MamAnomolie

My sister is a cookie splitter. For me, it's a whole cookie or nothing. Let me explain...

My mom is known for making an assortment of delicious dessert bars over Thanksgiving. Every year she swaps a few of her standards for new recipes, and every year we say that we miss whatever bar was replaced. Pumpkin cheesecake bars, mixed nut bars, pecan pie bars and lemon bars. We love them, and could all eat ridiculously large numbers of them at all hours of the day. But we try and control ourselves.

My sister will cut a bar in half. That way she can have one bar total, but enjoy two different kinds. My thought process is completely different. I either want a full bar or no bar at all. There is no middle ground for me. I am all or nothing, and not just where cookies are concerned. I have heard people say that this can be a good trait. If I do something, I go all out. I am thorough and dedicated in my tasks. I've been thinking about this trait a lot lately, though, and overall, it's not so good.

If I have something wrong with me, my initial reaction is that I don't have time to deal with it. It will go away on it's own. Surely it's nothing. This is my mode of thinking, until suddenly it isn't. That pain in my side is no longer nothing, but a cancerous tumor that is about to take over my body. In a split second after weeks of the same problem it inexplicably goes from one to the other. All or nothing.

When I exercise, I have to do it every day, because once I skip a day, well then I may as well just sit on the couch and eat bonbons all day. It's like I have an on/off switch but no volume control. There is no glass half empty or half full. There is no half anything.

I think this has become more of a problem since I became a mother. All mothers are busy and slightly distracted. A wonderful little person is getting most of your attention, so other things cannot get as much focus as they used to. I used to wait to call friends back until I had a dedicated chunk of time when I could focus on talking to them. I would wait to clean out the pantry until I had the time and space to take every single thing out and scrub, toss, repackage, and arrange in order of fiber content. But now my all or nothing mentality combined with motherhood has made it so that the calls to friends and pantry organization doesn't happen at all.

So, with the new year, I am striving for balance. And a balanced kind of balance. See, I have even jumped into balance with a ridiculous fervor in the past. And militantly balanced just doesn't work. In fact, it kind of defeats the whole purpose. I am searching for some space between the "on" and the "off."

Photos courtesy of flickr. Top photo: walter.keller. Bottom photo:bibliogrrl.