Adventurous Mom

Archive for the ‘relationships’ Category

Part 1 of 3 of the Stressed Mom­mies to Suc­cess­ful Mom­mies Series

I recently read mul­ti­ple post­ings by moth­ers that are so stressed out, that they would likely sell off one or both kid­neys to be able to cre­ate more time and have more money to devote to them­selves and their family.

These were just a hand­ful of the situations:

“I’m a sin­gle mother, I work full time, I have a 7 and 4 year old, I’m exhausted when I get home, but then I have to do school work, laun­dry, make din­ner, clean the house and then get ready to do it all over again!  I have no time for myself!”

“I have three kids, I work full time, go to Grad school and still feel like I can never get ahead!”

“My hus­band is in the mil­i­tary and gone half the year, my son has lost all abil­ity to potty train, and my daugh­ter does exactly oppo­site of what I tell her to do!”

My heart just ached when I read all of these stressed out Mom’s post­ings.  They were scream­ing for help onto a ran­dom forum post­ing, not know­ing where to go, just hop­ing that some­one would lis­ten to their cries for help!

Are you this mom?  Are you burn­ing the can­dle at both ends?  Are you cry­ing for help and think­ing that no one can help you?

1. Lis­ten to the flight atten­dant:

The first rule here is just to be aware that if you are at this point in your life where you are hang­ing on by a thread, do what every good flight atten­dant sug­gests in the event of cabin pres­sure fail­ure: “Put the Oxy­gen Mask on your­self first before you put them on small chil­dren.”  Eas­ier said than done?

If you con­sider the rea­sons, you are like the HUB of the WHEEL of your fam­ily. You are what keeps the fam­ily together, ungreased, the wheel doesn’t turn well, it’s squeaky and sticky.  With a well greased HUB, the wheel turns smoothly, effort­lessly and can do more rota­tions than an ungreased hub.  Con­sider your goal to be as smooth as a greased hub.

Tak­ing care of your­self means doing what you need to do to stay healthy. Eat well, take time for your­self, exer­cise, med­i­tate etc…  Imag­ine what your fam­ily would do with­out you? If you are not tak­ing care of your­self, you may con­tinue down the road to sick­ness due to stress.  So first things first –You are first!

2. Slow down to ½ speed!

It is easy to feel that because we have more to do, we need to do it faster, more hur­ried, and feel rushed.  Yet, when we delib­er­ately slow down the speed of our life, we are able to think more clearly and specif­i­cally about the task at hand.  It really is a funny para­dox! You may not actu­ally be doing less tasks when you slow your reac­tion speed down, it just feels like it!  What hap­pens often is you feel more delib­er­ate, your aware­ness comes into the present, and you can con­cen­trate on the NOW task and not the FUTURE task.

3.Notice How Your Vibra­tions are Felt Through your House­hold Like ShockWaves:

Do you notice that when you have a bad day, and you are stressed, the moment you walk in the house, all of a sud­den the kids are fight­ing and argu­ing, the dog is bark­ing, there is chaos spread­ing like wild­fire? Believe it or not, our energy lev­els have cer­tain vibra­tional fre­quen­cies.  Chil­dren are very sen­si­tive to these fre­quen­cies and react in strange and curi­ous ways, and usu­ally ways that tend to sound like nails screech­ing across the chalk boards.  Notice when you walk into your house calm, cen­tered and peace­ful?  The house can sense your “cen­tered­ness”, and mim­ics this energy level.  Its one of those mys­te­ri­ous uni­ver­sal prin­ci­ples.

4.Use your tran­si­tional Times and Take Men­tal Health Minutes:

When time is a pre­cious com­mod­ity for you at this time in your life, it is imper­a­tive that you use small por­tions of time to re-center, recharge and reju­ve­nate.  You prob­a­bly know this, but don’t mind­fully prac­tice this.  So, now I chal­lenge you to mind­fully prac­tice this.  When you are dri­ving home from work, put in peace­ful calm­ing music (I like to call it yoga music, eas­ily down­load­able from i-Tunes).  When you take a bath­room break, take 5 min­utes, close your eyes and do some deep breath­ing exer­cises and pos­i­tive think­ing.

5. Design Your Day:

This was a new con­cept recently intro­duced to me.   At the begin­ning of the day, spend 2 min­utes, grab your jour­nal and decide con­sciously HOW you want the day to go, and HOW you want to feel.  For exam­ple, “I choose to hap­pily drive to work, I will use the free time in the car to relax.  I choose to have joy­ous inter­ac­tions with my cowork­ers.  My meet­ings will go eas­ily and I will have easy res­o­lu­tions to my chal­lenges today. When I leave work, I will hap­pily use that time to tran­si­tion and be pre­pared and cen­tered for my fam­ily.  I con­sciously choose to be present with my fam­ily in the evening, turn­ing off my email and my phones.”  This only takes a cou­ple of min­utes, but you can see the impact that this has on your con­scious and sub­con­scious mind.  One of the beau­ties of this exer­cise is that you will not script your day to say “I wish work is dif­fi­cult, I wish the kids will be bad, and I want to be angry and stressed!”  It just doesn’t work like that!

Do not expect that you will imme­di­ately prac­tice all five steps right away.  Take one step a day and prac­tice.  A mommy’s job is so impor­tant and vital to the health of the fam­ily.  So mind your thoughts, mind your health and have fun!

Stay tuned to Part 2 Tips for Stress Man­age­ment – Mov­ing into Action to Reduce Your Stress

The Cop

I think one has to either be crazy or have just blind faith to be able to be mar­ried to an Adven­tur­ous woman.  And to be quite truth­ful, I’m not really quite sure how my hus­band puts up with my con­stant adven­ture, or if he’s just as crazy him­self.  He really is a patient man, which I  love but it pisses me off at the same time.  Some­times I inter­pret patient to be apa­thetic, but I’m learn­ing that it’s not.

Our story of adven­ture began when I was only 19, he was 23.  I was deter­mined to become a Fire­fighter, I had just com­pleted EMT school, was on my way to become a sea­sonal fire­fighter for the sum­mer, but not before my friend intro­duced me to this “guy”.  She says: He wants to be a cop…..oh and he has Jet­skiis!!  Nice, Jet­skiis!  At 19, such things like that are super cool, and I was a pretty good jet ski­ier, after all of those sum­mers at the lake on my parent’s boat, we had plenty of oppor­tu­nity to learn how to jet ski.

So I met the Cop, and our first unof­fi­cial date was in the SF Bay Estu­ary, with his Jet skiis.  “Do you want to try?” he asks…”Um sure?!” I meekly respond.  “Have you ever done this before?”  “Um…no, not really.”  “Okay, here is the throt­tle, the steer­ing, go like this, then like that…”  He sits and patiently explains.  “Okay, I think I got it, I’ll give it a shot!”

I start off slowly, then, I stand up….speed up….and start doing jumps and turns.  The Cop is puz­zled stand­ing on shore.  Either she has just pure raw tal­ent, or she’s play­ing me.  “No..I don’t think she’s ever done this before” my friend says.  He’s impressed, and as I get back to shore he asks again if I’ve done this before, and I finally admit­ted I did.  Impres­sive he thought, a chic that can keep up with me.

Our date con­tin­ued with more Jet ski­ing, and that night sev­eral games of pool in which I beat him.  That sum­mer was my first sum­mer together with the Cop , and also my first sum­mer away from home.

It was an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence to have a boyfriend and a new fire­fight­ing job at the same time.  Many women strug­gled in this job, it was phys­i­cally demand­ing, but for some the most demand­ing part for them was the jeal­ousy they had to deal with at home. Many hus­bands and boyfriends were not okay with their woman sleep­ing in a dorm with many other men, get­ting dressed in the mid­dle of the night, and deal­ing with dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions that is really con­sid­ered “man’s work”.  But not the Cop, he was really proud, and would bake brown­ies and cook­ies to send to the fire­house when I started my tour.  The cop became just another face at the fire­house, one of the guys.

These guys are gems, and his adven­ture scale was about as high as mine for life.  He sus­tained a life-threatening gun­shot injury at age 19 (off duty).  He should have died.  I should have died at 4 of acute  epigloti­tis.  There’s a rea­son we’re here, and together.  And I can all but attribute it to the fact that we’re sup­posed to expe­ri­ence this adven­tur­ous life together and share our jour­ney with the world.  Won’t you join us?

It has been an incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult past cou­ple of weeks for our fam­ily and for our extended fam­ily. We lost four won­der­ful, heroic police offi­cers in the line of duty on March 21, 2009. Two were Motor Offi­cers, and two were SWAT offi­cers. I admit that as the wife of a deputy sher­iff, I had an incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult time pro­cess­ing the events and I was very, very sad. I was also sur­pris­ingly sad for the young man that lived in so much fear of the police that he felt his only choice was to kill or be killed. Our soci­ety is very sick and the sick­ness is show­ing in the way that some of these poor chil­dren are being raised.

What I have taken from this mes­sage of death is that our life should be lived as if we were dying. For those of you that are coun­try music fans, this is a fan­tas­tic Tim McGraw song from a few years back that goes a lit­tle some­thing like this:

“I went sky­div­ing
I went rocky moun­tain climb­ing
I went two point seven sec­onds on a bull named Fu Man Shu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave for­give­ness I’d been denyin’
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin’”

Okay, I’m a lit­tle country…and I love it. But seri­ously, this was my theme song a few years back and it is funny how quickly we for­get the things that shape your life. This song was instru­men­tal in my per­sonal vision of liv­ing each day fully. Hor­ri­ble events such as this recent one with our brave police offi­cers also shape our lives. It can help us to remem­ber that our days are num­bered, and every expe­ri­ence on this earth is here for us to learn from.

So when we remem­ber our friends that gave their lives so oth­ers can live in peace, let’s not let their sac­ri­fice be for naught. Remem­ber their brav­ery by cel­e­brat­ing your life. When you’re being both­ered by those small stres­sors in your day, or you want to com­plain about your neigh­bor, or you want to be grumpy.…is this the best use of your time here? Our time is meant to be lived with pas­sion, with hap­pi­ness and fully. I picked a pic­ture of me hold­ing one of my favorite bot­tles of wine (Bode­gas Aguirre Caber­net) because I truly love drink­ing wine! That is one of my pas­sions and what brings me joy. So I’d like to raise my wine glass and toast our fallen officers.…your mem­ory will not be for­got­ten, and I promise to live each day as if I were dying!