Balancing or Prioritizing?

So the question today is about how you balance work, family and writing,  and at first I thought, this is a question that does not apply to me because I don't have a job.

Then I started thinking again.

I do have a job.  It's just a job that I work 24/7 at home, so it doesn't look like a job.  In a way it doesn't even feel like a job.  I think if I intentionally thought of it and approached it as a job, I would do a very poor job of doing my job.

Foster Parenting is like that.  It's a job that really starts with that first call from the county and ends with a court ruling of some sort.  It might last a few short days or it could be years or even a lifetime.  It looks a lot like regular parenting and we completely discount parenting as a job, but that's another blog.

So that left me thinking though, how do I balance my job, foster parent; my role as mom and wife to my family; and my writing time.

My first thought was that I really don't.  They are all sort of intertwined and co mingled.

My family knows that I write.  I write all the time in between everything else we do.  Our foster kids quickly learn, that's what I do.   They adapt quickly to understand that I sit at the computer and type.

The kids and the family things always come first.

Even if they have to wait a minute or two for me to finish a sentence or getting a thought down, they know they are first.  So I think, at least for me, for us, it's not so much a question of balance as much as priority.