I was at a point in my life where I was utterly overwhelmed. I struggled to complete any task and honestly on most days I just really didn’t want to get out of bed. The house was a mess no matter how much cleaning I did; the kids were acting out and completely ignoring me, I was stopping for fast food more often that I’d like to admit or serving them quick, easy meals because I just didn’t want to do anything! I was in this constant state of beating myself up over not being able to keep a clean house, not feeding my children good meals, being behind on school work and not being my best at my job. I felt like a complete failure. I kept comparing myself to my mom who even though she had cerebral palsy she worked full time, always made dinner and kept the house completely clean. She took such great care of my siblings, and I and I weren’t even close to being as great as she was. Unfortunately, she passed away before I had my children so these were all things I couldn’t talk to her about and I didn’t feel comfortable discussing how low I was feeling with anyone else.
One day after I put my kids to bed I went into my room closed the door and just cried. I just sat there behind the door bawling. I felt so useless and worthless. I was exhausted and broken. After a few minutes, my older son knocked on my door and asked to come in. I quickly cleaned up my face (wiped it off on my shirt) and tried to pull myself back together. He said he thought I was having a hard time going to sleep and that maybe he needed to come in my bed so I wouldn’t be alone and that it would help me sleep. Well, the little guy caught wind of this and thought that I might need him too. At that moment I realized that I am doing something right. These boys are empathetic and kind. I spend so much time thinking about what I’m doing wrong that I hardly ever took the time to see what I was doing right.
Well, I needed to do something about this, I couldn’t stay in the emotional state I was in any longer. I just didn’t know what to do or where to start, and I didn’t want to overwhelm myself all over again. So that’s when I thought I just need to aim for change, not perfection. This entire time I’ve been trying to be perfect. No one is perfect, and with a goal like that I was setting myself up to fail. So I decided that I was just going to aim for change.
For me aiming for change is about changing what is making me miserable one baby step at a time. I’m learning how to manage my time my efficiently and how to not beat myself up for everything I didn’t do. The first step was making sure I go to bed with happy thoughts. So I challenged myself to find at least one positive thing about my day while I lay there with my eyes closed. There are days that the only positive thought I have is that my boys are so handsome or that I didn’t have to fight with the little guy about sitting in his car seat, but there are also days that there are so many positive things that happened that it feels like an endless list of awesome! Doing this helped put me back into the right mindset.
Now comes the actually making change part. I’m trying to organize my life thoroughly so that I don’t get to the point of being overwhelmed anymore. This is my journey on finding what works for my family and what doesn’t.
