For those of you who don’t know, I am a full-on boy Mom. I have 3 young boys and April-May were heavy months for our family. I think we could all agree the heaviness of this world can really start to weigh on us over time. We are inundated every day with the news, social media and the curveballs life can throw at us; so what can we learn when walking through the heavy things of this life?
For me personally, these last 6 weeks have been full of sick kids, one head injury, tons of school projects, and end-of-the-year events as my 3 boys finished out their school year. One of the days, I literally was called by one school to pick up a kid with a possible concussion and while I was driving to him, the other school called to tell me my son was sick and I needed to pick him up. This was a moment I needed a clone of me; with a meeting starting in 15 minutes that I needed to be on and two kids to pick up, I started to take lots of deep breaths.
I had just been coached (yes, we are coaches with a coach as well😊) on how to handle heavy things when they keep being thrown at us. She said that staying calm in the moment and saying this simple phrase, “this is not a problem,” acts as a way of tricking our brain so that we don’t flood with emotions, fear/panic and we can actually problem-solve more efficiently. This has been a daily practice thus far and I believe it is working.
The last week of May was a doozy as my husband had to go out of town for work and our youngest who came home sick that day, got really, really sick. He immediately started with a 104 fever because we do everything big in our family. We literally have a sign in our home that says, “Go big, or Go Home,” just trying to live up to that statement, I guess? Meanwhile, it had just been 90 degrees here in CO and two days later it dumped wet, heavy snow. We had been adding a ton of trees and bushes to our backyard to make it lush so the snow element was not safe for the new landscaping. At 2:30am, since I was already up with my son fighting his fever, I went outside to knock off all the snow with a broom. Yes, I was the crazy lady dressed in all black and beating my trees in the middle of the night! I set a timer on my phone to go do that every 2 hours…It was operation “keep everyone/everything alive”! By morning, it was clearly impossible to keep my son's fever down so we had to go to the Emergency room, that is where they would tell us that he had Influenza A.
I’ve never seen my youngest son so sick, we did two ER visits, endured a blocked airway, experienced a very scary moment of him choking and acting quickly to get him to breathe, his throat swelled from the virus, and needed steroids to open it up again and in the end, it was all very dramatic and scary for him and for us.
After a very long week, he got better, slowly. We conquered all the science projects, got all the last assignments in, did most of the school events, did 8th-grade graduation, took the picture, made the memory, grew our patience, and are alive to tell about it all.
So why tell you all this? Well, my hope is that someone can relate to when it feels like all the walls are closing in. When life is spiraling a bit out of control what can we do to reground ourselves?
I spent some time reflecting, enjoying my trees and this is what helped me get through such a difficult time:
Mindset is everything!! WE all go through hard times and difficult situations; we have overcome them before and we will again. Staying calm and allowing our minds to problem solve helps us rise above the trial or situation.
Listen to what your body and soul need. This was huge for me. I feared letting people down while I was walking through such a heavy time and tried to keep commitments and responsibilities, but in actuality, I had nothing to give, I was running on empty, when I gave myself permission to let go and was honest about what I could handle, there was so much freedom.
Self-care is essential. I knew I needed to be the main caregiver for my family, especially with my husband gone, if I got sick the whole ship was going to sink so I made the decision to eat clean, get 10 hours of sleep, keep my stress low and not tax my body by doing the high cardio workout and interval training that I love.
Asking for help is healthy, not weak. I asked for coffee deliveries, and help with getting meds from the pharmacy and in the moments I thought I could handle making dinner, my close friends reached out to tell me they were having dinner delivered to me. I learned a while ago since I love helping people when they are in need as well, that it is healthy to ask for help and it is not a sign of weakness. People want to help, it brings them joy, when we say no all the time to their offers, we are robbing them of the joy of serving us, so say yes.
Lisa and I want to continue to walk this journey of life with you, we may not be able to control the circumstances or have all the answers, but there is something powerful about not walking any of life’s challenges alone.
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