You know I’ve been feeling settled and restless, my last few blogs have been full of dis-comfort and a chaffing at the bit without knowing which direction it is I want to head in, but knowing I want to go somewhere.

I want to be with my family, I want to travel, I want to do meaningful work which allows me to pay my way and have financial independence and I want to be able to look back from my death bed and think ‘ that was a life well lived’.

At the moment I don’t feel like I’m living life well enough.

I look in this direction and see people who are getting promoted and buying bigger houses and I don’t want those things, that isn’t for me.

I look in the other direction and see stay at home mums or women for whom their children are their life and that’s not me either.

I look inside the books I love and the music and art I’m interested in and I see either young women or women who never had kids.

I look to politics and see no one woman I identify with, not one that I think ‘ oh I could hang out with her for a bit’.

I see sporty women, but I’m not them, and I see adventurers who sail around the world and know that I couldn’t leave my kids for that long.

What I want to see are women who live creative and meaningful lives that make a positive difference to the world whilst paying their way and raising kids who they want to spend time with.  Where are those women?

I can’t think of anyone.  Help me out here.

Yes there are successful business women like Karen Brady, but she’s succeeded by playing the male game of competition and climbing ladders.  But where are the women who are making a difference to the lives of other women?

Where are the women who refuse to put their family second to a career or a career second to a family?  Where are the women who are not juggling but balancing and synthesizing ways to live that are creative and exciting whilst also being stable enough to raise happy kids?

Where are the women who have eschewed the male role models of success and found their own way of succeeding? Where are they?

Maybe this is part of why I’m feeling so restless and unsettled and keep having dreams about losing things.  I feel lost, I could do with a guide, older women who have trodden this path before me, but when I look I can’t see them.

And maybe this is because what we’re trying to do is new.  Maybe we are the first women who want to succeed and make a difference, to pay our way and travel and stay fit and healthy and raise children in a happy family.

Some might say it’s impossible, but I don’t believe so.

Each time one of us refuses to settle for the conventional mantels of success, each time one of us says ‘I’m not taking that promotion not only because of the kids but because I want some of my life for me, for my adventures, for my creations, each time one of us chooses freedom over duty and obligation we are beating back a new path.

Maybe we are the path beaters that others will follow. Maybe we have to cut through the tangles of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ and ‘supposed tos’ and find our own way so that other can follow.

But boy is it tiring and confusing and I feel a bit lost.

Are you sure there isn’t anyone out there who I can learn from?

 

 

If you enjoyed reading this please share it with friends. You might also be interested in talking to me about coaching , or maybe try some of my online courses (some are free), or treat yourself to a climate protecting pamper with vegan friendly, organic Tropic which supports the planting of forests and education in deprived areas.
Thanks for being here.
Julie