
YOU WANT A PIECE OF ME?
With the 4th of July directly behind us, I’ve been really thinking about pie. I love pie. All kinds. I even tried to bake one Thursday until we had an unfortunate oven smoking incident…
Now that my mouth is watering, I want to talk about the most important type of pie. The pie that we were given when we became adults; the pie that represents our lives. My mother in law taught me this analogy years ago and when I start to feel stressed, I come back to it time and again. You see, each of us has a pie with slices in it that represent how we spend our time and energy. One slice belongs to the Lord, one to your spouse, one to your family, one to your friends, one to your home, one to your job, and so on. In a healthy pie, the slices that are the largest are the most important like spending time with Jesus, the energy and time spent with your spouse and your family. In my prioritized life, these are the most important to me, so therefore they hold the biggest pieces of the pie. As I go down the list, the slices get smaller and smaller. We each only have so much pie that we can give until we run out.
What happens when you start to prioritize other things before Jesus, your spouse and your family? Well, those important slices start to get a little smaller. And smaller. And smaller, until everything is backwards. If I am not intentional with my time and focus, I can get backwards really quickly.
I’m currently reading a book called The WomanCode and author Alisa Vitti says that one of the things a woman trying to conceive must do is to make room in her life for a baby as if one were there. To stop overextending herself and to spend time at home nurturing her household, her husband, and herself. This paragraph caused me to picture the pie and then to think about my current life and if I had room for a baby. Do I have a slice big enough left to support a baby?
You would think that a married woman at 31 on summer break, getting to do as I please would definitely have a LARGE piece of pie leftover for a baby, but internally I don’t feel like I do. I spend so much of my time not doing physical things, but worrying about things. Worrying about the smallest details to large scale catastrophes. Each day when I wake up, my mind is flooded with details of friendships, social media, the new school year and how I’ll fit everything in this summer, newest trends, diet, and other things that shouldn’t have a slice of my pie!
As a 6w7 on the Enneagram scale (not sure what the enneagram is? Check out www.enneagraminstitute.com) I am a Loyalist; “The Committed, Security-Oriented Type: Engaging, Responsible, Anxious, and Suspicious Type.” I am an anxiety filled person who is constantly looking for reassurance that everything is ok. Whether it’s safety related or friendship related, I am suspicious and my mind wanders thinking of worst case scenarios. Conversely, my 7 wing The Enthusiast, is described on the enneagram institute website as “The Busy, Fun-Loving Type: Spontaneous, Versatile, Distractible, and Scattered Type.”
Busy. Scattered. Distractible. Anxious. Suspicious. Those words don’t sound at all like inner-peace and self-care do they? Does this sound like I have enough space in my brain/life for a baby? NO. Trust me, you should hear and feel what’s going on inside my body any given day…
So as a personality with all of these traits, I HAVE to strive extremely hard to make time for self-care and to calm my insides down. It takes so much work and reassurance from my husband and family. It takes conscious efforts for me to avoid activities and people that disrupt my inner calm. It takes unfollowing people on social media accounts for a while, and sometimes deleting social media all together. It takes quiet days at home on my couch binge watching my latest Netflix show. It takes constant hugs and back rubs from my amazing husband who talks me through every panic attack. These are self-preservation tools that I am working on so that I can devote my time and energy to the things that matter most and create a space for a child. It pains me to think that maybe because of the stress and anxiety that is mostly self-inflicted, I have been subconsciously blocking myself from getting pregnant.
If you have someone in your life that is a 6 like me and you have felt like they have sort of fallen off the map, it’s ok and they are ok. When they are feeling healthy again, they will show back up. With a 7 wing, I often show back up before I’m actually ready because of my spontaneous and fun loving nature! But is that truly what is best for me? Slowing down all facets of life and focusing on what’s truly important to me is what getting healthy looks like.
I encourage you, even if you’re not trying to get pregnant, to think about your life in terms of pie. Who holds the biggest slices in your life? Not just who do you spend the most physical time with, but who deserves your attention and focus the most? In your pie, do you spend more time with friends than family? Do you have any slice available for Jesus? When you sit down and really look at your life, what is most important to you? Who will you give the biggest pieces to yourself to and who or what could you make a little bit more room for? Is there a slice for you and self-care, exercise, and nutrition? (It sometimes even helps to draw a diagram of a pie!)
Now that I’ve said the word “pie” 800 times, I think I’ll go try my hand at that apple pie again cause MAN it sure sounds delicious!
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