Do you ever get caught up in the “day to day” grind?  I sure do.  For me, from the first moment I wake until I lay my head on my pillow at night, the minutes fly by and are filled with my mom duties and my career duties, aka my two full-time jobs.  I have to work hard to schedule any time for myself or my husband, my friends or my family.  For example, November 3rd is booked for dinner and drinks with my sistas.  Otherwise, it will NEVER happen.  Can you relate?

I can remember from a very early age my mother telling me that I could stay home from school.  I think my first memory of this was in first grade.  I woke up just like any other morning, and was grouchy because it was too damn early to be getting up.  I was never a morning person.  So on this particular morning, my mom said, “just go back to sleep, you can take the day off.”  And I did.  Later, when I decided to get up, I remember walking out onto the bright yellow painted screened in porch that we had.  It was painted bright yellow because my mom wanted it to be the most cheerful color she could find, and that bright yellow was it.  The porch had a round table with chairs in it, and the rest of it was pretty much set up to be my “pretend classroom.”  I had a chalkboard in there, my overhead projector (yea, you read that right) and my desk with my school curriculums and notebooks for my pretend students.  Occasionally one of my real friends could be coerced into being my real student, and I would teach them, lecture to them, make them answer my quizzes…until they got sick of my bossy ass and went home.  Most often, my students were pretend.

My mom was sitting in the yellow sunroom on this morning, at least as I remember it, in her pajamas, having her coffee and a cigarette.  She had platinum blonde permed hair, too.  And hot pink long painted fingernails.  It was 1986.  When I joined her, with my bowl of rice krispies with marshmallows, she told me that every now and then, we ALL need to take a day off.  This is not a “sick day” because we are not sick.  It is just a day to take a break from the regular schedule and routine we keep.  It is a day to recharge, focus on yourself instead of your responsibilities, a Mental Health Day.  That was cool by me.

Each and every year I had a couple of those mental health days.  Each and every time, she told me it was a good thing to do.  Sometimes we called it playing “hooky” and we laughed about it.  As I got older, graduated and moved out, went to college, became a lawyer, a wife, a mother, I had to figure out on my own how and when this is appropriate or not.  In the hustle and bustle of life, it got easier and easier to overlook.  Other, more important (seemingly) things took over.  Mental health days became a thing of the past.

Do you know when mental health days become REALLY important?  When you get older and have to learn to take care of yourself because no one else is going to do it for you.  When your parents are not there to pick up the slack, a mental health day will help you take care of business.  I find it pretty ironic that as we hit this adult stage of our lives, we lose the time to do this.  That is why I created this blog.  I want to share with you the bits and pieces of tips and advice that you can use to regroup and gain focus for yourself.  You must do this.  My mother was absolutely right when she encouraged this.  She knew that without these days us women can lose ourselves, get lost in the shuffle.  We can’t just wing this, our life must be intentional or it will not progress for us.

These blog posts are the things that would make up a mental health day for you if you were to take one for yourself.  Whether it be a day to focus on your money by creating a budget for getting out of debt and saving some emergency funds, or a day to create a schedule for yourself so you can accomplish what you want to in your life on a daily/weekly/monthly/annual basis.  Whether it be a day to focus on meal plans that provide clean eating for a week in under 30 minutes for the entire family so you can lose 10 pounds, or a day to focus on how to get the little things done, like laundry, exercise and grocery shopping, so you can carve out time to focus on what you are most passionate about.  Or maybe it is just a day about nail polish, shopping with your daughter and eyelash extensions, because beauty.

If you are anything like me, you are a busy woman that wants to be the best mom and wife you can be, but also wants to be successful in her career and her self.  You want it all, and you were taught, in that sunroom back in old school Austin, that you can have it.  So make it happen, and use my little blog to help along the way.