been thinking about the fact that I don’t have any concrete goals right now.

This has never happened!   I was in school for what seemed like forever-finished college and grad school, got married, bought a house, started a successful blog, have a great job and the last 18 months I’ve spent a lot of time in self-exploration.  I had all these material things but there were some personal issues I needed to fix.   As a result, I am much more at peace with who I am and who I want to be in this life.  But over the last few weeks as I drove home from work, I kept asking myself “why don’t I have anything to work on?“  Then earlier this week I just thought *shrug* “because I just don’t!”

And Im alright with that.

This took a few days because I’ve always said to my friends that I don’t want a quarter or semester of my life to go by without having worked on something important to me.  Then I realized that I’ve been doing just that-in fact, the most important project-ME!

I know that so many of us are pressed to start that business and get rich beyond our wildest dreams, complete that doctorate, meet the man of our dreams, get married, have a baby and anything else that will validate our existence.  And, I’m here to tell you that yes it’s possible.  However, it’s important to note that you shouldn’t lose sight of yourself and who you are along the way.

At some point, I decided to focus on the things that are important to me and cut out all the extra.  What’s the extra?  If you don’t sleep next to me at night (husband), if I don’t pray to you in the morning when I get up (God) and you don’t sign my check on the 1st and 15th – then you are extra.  I cut it all out and went on this journey to figure out how I wanted my life to be and what I needed to do to get there.

What did I want?

*I wanted a deeper relationship with my husband.  We are both working professionals and it’s so easy to put our marriage on auto pilot and I dreaded the thought of that happening with my marriage.  So I wanted to be intentional and purposeful in going about creating the marriage we always dreamed of, not what we feared.

*The relationship with my mom was on it’s last leg and I needed peace.  I knew that nothing in my life would be “right” if I didn’t put the work in needed to fix the relationship.

Once I got started, it took me a while to get back to me and find out who I really am.  After I got married I got caught up in my ideal of what a wife should be and when I didn’t fit that mold I went into a space where I needed to figure that out.  I didn’t want to be known solely as “hubby’s” wife and have my whole existence get caught up in that mold.  Don’t get me wrong, nothing wrong with being a wife, but I am a woman with a life and identity and that continues on through marriage.  I just had to learn how to manage and shift my priorities.  And, being honest, I also had to learn how to be a wife because I was so ready to put it on autopilot due to competing goals and priorities.

This year I committed to doing just that -being a better wife.  Being the kind of woman and wife that I always hoped to be and while I’m not there yet, I’ve made significant progress. I learned a lot of old and negative stuff from watching my parents, cultivating old fears from childhood related to my father’s death and just plain ole not understanding what it meant to be someone’s wife.  Learning who I was being and how contrary it was I needed to be changed my life and perspective on my marriage.

Last year I worked on reconciling the relationship I have with my mom since historically it wasn’t a great relationship.  This even caused me to reconsider whether I wanted to be a mom since I was approaching the ripe old age of 30.  I forget when it happened, but someone asked me to view my mom in the same way I did a younger version of myself.  It was a Louise Hay book on forgiveness.  Essentially, I had to see my mom as someone who has an issue much larger than they are and working with the tools they have been given.  Eventually it sunk in and the old hurts and resentments went away.

To be clear, my mom was a relatively young mom at 20, and I don’t think she understood everything she could about being a mom.  In realizing that, I began to have many questions about whether I would be able to parent my own child, hence my doubts about becoming a mom which I’ve documented on my other blog.  How did I move past it?  I read a series of books on women who were in similar situations: Mothering Without A Map and The Emotionally Absent Mother.

I can go into detail about my process of understanding my past, present and even my future as a mom in another blog.  For now, I can say that reading both books changed my life and my outlook which was huge for me.  I don’t have that anxiety anymore about being a mom and it’s something I struggled with majorly for so long!  Now, I’m good and I can’t wait to become a mommy.  Don’t press me on dates just yet!

In closing, Im happy to be here.  A place where I can enjoy life and really as they say smell the roses and mean it.  Walk my dog and not be pressed about the next thing on my to-do list.  Every minute of my life I am thankful for this journey because it’s made me who I am today.  People will always tell you that you can’t have it all and that it’s impossible but I say forget them because they didn’t try.  If you want a certain life for yourself, then work at it, put it in what’s needed to get there.  Whether through self-exploration or seeing a therapist-you can get there.  But you don’t get to sit around a pout about it on the sidelines if you didn’t try.