Adventurous Mom

Archive for the ‘responses’ 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

Every­day and every week, I keep expect­ing life to get “eas­ier” but some­how it never really gets eas­ier, but there are days that I work really hard and feel accom­plished and there are days that I barely feel like I am keep­ing my head above water! Up and down…up and down…up and down. What I find that with each expe­ri­ence I learn more and my tol­er­ances for dif­fi­cult things improves. What I am also find­ing is that the world around me isn’t nec­es­sar­ily chang­ing, but I am chang­ing and my responses are chang­ing.
I am a self-proclaimed over-achiever. This is a bless­ing and a curse at the same time. It has cer­tainly served me well in my career. On the reverse side of the coin, I real­ize that I some­times expect too much of myself. I expect to have a fan­tas­tic and per­fect day every­day! I think I will always expect that, but there are forces that are out of my con­trol that occur in this world that inten­tion­ally or unin­ten­tion­ally seek to ruin my day. I acknowl­edge those occur­rences.… and what I’ve learned to do now is be curi­ous about my response! Instead of get­ting angry, sad, mad or depressed, instead of dwelling on the issues for days and day and los­ing a lot of sleep, I become curi­ous about the prob­lem and my response to the prob­lem. This is a really dif­fi­cult task because I just want to react. I wanted to be Mamma Bear and go after the prob­lem that was con­fronting my first grader, I wanted to dig my claws into the prob­lem and tear it up!! But that response would not have been ben­e­fi­cial to me, or to the teacher for that mat­ter. I look back and ask myself, “Did I respond well to that sit­u­a­tion?” How could I have bet­ter han­dled it? That was very stress­ful, and I think I did okay. I would give myself a 6/10. (Here I go judg­ing myself.) But a 6 is far bet­ter than would have been my response level of a 2 last year! I’m improv­ing, I’m becom­ing aware, I’m learn­ing how to self cor­rect.
My point in talk­ing about my responses is that I am learn­ing it is okay to make mis­takes. But the real mea­sure of matu­rity is how do you respond to those mis­takes, and how do you respond when life throws you a curve ball? Are you the bat­ter that adjusts her swing? Or are you the bat­ter that swings expect­ing every ball to be a fast­ball, then get mad at the pitcher for throw­ing a curve? Real­ize that life hap­pens, it hap­pens up and down…up and down. How do you respond to the ups and downs? Adjust your­self, your response, and be curious!

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!