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Do you ever visit Marian at Miss Mustard Seed’s Blog? If you don’t, you should…

I’ve been reading her blog for a few years now and in a lot of ways, feel like she’s a kindred spirit. She creates these beautiful pieces of furniture (that I both admire and envy) and can out-decorate most interior designers I’ve met despite the fact that she has no formal training. But what I really love about Marian is that she is so…real. I could be totally wrong but I imagine that, like me, she wears paint more often than she gets to wear makeup. She might have a room looking great long enough to snap a photo but then she’s tearing it up again to create something new because there is joy in the process of making something beautiful. I think that’s what makes me feel most connected to her; that drive to create. It makes a woman do crazy things like sneak out of bed at 3 AM to write or move furniture or spray paint something in the backyard. It keeps you going when you should have pooped out hours ago.

The other day, she wrote a post about limits that I read and thought, “Amanda, you NEED to pay attention to this.” For the last two years, I have been so guilty of pushing my own limits. You know how they say that if you’re on a plane that’s crashing, you should put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help anyone else? I don’t think I could. I would probably sit to chat with anyone who needed to get things off their chests, redecorate the cockpit, serve anyone having a panic attack a mixed drink THEN maybe, just maybe, I’d sit down and put on my own mask. You see, I don’t have a problem with time management in the sense that I can’t get enough done with the time I’ve been given. My problem is that I manage my time so well that I don’t “waste” time on taking care of myself.

We found out a few weeks ago that my mom will have to go on a donor list for a new kidney. Like me, she is a workhorse and has always been. She raised two kids by herself on minimum wage yet we never really went without. We lived on less, sure, but she always managed to cover everything by taking on extra shifts at the nursing home where she worked or selling stuff whatever she had left of value to make a little extra. At Christmastime, she’d stay up all night making what she couldn’t buy. I remember one time she shared a candy bar with one of her patients who was sad that her son didn’t come to visit on her birthday; it was the only chance my mom had to eat all day and she gave half of it to someone else.

I took her grocery shopping to help her choose foods that would fit within her new restrictive diet guidelines and the whole time she kept saying to me, “Amanda, you need to slow down. You don’t want to get to this point.” And I didn’t but the next morning, despite all of my good intentions, I had a Diet Coke for breakfast. Only a Diet Coke. I didn’t eat anything else all day until dinner, when I called my husband and told him to bring home a pizza because I didn’t make it to the grocery. Every morning, I start off thinking, “Today I will do better,” but then I don’t. I eat what I can grab on the go be it a banana or a cookie. I drink Diet Coke and coffee to keep me moving. Sometimes I start a fresh pot at midnight.

And then Saturday, my gallbladder crapped out, too. I’ve known something was wrong for weeks but have just worked through it and ignored the signs my body was sending. I spent Sunday on the couch, frustrated because I had so much to do that wouldn’t get done, yet beating myself up for letting myself get to that point.

Last week, I wrote about “being it all” and many of you seemed to relate. Today, I’m telling you that your body knows your limits even if you don’t. So, be good to yourselves, friends. Eat your fruits and veggies. Listen to some music. Put your oxygen mask on before you try to conquer the world. I’d start with this song:

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