Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting.<\/p>\n
SIGN UP<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n Back when we spent most of the daylight hours at an office, our workdays felt crazy busy. That ride home was the point where we\u2019d finally catch our breath. Some days, I\u2019d stare out the window. Other days, I would walk home, call a friend, or get lost in an audiobook. It was one of the only moments in the day when no one needed anything from me. I didn\u2019t realize how rare that was.<\/p>\n Certainly, remote work has been great in a lot of ways: a little extra sleep time, flexibility, more time in the day with your kids. But it quietly took something important away. The built-in alone time during a commute has a positive impact, according to research by the World Economic Forum<\/a>. That transition time can actually benefit our mental health.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now, everything blurs together. You go from intense work meetings to making dinner to answering emails to helping with homework\u2014without a break in between. We are always on. It\u2019s depleting. Without a clear delineation, there is no recovery from either. That is when the irritability creeps in. Parents can feel helpless, agitated, and burned out, and don\u2019t have the mental capacity to handle even one more thing.<\/p>\n That \u201cwasted time\u201d commuting was doing something significant. It was regulating us. So now, we must find other ways to reclaim that pocket of time.\u00a0It doesn\u2019t have to be complicated; it just has to exist in some form.<\/p>\n The goal is to mentally mark the transition for yourself. Because the real loss wasn\u2019t the commute. It was losing the only part of the day that didn\u2019t belong to anyone else. Without that pause, your life just becomes one long shift.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nCatching our breath<\/h2>\n
Mark the transition<\/h2>\n
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