Hurdles In Healing

I've spent how many blog posts waxing on about emotional, spiritual and mental healing? Okay maybe let's not count those. What about other healing though?

You scrape a knee, hangnail or stub a toe? Maybe you do some neosporin and a bandaid? Everyone is different. After my illness last week, boy do I have to heal. And here is where I am with it, which of course has me thinking in all terms of metaphors and other themes.

I'm totally not back to my full self yet. I'm careful with food, coffee, treats and so on because I'm super sensitive to everything with my body right now. I had a really rough workout this morning because I woke up with stomach cramps not knowing if I should go or not. I had to take it easy working out.

I'm not a "take it easy" kind of gal. I constantly push myself. I always want a good challenge so patience with healing is not me. This morning I realized that whatever my body is going through, everything is telling me to SLOW DOWN.

It's almost too funny, the irony of my body literally rejecting going back to life and getting sick the night we returned home. We pretend these things are inconvenient coincidences, but maybe they are legit signs to pay attention to. Did we have such a great vacation, one that ended weirdly with a little bit of a disagreement with my husband and an uneasy ride home that my body completely rebelled against coming back to routines?

You can speculate whatever you want but I'm more attune to the idea that emotionally, mentally and spiritually I have more power over my body than I think. What do personal trainers say? "Mind over matter?" There is truth in the cliches.

We go to therapy to heal mental wounds, but with physical ailments we take medicines and get shots and rarely let our bodies rest. I'll give it to my 6 year old but she was completely right, forcing myself to go back to work that following morning was not a good idea. I needed the rest.

So what are my hurdles in physical healing? They are ironically mostly mental. Now I second guess on what I may have overlooked within my body before my nasty illness overtook my day to day. I'm now wondering what every cramp and moment of discomfort is telling me. Is this a new "normal?' Will my body go back to pre-illness regularity?

We joke that getting older sucks and that what we got away with in our teen and twenties is long gone but it's completely true. I had a better metabolism and very lax caffeine effects compared to now. I can't have iced tea in the evening or it messes with my sleep. I can't drink too much alcohol, which means more than two glasses in one sitting with food, or it can ruin me an entire day. And now, I'm pretty careful about what I'm allowing my tummy to wrestle.

See if I Google it I probably have a tapeworm or something insane. So I sit here hypothesizing and worrying about never getting back to what I thought was normal. Then as I'm trying to figure out what to write about today, I realized I need to embrace whatever my body is telling me and that this may be my new version of normal.

Last night in the homework war, uncharacteristic to my normal self, I used the most calm tone ever talking about the tasks. I refocused her. I didn't yell if she had some crying jag outburst. I just said, okay, "If you need to feel your feelings that's fine, but if you can persist and get through what we need to do, you can spend your evening the way you asked me to earlier. Otherwise those privileges will be lost." It seemed to work much better.

Everything around me, is screaming "SLOW DOWN." Besides my body physically telling me, my anxiety, and things going on in my personal life, I'm just very much yielding to the probability that the new "shake up" in the routine, means taking things so much slower instead of some ridiculous race to get stuff done.

I'm learning to heal all over now. I'm completely in it. We are a couple months away from 2020. All of the motivational things and funny memes are coming out about it's entrance into our calendars. What am I feeling? I think 2019 has been incredible growth. Nothing is perfect and everything in my life is a current work in progress; completely in flux. But I'm not miserable, depressed or overly anxious. I'm making things work. I'm taking things as they come. And that is huge.

Healing may not be linear, which is fact, but I'm just continuing to heal, all over. It is completely encompassing me. There will be many hurdles in healing. There always are. But today, in the midst of the stomach cramps and gurgles, the morning out of routine and the workout that was super difficult on my body and lungs, I just realized "Okay, here I am, healing and working it out one step at a time." I can only do what I can with what I'm dealt. What a revelation! And so I soldier on!

Early Bedtimes For The Win

All households, children and parents are different but in mine, I encourage and work hard towards "early" bed times. I've had this discussion often because most parents I know don't necessarily have many rules about bed time. My definition of early is between 7:30PM and 8:30PM. Late would be anything after that.

Here's the thing, I'm up early always since I had a baby. Sleeping in is 7ish regularly and on some freak occurrence maybe even 8ish. My daughter does not sleep in. She seriously has to be up until 10PM or so with high levels of activity to make it to 7AM. Normally, she is up at 6:30 regularly or even 6 sometimes. 

I love to go to bed early too! I love being asleep no later than 9PM because I'm up at 5 to work out and then I get my 8 hours of rest. I'm very much that person that needs 8 hours of rest and I don't even feel badly about that. 

My kid can fall asleep in a good 10 minutes and early bed times leave room for her to have a better tomorrow. When we all stay up too late, the recovery the next day is rough because we don't sleep in and rarely have the opportunity to nap. I will always champion early bed time.

I think I have one other mom friend who is completely with me on this and it works well in her household also. We both notice pretty intense behavioral shifts when our kiddos aren't rested well enough. 

I don't judge anyone for letting their kids stay up, if you all have the energy to deal with that, power to you, but I guard our routines pretty closely. It took me a long time to realize how much sleep I just need to be a nicer person and the recovery the next day is often not worth the late stuff. There are exceptions, of course, but mostly I'm that "early to bed, early to rise," nerd.

My husband gives me a hard time because I literally attempt to sleep hoard at all times. I feel like if I collect enough sleep, you know like a squirrel collects acorns, I can make it through the sleepless times better. He always laughs, "I'm pretty sure that's not how it works."

I gave being up late and irresponsible the good college try a few years ago. Not for me, no thanks. 

Lately I've just embraced, or tried to, almost everything that comes along with all this aging stuff. It doesn't bother me. I need plenty of rest, lots of water and to make sure I get some good proteins. The rest is just taking it one day at a time.

The thing I love about the early bed time stuff, is it allows me to go to bed when I need to, instead of trying to get more things done while the kiddo is still up or having to stay up way past them. My daughter throws a fit about how it's unfair that I get to stay up when 90% of the time I'm right behind her for bed time. She then gets pissy when my lamp goes off and I give up and give in to sleep also. It's kind of hilarious. 

My husband used to get annoyed that I went to bed so early and wouldn't stay up late with him for no reason. In turn I got annoyed that he wouldn't go to bed early so we kind of had to find our happy medium. It's a fact guys don't need as much sleep as we do anyway. Throw in the mom factor and no contest, we need all the sleep!

That whole "You can sleep when you're dead thing?" I get it, but sleep is my favorite hobby and I make no apologies anymore. I am every cliche meme about sleep and I own it because between motherhood and the thyroid drama, I am a much much nicer, better, awake, alert and helpful person when you just let me get my rest. Ask my husband!

I admire the moms that stay up late and kick butt the next day. I admire the moms who can still be sweet and patient with their kids up until double digit night times. I admire anyone who is a night owl because I tried and failed at every kind of attempt. What works for your family is awesome, keep it up! I however, always encourage and advocate early bed time stuff because it has worked super well for our household.

Don't get me wrong, my husband lets bed time fly. It's like a fluid concept in his world, but he is only home for bed time two nights a week if even that so this mother hen makes sure the baby chick is in bed so when that rooster crows the next morning, everyone can function! Fourth of July will of course be an exception to the rule as most holidays are but boy is Christmas Eve the absolute most important bed time strictness rule ever. That kid gets up earlier and we have to stay up later with the elves to get it all taken care of. 

So hopefully everyone has restful times and routines and I love to hear about any and all! Happy Tuesday!

Saturday Party-Palooza And Universal Make-Ups

After a grueling 48 hours of being on the phone arguing with the system and then cleaning my house on a Friday night -- yes I am a party animal -- I was amping myself up for a very busy weekend. As I've made extremely clear, I relish and love my down time. Any time for me to hide in my bed and eat popcorn, and I'm there.

Today we have 2 back-to-back birthday parties and a friend coming along. It was supposed to be horseback riding to birthday party 1 to birthday party 2 to Mom being done and in bed by 6PM, but instead horseback riding was cancelled.

This was a weird blessing in disguise because I now have a slow, easy-going morning, yet another thing I fantasize about but am rarely awarded. The girls are playing on a "Friendship mission" and I'm seeing my hubby for the first time in 2 weeks for more than 20 minutes in a row. 

We often forget that the universe can give us what we need even when we don't fully understand that we're asking for it, let alone needing it. I had a conversation with a friend earlier this week about how much of life is "if I can only make it to this then I can be happy," or "I just need to get through this weekend and then I can be more focused." We are usually centered on what we don't have to achieve what we do want, instead of appreciating all that is in front of us.

I had a rough couple days, yes. I threw my inadvertent tantrum instead of just bottling it up inside like normal Americans, and now I can reboot and get away from it. It's so important to just take things as they come, but often difficult.

I was anxious about today. A partypalooza Saturday wasn't ideal. I have to leave my comfort zone and socialize with other moms, and two full parties in a row. Tomorrow I get to catch up with an old friend but also in a large social outlet. Sometimes these things drain me.

I had this conversation with my dad this week about how, we love gathering and being conversational and social with people but we need a retreat in our safe space until we get back to an even calm after all of that. 

After my bad customer service experience, and as someone who works in customer service, I realized that being treated badly by bad customer service reps, made me a little less patient with my own customers, and one thing that I work hard on in my job is patience, and understanding. I wish that was a STAPLE in everyday communications but we often get so frustrated so quickly, it falls to the wayside. 

With all the reflection and then cleaning and calm, and now a morning of play dates, family time and extra coffee I'm feeling better. I'm still adjusting to a lot, especially work stuff with my husband, but I'm also mindful that we have great things ahead to look forward to. 

The Universe gave me this morning to make up the last few rough days and I feel grateful and ready to take on party-palooza. So happy Saturday!