What is Sustainable Motherhood?

I suppose I’ll start with what sustainable motherhood is not. It is not working from 8:30am to 6:30pm, picking your son up from daycare and then coming home to make and serve dinner, bathe and ready him for bed, and then read Where is my Cat until you both fall asleep, only to wake up six hours later, to do it all again four more times before the week finally ends.

Is that the often discussed, but rarely attained work-life-balance people speak of? No.

Is that every girl’s dream of having it all? Nope.

Is that sustainable? Absolutely not.

I was first introduced to the idea of sustainability during a business dinner with a group of experts in the field of public health. The conversation was centered on how to design a “sustainable healthcare delivery system” for developing countries. The group focused on the role that microfinance strategies might play. They discussed the examples like BRAC and Grameen Bank. It seemed a truly novel idea at the time but deeper understanding and a little research would prove that indeed the idea was not novel, just new to me.

The word continued to surface in my day to day, as discussions of sustainable living, development, agriculture and design all came to the forefront. Wikipedia defines sustainability as “characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely” and sustainable living as “an individual or society's lifestyle that can be sustained with limited exhaustion of natural resources”.

I define Sustainable Motherhood as a lifestyle that challenges the status quo, insists that less is more, with a focus on only those activities which replenish ourselves, our families, our friends, our work and our global community.

Three years into my quest to be an uber-mom, a take no prisoners employee and a reasonably good wife, I find myself underperforming on all fronts. By embracing the idea of Sustainable Motherhood, I never want to have another day when work went well but my son went ignored. So as I begin what some would call a life-cycle-assessment, it has become clear that my job is like a nitrogen rich fertilizer offering good yields one year, only to raise expectations and reduce the value of my efforts every year after. It is indeed not sustainable and to achieve my goals I must find new alternative financial resources. As I explore my options, I will chronicle my experience and what I uncover here to try to help others like me achieve a more sustainable existence. Welcome to Sustainable Motherhood...For those who know less is more and having it all is a bunch of bull.