As a mom, I often feel like I’m running in too many directions. I’ve joked with friends that my life is a bad triangle; I can blog and homeschool, or homeschool and do housework, or do housework and blog, but I can’t do all three. So Lisa Pennington’s book Tightropes and Teeter-Totters: Finding Balance in the Ups and Downs of Life seemed to offer some much-needed advice.
Lisa drew me in from the first pages of Tightropes and Teeter-Totters. She has a great sense of humour, and left me laughing while feeling like she understood my life. She’s honest about the fact that what she shares is stuff she’s learned from experience:
These are also places where I fall occasionally, but I have found ways to get up and keep moving, make improvements, and do better next time. I don’t have to pretend to be okay because I know that everyone messes up or gets hit with unexpected problems. I know where to turn to get back on my feet, and I want to share that with you.
Lisa offers concrete, practical strategies for assessing your own life and achieving balance. She shares tips for finding balance in specific areas of your life, including self-care, marriage, motherhood, friendships, money, moods, and more. Each chapter ends with an assignment—a small task to practice the tips Lisa has shared.
Lisa is honest that we’re going to experience ups and downs in life. Sometimes I think that if I can just get everything figured out—if I can get my house perfectly organized and catch up on my blogging tasks and establish a perfect homeschool routine—then those ups and down will cease. But that’s just not life. What we can do is learn to find balance when the ups and downs occur, so that we don’t completely fall down when something unexpected happens.
My dream for you is that at the end of this book, in addition to having some new tools for dealing with your struggle, you feel permission to let go of ideas you have that aren’t helping your life and grab on tight to the love story you are living. I hope you will see yourself as a beautiful woman of possibilities and ready to pull yourself up from whatever you’re dealing with. And don’t forget how your love story ends: happily ever after.
Lisa Pennington is a homeschooling mom of nine who shares her life—one laundry load at a time—on her blog, The Pennington Point. She is a sought-after speaker at conferences and women’s groups and is the author of Mama Needs a Do-Over. Lisa and her family live near San Antonio.
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