Processing Endings Well

 

                                                                      (A picture from the evening, just because I felt like Cinderella)

My Saturday night was magical.

One time a year, my husband and I get FANCY dressed up and attend a fundraising gala for Encompass, a local pediatric therapy clinic. We go all in on this night. We arrange for overnight babysitting (thanks, Boppa and Grandmom-mom), we arrive to our hotel early in afternoon to rest and get ready for the evening event.

To be honest, the anticipation of this event has helped keep me going over the last few weeks. Weeks filled with some big challenges with kids, many medical appointments and tests for family members, and a full-scale review of an educational plan for one kid. All on top of daily life of a big family and the beginning of the school year. I just kept looking to Saturday night and dreaming about my dress and the fun and the food and the full night of sleep. On Friday I got my nails done and packed my bags, I had almost made it.

Then came Saturday and it was amazing, and I soaked in every minute of it. This year, I was gifted a stunning ball gown and I felt like Cinderella. I came home on Sunday happy and rested. (You can ask my husband about how he won half a hog in a silent auction sometime)

And it was over and all that was left of my fancy, long anticipated evening was the still glittery nail polish (which I am still looking at as a type). The event that had kept me going was done. Now what?

This is where all the work I have been doing on endings comes up yet again. Life has a whole lot of endings, so we need to learn how to handle them well. Otherwise, we can fall into two categories, one where we feel sad that it is over and then the sad gets attached to the event and we don’t even want to think about it because we think about the sad way we felt when it was over. The other one is where we decide it isn’t even worth it to anticipate anything because it always ends. Either way, our lives become generally more disappointing.

There is a healthier way to process the end of something we looked forward to and loved very much and now it is over. The key is we must process it. We need to finish well, even a Saturday night out may need some processing to finish well. And how do we do that? Here are some ideas:

Send a thank you. If there was a host/hostess of the event, send a thank you with an anecdotal highlight of your evening. Tell them how much it meant to you. Maybe send a picture of the event because hosts do not generally get to take many pictures. This doesn’t have to be complicated. In this story, I just sent an email with pictures attached on Monday.

Wrap it up. Do what you need to do to wrap up the event on your side and put everything away. Staring at a pile of unfinished business because you don’t want to think about the event being over is just going to bring you down. This is one reason I recommend unpacking as soon as you get home from a trip. In my story, I was given some phone numbers that I will need to follow up with in about a month, so I put the contacts in my phone and tossed the papers and cleared my desk. Just little things, but they all add up either to wrap up the fun or drag us down.

Find what’s next. A quote attributed to a few people goes like this “everyone needs something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to.” I think these are words to live by and yet, the last one is not often done. If we are not careful, we just put our heads down and carry on. So, my last recommendation is to find your next thing to look forward to now that this one is over. My mom keeps a daily countdown on her phone to her next thing and she will reset it almost immediately, even if it is for 200 days later. She has her eye on the next fun thing to keep moving towards.

Having fun is important and on the hard days those things to look forward to and the memories once the event has past is something that we all need. Let’s process them well, remember them fondly, and look forward to the next thing…even when all that is left is the sparkly nail polish.

Giving up to make it through

The last few weeks have had circumstances that individually would have made life challenging. But these were not nicely lining up and waiting their turn, no, these circumstances were all punching at once. One friend asked how I was doing and I replied with “slowly losing the will to survive.” It was dramatic, of course, but I just could not get above the hits. Because I struggle with chronic depression, I am very careful about becoming overwhelmed. I have a lot of built in stops and self-care to manage my mental health. I couldn’t even access a good number of those given the circumstances.

One thing that I know about myself is that my first reaction to struggle is to try harder. This is almost a part of my DNA. I was raised by people with this attitude and I was raised in a culture of this attitude. Not only do I try harder on whatever is going on, if that isn’t possible, I try harder in other areas to hope to compensate in the area where I feel stuck. My most recent example of this was actually during the last week. I was literally stuck at home (too much snow to leave) with a sick baby and two other kids and I was sick myself. So what did I do? I finished painting Isaac’s room. No joke. I figured that even if everything else fell apart, I would have one thing accomplished. Truthfully, it did feel good and it helped me later in the week to have that done. So I won’t say I shouldn’t have done it, but it does sound funny to say I did that in the midst of all that was going on.

Sometimes when I am in these places, though, I end up creating extra work or anxiety just to feel like I am “doing something”. Last week, I tried a different approach to see if it would help with anxiety and mental health. I gave up.

I came up with the idea when I was thinking about the military term “embrace the suck”. The idea there is that you can’t change your circumstances, so embrace them and get through them, rather than fighting against it as you go. I couldn’t change the snow. I couldn’t change my child being sick. I couldn’t change myself being sick. I couldn’t change being “on” all the time. I couldn’t change my husband being out of town. And, really, there wasn’t much to do.

Normally in that time I would find something to do, and I did in the painting, but that didn’t take long. So I would turn to “well I can read and study for work I have coming up”. But this time I didn’t do that. I decided to give up on it all and read a novel. Just lose myself in a book as much as I could. Let the kids watch TV and sit next to them and read.

I started to think maybe I needed to give up to make it through. I had a mental picture of Devil’s Snare from Harry Potter….that struggling could actually make it worse. That I just needed to relax everything to get out of this space. I stopped reading non-fiction and finished 3 books last week. I didn’t make a real planned dinner for over a week. And this season of circumstances is still not over, but I do feel like I am making it. I can do this. Our routine will reemerge in the coming weeks. All the tasks will get done. My kids will eat regular dinners again. I will get my work and study done. But for now I am going to go read a book.

A night alone

Over the course of the last year or two as I have learned what self care means on a regular basis and to me personally, I have been trying to take a night away from home every month (or maybe two). My husband does an amazing job of keeping everyone happy at home so I can step away, pause, and renew my mind for my role as wife, mother, and operations manager of our family!

(These nights do always feature a favorite take out dinner)

Sometimes it is about sleep (okay, it is always a little bit about sleep) and reading or watching a movie and just stepping out of my daily roles.

But more often it is about a moment to pause and reflect on what has been happening in my rapid fire lifestyle. It is a time to look ahead to what is coming. What season are we in? What is the next season? What needs to be prepared for next?

There are nights like this one where I know that we are entering a busy few weeks. That this

is our last weekend home before we are out of town for three weekends in a row. Tonight is about having the time to put on some quiet music of my own choosing (and not negotiating with a six year old DJ) and putting some thought into what we need to pack. To take a moment to figure out some logistics. Have time to hear my own thoughts about what a trip to the beach for 10 days looks like (do you even understand the packing this involves?).

It doesn't have to be a movie night on the couch to be self care. It can be a night of balancing the check book, finishing a few projects, and planning for the next few weeks that restores my soul and fills my cup. These might actually be my favorite evenings away alone. The ones where I am still actively playing out my roles but just in a calmer environment that speaks to my soul.

I will finish up soon. I will head to bed for that sleep I mentioned. Then I will get up tomorrow and be so excited to see all my people. The ones for whom I am happy to do this work, this planning, this preparation. The ones who will bring the noisy back in to my day. The sweet faces I get to travel with for the next few weeks and I will be in a much better place to take them all on.

On draining and recharging

I spent a weekend recently on an AMAZING trip away to New York City. It was exactly what my spirit needed in this crazy middle of life. I needed to be away to get renewed to come home and be a better mommy, wife, and human.

I was recharging a VERY empty battery. Not until I was away did I even realize just how soul crushingly tired I had been. I would have told you I was that tired, but until I was really starting to recharge, I didn’t even grasp the full magnitude of the problem.

As I was recharging, I was thinking about what I needed to do to not get to that place again, because, really, mommy can’t just run off to the city very often! The goal becomes staying charged up to a healthy level all the time. I think this is where we could have a long talk on self care routines, but that isn’t the point here because I realized something else as well.

Part of knowing more about your battery, is knowing what is draining it. When our cell phone battery is continually draining quickly we start to charge it more. This is a good practice, but to really solve the problem we actually need to know why it is draining so quickly. There is a part of the phone that shows how much of the battery is used by each app and we learn that not all apps use the same amount of battery. Ah-ha! Our lives are like this as well. Not all our roles use the same amount of battery. Some things just take a lot more out of us than others. Honestly, I think we all get that on some level, but there is a part of it that women really seem to struggle with.

Here is the biggie….not all apps drain all batteries the same. I have an example. My aunt’s phone battery was draining fast, so she checked the battery usage and found a particular app draining the resources. I had the same app on my phone and it wasn’t doing the same thing. Interesting. Same app. Different phone. Different battery drain. See where I am going with this? In our lives we look around and see someone else doing similar things and they are not feeling like their soul is sucked dry so we think “I am weak because this is killing my spirit.” NO! Our souls are all individually wired and have different capacity for different things. Maybe one woman is amazing with several kids, while another mom is at her limit with one. Maybe one woman finds housework a joy, and another it is the hardest part of her life. Maybe some women just have an oversized capacity in general and can “do it all” with grace. We just can’t compare. It does no good. My aunt comparing her phone and mine does no actual good to her battery power. If she wants more power, she has to deal with the battery she has and the apps she is running.

So goes our lives. We need to be assessing within ourselves, without comparison, what our battery usage looks like, what is draining it, how quickly it recharges. All without judgement on ourselves or others. It is quite possible that you just have to delete an app. It takes too much energy that isn’t worth it. Maybe it is a change in lifestyle. Maybe it is cooking less or outsourcing cleaning. I firmly believe this is why some women do better with working full time and having their kids in some kind of child care (that kid app can be exhausting if it runs all.the.time!). It could be giving up the dream of homeschooling because that one certain kid is a battery drain. The only one who knows is you. No one else.

I have been taking this week back home to think about some of these things. Where is my drain? What does my recharge look like? How often do I need to plug in? Back to self-care for a minute, what charges my battery in different amounts of time? All of these questions I am still answering for myself are going to be the key to keeping my soul at a healthy level of charged so I can be the thriving person I want to be.