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October 13, 2016

Why I Quit my Job & Gave up being a Super Mum.

author's own

From the outside looking in, it probably looked like I had everything.

I was a mother, wife, head teacher, manager, business founder, author and health blogger.

The truth was, I was so burned out I felt like I was dying a slow painful death.

My mornings started at 6 a.m., where I would make lunches for the kids, answer emails and texts, and prepare for my days teaching. I would then wake my sleepy children, and force them to get ready while I watched the clock, dreading being late for work yet again. You see, my children didn’t want to go to school, they hated it, and forcing them to go every day was getting harder and harder. My son is on the autistic spectrum, and his anxiety was at an all-time high, my daughter is a crystal child, who carries an open heart and absorbs the energies of the world.

We weren’t living our truth, and it was showing.

We were all falling apart at high speed.

I would gently nudge my kids out of the car at 8:20 a.m. in front of the school, telling them I loved them, my heart breaking inside as I drove away, my little girl wiping her tears, and me fighting back mine. I would then work as a busy teacher and manager until the school bell rung, racing to pick them up, wiping tears from the day or easing fists of rage for my son, who’d had yet another day of sitting in the backroom or cloak bay at school. Then I’d go home to answer more emails, take phone calls, pack orders, hang out washing, bath kids and organize dinner. I’d finally flop into bed at 11 p.m. too tired to even pick up a book.

I’d do exactly the same thing the next day. My head was constantly spinning, I was bumping into furniture, forgetting things, gaining weight, having nightmares and fighting fatigue.

It sounds so crazy now I think back over it all, yet it’s not far from how most people are living. We are killing ourselves trying to do it all. Busy has become the new normal. I lost my friendships, missed my family, felt constantly tired, fatigued and at times on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

But I couldn’t lose it, I couldn’t just go and have a breakdown, I had to keep it all together, why? Because it’s just the way it is, right?

Wrong—it doesn’t have to be that way. Life can be a calm, and rewarding adventure, filled with family time, hobbies and all the things we love.

For so long I had this overwhelming societal pressure—I had to be doing it all or there was no other way to be successful. I had the pressure to keep working to earn money for things we didn’t even need. Like the ever increasing school fees to a school my children didn’t even want to be attending anymore. But I couldn’t drop the ball, what would people think?

This feeling of not wanting to let anyone down led me to a life that wasn’t mine. This feeling of worrying about what other people would think, led me to neglect the needs of my children. My children were just as tired, burned out and lost as I was. As hard as I was working, (all for them, I told myself) I wasn’t giving them what they really needed. I wasn’t giving them myself.

So this is what I did.

I made a decision to change my life. It was bloody scary, and I was shaking so much, but I trusted myself and I asked the universe to support me.

I quit my job. I took my children out of school, and applied for an exemption to home school them. My husband was on board, especially because I was already feeling happier, and we moved to a rental property by the beach, an hour away from the busy city.

I was thinking: I’m either the smartest person I know, or I have lost the plot and am going crazy mad. Either way, not doing anything at all was going to kill me. I needed to change my life.

Truthfully, at first I didn’t know how we were going to live on just one wage, and afford to change our lifestyle. But being an avid believer in the law of attraction, I decided that if I believed in myself enough the universe would believe in me too. I put out into the world what I needed, and then I acted as though it had already fallen into place. I felt so strongly that we would be taken care of financially if I started to put my energy into what I loved doing instead of what I didn’t.

So when I quit my job with nothing by my holiday pay in my pocket, I started to put the energy and love back into my skincare business, and it soon started to bloom again. I also started to write again, and the ebooks I had already published began to sell again. We found that moving out of the big city lowered our rent and our outgoings, we saved on gas, school fees, and we were no longer buying things just to make ourselves feel better. I had time and energy to cook meals from scratch so that saved on money too. Just being together as a family was all the happiness we needed. Everything began to fall into place, just as I knew it would.

And then, we hibernated. All of us together, we didn’t watch TV or go out, we didn’t have visitors or phone calls. We just healed. We spent time together reading fairy tales, talking, cooking, baking, bike riding, hiking, writing and swimming. I did things for myself—I washed my hair, painted my nails, meditated, practiced yoga, began writing my next book, and I created new recipes for my business. I have also just launched a website empowering other people to take control of their lives, and am working on an e-course to help people discover their purpose and passion in life.

It was the best thing I have ever done for myself and my children. During this time, I found myself and I gave my children what they needed most—myself.

So many of us stay stuck in jobs that drain us and in lives that drain us, because we think there are no other options, we forget that our lives are our own to create, and the only thing that will stop us is ourselves. For too long I made excuses, in the end I only had myself to blame, it was the life I had created after all.

Now we live the life of our dreams, we don’t have any anxiety, my children laugh and smile, and I feel like I am giving them a real childhood. I use to wake up in the morning dreading the day, now I wake up so excited about what the day will bring.

I am the creator of my own life, and so are you. My life is different because I decided to take control, rather than have society control me.

What are the signs in your life telling you? What is the life you want to create? What is stopping you? If you believe that there is a way, then a way will appear.

~

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”  ~ Joseph Campbell

~

Author: Jamie Geurtjens 

Image; courtesy of the author 

Editor: Ashleigh Hitchcock

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