You go to work all day long and fulfill the demands of your job duties.  You have have good days, bad days, and meh days.  Maybe you love your job and it gives you purpose and happiness.  Maybe you hate your job and it’s what has to be done to play the bills.

You stay at home all day with the children, cleaning mess after mess, meeting demand after demand.  Sometimes all you do is meet the needs of another person or people.  You love everything about them and they can drive you crazy in ways that can never be explained.  You long to give them every experience possible.  Sometimes you feel appreciated and sometime no one even notices the many hats you wear in one day.  Maybe you do this by choice or maybe the cost of daycare is just too high.

You are expected to eat right, exercise, and stay healthy.  You search for financial stability or financially thriving.  You are expected to follow all the rules, be the best friend, volunteer, support others, attend church and be a productive member of society.

And then 5:00pm hits…dinner, homework, projects, extracurricular activities, cleaning, maybe care for animal family members, people coming home, people leaving, you name it.  No matter who you are, where you work, or the number of involvements you have; this time of the day is just a whirlwind of nonsensical chaos.

So what do we do?  We lose our temper, get anxious, feel overwhelmed, succumb to being drained by the stress of the day and everyone around you gets the absolute worst version of you.  YOU are not alone.  There are so many homes that run this way and so many people thinking “I have got to be doing this wrong because life is just too hard.”

My guess is that you are doing to much.  You are following the definition of success set by someone else and IT. IS. IMPOSSIBLE.  There are too many things and you will not succeed at all of them and start to feel like a failure. This starts a downward spiral that can lead to no where good.  Do yourself a favor: Set your own definition of success.  I’m not kidding, don’t listen to the Webster dictionary or the lates news trend or whatever specialist is on TV spouting about what will make you instantly successful.  Make YOUR OWN definition, then do it.  Reevaluate everything you do, does that lead to you definition of success?  Really think about it.  Rate your priorities.  Then make the change, the switch, commit to your new success.  You will find yourself calmer at the end of the day, more open to the needs of your family and friends. That 5 o’clock chaos will still be there, but it will be manageable because it, like every other hour of the day, will pass.  Then you can ENJOY the other hours in your evening meeting the priorities that you have set for yourself with much more ease.  Lets collectively put an end to keeping up with the Jones’s and spend more time finding and living our own peace.