I love a list.

Without a list the things I think I have to do – more on that in a bit – drift out of my head, like balloons making a bid for freedom into a bright summer sky.

Without a list I feel untethered, sure I should be doing something but not quite remembering what that might be.

With no list my head gets full of all these balloons bobbing about, suddenly appearing, distracting me, only to float away again before I can grab their strings and tie them down.

Basically, without a list my head is a mess.

With a list my head is still a mess, but it feels a little calmer.

With a list, though the balloons keep popping up, I can put them into some kind of order or at least tie them to a lamp posts to return to later. (This metaphor may be getting away from me)

The problem arises when I have too many balloons on my list.

As a parent there can be a lot of balloons to hold onto. Never mind, just the everyday watering and washing of your little and not so little ones, there’s work and the house and making sure the kids are eating wholesome home-cooked-prepared-from-scratch dinners, not the sugar-coated cereal/sandwiches-and-crisp-world that l raised my kids in.

And social media, as well as pointing out ten easy ways to make creative healthy lunch boxes, also demands that we do this while working on our abs/lifting weights/wild swimming and wearing fancy leggings.

And don’t forget organising our cupboards, and remembering to order jars so we can organise the cupboards, and not leaving said jars on the side in the kitchen causing more mess as we realise we’ve no time to organise anything. 

Oh, and then there’s getting everything ready for the coming…insert any event here – summer holidays, Christmas, family gatherings, school plays. And of course, all of this should be perfect, and the kids should be perfect, and the dog should be perfect and the house, and the cupboards, and your life.

That is a lot of balloons to have bobbing around in your head.

When I was raising my kids, back in the dark ages, when we didn’t have smartphones, the pressure was still there but it wasn’t the same. There wasn’t this daily bombardment, telling me all the things I should be really doing to be a proper mum.

But even then, there were always too many things on my list. Always way too many balloons bobbing about in my head and I often went to bed thinking I should’ve done more, should’ve been nicer, should’ve been more organised.

Looking back, I wish I could’ve seen it was a scam.

I wish I could have known that the important things, were not the cupboards being organised – (it was never tidy, and it was never organised, no matter how hard I tried.) I wish I hadn’t spent so much time worrying about all the things I didn’t get done.

I wish I’d remembered that being a mum, and going to work, and managing a house, and the shopping, and a family were at least four separate jobs, and I didn’t need to be perfect at any of them.

So, for this coming year, as the balloons begin bobbing about in my head, and my lists instinctively growing longer, I want to remind us all that we don’t have to do this.

And I know when I was raising kids, I’d have laughed out loud at someone saying that. That trying to think of a different way of doing things was more exhausting than actually bloody doing what was on my endless list. It was all important and it all needed to get done.

But I promise, you won’t look back on this time and think ‘I wish I’d had better organised cupboards.’ You won’t think, ‘if only I’d planned a bit more.’

The lists are just a story we tell ourselves about how we think the world should be – or actually a story we are told, a story we can never live up to, a story that leaves us feeling, exhausted, defeated and sometimes just plain crap about ourselves.

So, I invite you to let go of as many balloons as you can. I promise you, they won’t matter in the end.

Maybe we can start telling ourselves a new kind of story.