The Best Mom Advice, Ever

Michelle Lee-Ann
3 min readMar 22, 2023
Photo by Kate Stone Matheson on Unsplash

The best advice you’ll ever get as a parent: take the entire day, and night, to yourself.

Whenever grandparents would babysit, I would rush around trying to do everything. I’d clean the house, workout, work on some writing, study a bit of French. In the early days, I’d either sleep, or lay on the couch watching TV, half asleep, just trying to survive. There is no better feeling than sitting on the couch in your jammies, eating snacks no one is stealing, and watching your favourite TV show. To think I took this type of relaxing for granted.

I may have been getting some things done, but I still felt exhausted and like I was drowning, constantly. It didn’t seem worth it to continue to try to get everything finished as fast as I could in the little time that I had to myself. Besides, my house was completely trashed in ten seconds once my toddler returned home. The level of clean and tidiness I was reaching for when she was away was not sustainable, which is a completely different topic. So, when my husband was away on a trip and my daughter was at her grandparent’s for a sleepover, I did something I hadn’t done in a very long time: I did absolutely nothing.

I did some things that needed to be done like making supper and a few dishes, but I didn’t try to write 5,000 words, or study, or run myself into the ground trying to clean the entire house from top…

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Michelle Lee-Ann

Recently published kid's book author, lover of all things Karl Lagerfeld, Golden Girls enthusiast, and finds happiness in books from Hemingway to Harlequin.