Don't be a passenger

Have you ever just had one of those days where you can literally feel the weight of the world on your shoulders? Well, my day has become months. As I was traveling to NC yesterday, I had nothing but time to think. I mean between the breakdowns, snack requests and bathroom stops, I had time to really just sit and think about life. I have a love/hate relationship with freetime. Maybe hate is a really harsh word, but I guess it would more of a love/dislike relationship. Whenever I have freetime, my brain tends to think that is the best time to make a rapid fire slideshow of everything that has happened in my life over the last 30 years. Talk about overwhelming, right?
On this trip though, I only got the last 5 years in rapid playback and I felt like I was an outsider that was just watching a movie. Some of the things that I was seeing I didn't even remember living through and that made me sad. I realized that I had been an outsider in my own life! Who does that?? Me apparently.
As I thought about this more, I found out that there was a pattern. Anytime that there was a stressful, angering, or traumatic event, I basically just cruised through the days, weeks, and months after that. I was clearly living my life, but I wasn't taking part in my own life. I was carrying the stress, anger, sadness and fear from day to day and it was altering my view of my life. I need to know how to fix this! I know that I can't go back and relive the past two years, even though I would like to. I can only make a change moving forward.
But what can I do? I'm going to experience things that stress, upset, anger and sadden me, but how do I stop that from influencing all of the moments after that? I've got to let those moments be just that, moments. I can't dwell in that negative space. I have to be okay with living in that moment and then moving forward. I don't want to simply go through life. I want to be present and truly live each moment of my life. The only way to do that is to stop allowing negative emotions to drive my life. Doing that is like going through life with colored shades on. You can never truly enjoy or experience what you are looking at until you take the shades off.
From this moment on, I won't allow a bad moment to ruin my day or week. Just take a deep breath in and release!


XOXO

Can I have a little bit of grace?

Every day, I find myself questioning whether or not I am good at enough at any of the things that are currently my responsibility. I question whether I am doing all of the right things as a mom, a wife, a student, an employee, etc.. This morning around 0330, it dawned on me that I don’t have to be perfect at everything. There has only ever been one perfect person, and He understands and loves my imperfections. So why have I been beating myself up about them? As a mom, I think that it is hard for me to be okay with making a mistake. I mean, I have been given the responsibility of shaping my son and daughter into the people that they will be for the rest of their lives. That is a huge responsibility.

I want them to be wonderful human beings and I know that my influence will help shape that, but I also know that everyone makes mistakes. It is inevitable. Parenthood does not come with a step by step manual that you can follow day by day to make sure that you are hitting every single point perfectly. That is unrealistic and could you imagine how long that would take someone to actually come up with that? And who has the authority to actually say what the right and wrong way to parent would be? It is so disheartening when I am on social media and I see women bashing other women about the way that they are parenting their children. Unless someone is abusing or neglecting their child, I don’t think anyone has the right to say that what one person is doing is wrong. It is probably what works best for their life and we have no right to judge that.

I am a strong believer in the saying that you can’t tell me how to live my life unless you have first walked a mile in my shoes. Until you know exactly what someone is dealing with, you will never be the expert on what they should or should not be doing with their children, their marriage, their career or any other aspect of life. I find it extremely difficult to believe that I am doing every single thing in my life 100% well every single day, but I have learned to give myself a little bit of grace. I looked at a pile of clothes that I knew needed to be folded last night and I opted to read my kids two more bedtime stories instead. Normally, I would have stayed up really late folding the clothes, but I had other things that I needed to do and I will fold the clothes. There won’t be any war on laundry happening in the next few hours, so I am sure it will be fine.

I am taking this approach with every aspect of my life. I am going to prioritize the things that matter and make sure that I am accomplishing those to the best of my abilities instead of trying to do everything all at once. This approach makes the planner in me a little bit nervous, but I know that in order to be good at anything, I have to be great emotionally, mentally and physically and I know that being stressed out and exhausted about everything was actually accomplishing nothing. So, I am prepared to tackle today and I will be okay with leaving a few things undone as long as I know that the things I did complete were done to the best of my abilities. Isn’t that what life is about anyway?

Life is just a series of weekends….

As I sit here writing this blog and watching my children sleep, I realized how many moments pass because I am so focused on the next day or activity. This week, I have found myself wishing it was the weekend. Trying to remember the details of what happened on Monday and Tuesday and realizing that I can’t! Partially because I suffer from mom brain and because I willed those days to go by so quickly because I have been in such a rush to get to Friday.

But, why? Why are my days and moments sped up just to get to another day? Why can’t I be present in the moments that I have right now? Big questions for 1 am, but here we are. Or here I am rather. My baby girl will be six months this month (insert actual tears here). Every day I say, “man time is flying by” or “why are you growing so fast”. Well duh, right? If I pray for every day to go by quickly just so I can get to the end of the week, of course she will be growing really quickly too! It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put those pieces together. In my haste to be done with my work week, I am missing important moments in other aspects of my life!

Now I just want to slow down! I want to go backwards and catch every moment that I have missed in each area of my life. Talk about sensory overload! I know, it is impossible, but just really take a moment to think about that. What if you could go back to those stressful days that you wished would just hurry up and end already and just take advantage of every moment? Instead of rushing the day past, why not take a few minutes in that day and do some self-reflection or advancement? Listen to a podcast on making each moment count, think about a way to make yourself better in those moments instead of rushing them!

This is exactly what I need to do. From today forward, I refuse to be in a hurry to get to the next day. I am going to live in the present and not be so concerned about the next day. I want to make all of my time every single day count. It sounds sort of like a fairy tale. Cue the cute life is all butterflies and rainbows music, give me a beautiful dress, nice backdrop and of course some cute animal that sings with me and knows all of the moves to my little musical number. But why can’t it be that way? Why can’t we just take a second to be amazed at the fact that we get 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? That means that we have 10,080 minutes each week to take advantage of!

Take advantage of each one. Trust me, I get it. Sometimes work, school, or parenting can be challenging, but even those moments are worth it. If every day you danced in daisies and hid behind waterfalls, you would never truly be able to appreciate the moments that go well. Unless your job is to do those things and if so, just know how jealous I am of you. But, we can all look for those daisy dancing moments and take advantage of them. When you’re constantly rushing time, you miss those moments and so many more. Today, I am going to take a few deep breaths and just make these moments count. I mean, I am already down 2,880, so I need to make the most out of the rest of them!