The Emancipation of Cheryl

By Cheryl Henderson -

You know, sometimes quoting that great philosopher, Bugs Bunny

"A Rabbit's gotta do what a Rabbit's gotta do!"

And that's even more true if you're a busy mom, wife, homeschooler, virtual assistant, friend, sister and daughter. Although my primary personality is blue I do have a lot of yellow mixed in there. And that's when the trouble starts! I don't like to see people suffer. I try to help people as much as I can to reach their dreams and work out their problems. I try to spend time with them and make sure that everyone is okay. And it's killing me.

You see, all the of the things I've described above are wonderful things to do. My problem is that I get so wrapped up in doing those things for others that I don't get to do the things that I need to do in order to be productive and happy. My children don't get to spend the amount of time that they want to spend with me because I'm on the telephone counseling others. My business doesn't get the advertising and marketing that it needs to get because I'm helping someone else work on their business for free. I use all the productive daytime hours fooling around with everybody else's stuff and then I'm too exhausted for my own.

And then I (stupidly!) added on the burden of cyberschooling this past year thinking maybe I was wrong to want to bail out before. So there are a whole bunch of artificial deadlines and paperwork that is hindering my families enjoyment of learning, so that's got to go too! I really love their instructional supervisor, but I just can't do it anymore. I love traditional homeschooling and so that's what I'm going to do. No more experiments!

So, now I'm having my own quiet civil war. I am going to free myself from the shackles of "Try and the Save the World" syndrome and work on building my family life and business to a level that I find acceptable and fulfilling. I'm not going to abandon my friends and relatives, but I'm also not going to be their free therapist any longer. For conversations that require more than 30 minutes of my time, especially ones that are repetitious (e.g., "oh how could he/she/it do this to me?") and circular I'm thinking of getting a phone list of some good therapists in the area.

I've allowed these folks to waste my time because I was too busy trying to be nice and help. But I've been noticing that for all the favors they ask of me, they don't reciprocate much. I even had one young lady call me on Mother's Day to complain "how could my husband leave me?"-- mind you this is the same conversation we've been having for 6 weeks already -- he left her in March! AAAAAH!

Whether in your business or family life we teach people how to treat us. And I've taught these folks to waste my time and sap my energy on their problems. So, now I'm going to teach them about independence and the need to value my time more. I'm sure that some will find this process painful, but they'll be the better for it. And so will I!

Cheryl - Emancipated on May 21, 2009

How about you?

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