Hi, I'm Jacey
The editor of Damsel in Dior. My hope is that this space offers you with the inspiration, tips and tools you need to approach every day never feeling like a damsel in distress, but always like a Damsel in Dior.
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HEREThe editor of Damsel in Dior. My hope is that this space offers you with the inspiration, tips and tools you need to approach every day never feeling like a damsel in distress, but always like a Damsel in Dior.
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I don’t like the word: balance.
To me, there is no such thing as a balanced working mom. There is no mom who has a perfectly balance life where everything is in sync and in harmony. She just doesn’t exist and to be honest, if she did exist, we would not be friends.
Because we just added an entirely new layer to our already busy careers, the By Damsel store that we opened in Los Angeles, a lot of you have been asking me how we are juggling our lives between work and new parent life. In a nut shell: we spend 7-8:30am with June every day. At 9am, I head to the office for work. When I’m with June, I am 100% with June. When I am at work, I am 100% at work. I schedule in night time routine with June every single night and if I have to miss, it better be a damn good excuse. It’s a juggle but the trick to juggling is to keep your focus on the ball. If you, for one second, aren’t 100% committed, then a ball drops. This is why we put our cell phones away when we are with June. And we check the guilt and sadness at the door when we are working.
If you imagine a scale and it being perfectly balanced, then both sides have evenly distributed weight {effort, time, energy} being put into them. If you are devoting 100% of your time, energy and effort into one thing while you are doing it then there is no way to achieve this thing called “balance.”
I am completely comfortable with the idea that my life is unbalanced.
Rather than focusing on trying to achieve a perfectly balanced life, I have been striving to focus on being present with whatever whatever I am doing in the moment and wherever I am at that moment. As we hop from work to relationships to parenting to work again, we are giving 100% of ourselves into each compartment of our lives so when I step back to look at things from a whole, I do not feel like one area is really suffering.
While I was researching the idea of “balance” for working moms, I came across a few blogs, forums and editorials and found a few key tips from fellow working mama’s that I found really helpful.
In her article, 7 Things All Working Moms Should Know, my friend Chriselle Lim shares that boundaries and rules are vital in keeping family time a special ritual that deserves undivided attention. Whether it's 5 minutes or 10, she suggests putting your phone away so that you can truly be present with you are enjoying time with the family.
I positively loved this NY Times article that shared a study by Kathleen McGinn, a Harvard economist. She found that daughters of mothers who work outside the home grew up to be higher achieving and they ended up just as happy as they would have had their moms been home with them.
“We expect women to work like they don’t have children, and raise children as if they don’t work.” – Amy Westervelt
President Lisa Sugar, from PopSugar, keeps it simple with her advice: 'Some days you'll wish you were home with your kids, and some days you'll be so glad to be in the office.'
Now that Grant and I have the store and are constantly spending our days there, we’ve bee away from June a lot more than in the past. Our office is located in a studio in the backyard, so technically we can see June any time we want to pop into the house. BUT she has now reached the age where she notices when we leave the room. So, sometimes, even when we are able to pop in and say “hi” it causes her to start crying and throws off her playdates with other babies at the house. It’s heartbreaking, so we really have to pick and choose when we do our random “pop-ins” now.
At the end of the week, the very LAST thing we want to spend our energy on is doing house chores. In this helpful article by Motherly, they suggest enlisting others to help pitch in around the house. Our incredible nanny offers to do the dishes while June is sleeping and I cannot begin to tell you how helpful it is!
Gone are my days of spending time strolling down the grocery store aisle. I am one of those weirdos who actually enjoys going to the market, but it's a true time suck. If you live in a city like Los Angeles that offers delivery, be sure to use it to your advantage. We have everything from groceries to diapers delivered and it truly does save us a lot of time.
Are you a working mom? Are you working as a stay at home mom? How do you handle the unrealistic idea of “doing it all?”
The editor of Damsel in Dior. My hope is that this space offers you with the inspiration, tips and tools you need to approach every day never feeling like a damsel in distress, but always like a Damsel in Dior.
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