March 5, 2021 Blog Disclaimer: This isn’t necessarily a blog this week. It’s more of an essay. A biography. A VERY LONG blog. It’s like my VERY LONG journal entry that I needed to write to debrief the last few weeks. Read at your own risk, and if you do read this, settle in. You’ll need a snack break.
I write my blog for a few reasons. First, I have a lot of stories. Ask anyone who knows me. I like to talk and I’m always looking for an audience (this pandemic has been tough for me, peeps). Second, I can relate to my preschool families. My kids are young. I still have a preschooler. I may be the director at Soapstone, I may have been a teacher here, but before all of that? I was (and am) preschool parent just like you guys. I can relate. Been there, done that, still doing it, and always stumbling along. If anything, I think I can make you feel better about what you are doing at home. LOL.
But, I’ve never had a blog that just talks about me. However, I think the events from the last few weeks warrant it, so here goes. My blog about me and ultimately, a blog about the difficulty of slowing down.
“Slow down!”
“Take it easy.”
“Take care of yourself, because if you don’t, you can’t care for anyone else!”
“Everything else will be fine, just focus on yourself.”
– Everyone I Know (With Loving Hearts)
Ugh. These are phrases I have been hearing on repeat for almost two weeks. Clearly phrases that I have needed to hear and phrases that are truly being offered out from a place of love and a place of sincere worry. These phrases are not new to my ears. I have heard them all before, many times before, and sometimes – even sometimes – I say them to myself. But as my husband will tell you, I am pretty horrible at listening to them. Or maybe I’ll listen to them for a few days, only to push them to the back of my mind as I gear up for the next thing I need to tackle. I convinced myself, from an early age, that I am a very busy person. That I thrive on stress. That down time feels really awkward for me and if I have downtime, it means I’m not doing enough. It was the same way in college. It was the same way in grad school. The same way when I started my teaching career or when I had a family. I’m a repeat offender.
Stress doesn’t help anyone slow down, either. It just ramps me up, as I imagine it does for most people. For a year, I’ve been dealing with the same things and same stressors all parents have been dealing with everywhere. I’m a working mom, with a first-grade daughter who is in Virtual Academy, a husband who works from home and helps said daughter with first grade until I can get home, and a son who luckily has preschool to see other kids and then spends the afternoons basically being ignored so my husband and I can still work while we do first grade with our daughter in our basement (not a dungeon). We’ve been hanging on by the proverbial thread for a while, but that’s just what we are all doing. My family, myself – we are not unique. This is how we are all living these days. Living the dream by staying home and making impossible choices about the health and well-being of our children and each other. It’s stressful. It’s been hard. But we’ve been making it through.
Then, two weeks ago, I set out on a long run – a 13.1 mile distance, to be exact, with my awesome run group. It was biting cold, around 28 degrees when we started. I’ve run in the cold before, but I felt pretty crappy right from the start. I blamed it on my asthma – the cold makes it worse. I couldn’t breathe, my chest hurt…but I just kept thinking – I’ll settle in, I just have to warm up. My asthma inhaler didn’t work. My chest pain got worse, and moved into my shoulders and arms. I got really, really light-headed and stopped to walk so I wouldn’t fall down. Now, I am also the most stubborn person in the world, so I HAD to finish the minimum mileage on this run, which was 8 miles. When I was done, I sat in my car until I could drive home. I waited the whole day to feel better, but I never did. I just attributed it to a really crappy run from which I was struggling to recover. Even more, I spent the entire Saturday being sooo mad at myself for not pushing it to the 13 miles that I wanted to do. My husband pleaded with me to call the doctor or go to the ER. He showed me a funny video with Elizabeth Banks about what a heart attack looks like in women. I laughed, even though it did scare me a little since I basically had every symptom, and told him I was fine and I would call on Monday (kind of knowing I would push it off). But I had WAY too much to do. I promised my dad I would help him unpack his kitchen (he just moved to Raleigh). My own house was a mess. I had laundry to do. We had sportsball games over the weekend. I didn’t have time to go to the ER.
Sound familiar? Probably. I can’t imagine I am the only one who does this.
Long story short? The next day I ended up in the hospital, attached to monitors, getting tested, away from my children, my home, my job, my running…all the things I work so hard to keep in check and in control. And I felt guilty, even in the hospital,, thinking about all I wasn’t able to do. Guilty that I wasn’t home and I wasn’t at school and, “Oh my gosh, I hope my dad can handle the kids for a couple days”, and “The kids must be so worried about me”, and “Oh no – I have to do payroll!” I FaceTimed the kids like no tomorrow (except they were too busy having fun at home with my dad to really talk), I made my husband go home to get my work laptop even after his stern lecture to me about not going to get it. I repeatedly asked the doctors when I could go back to work and start running again.
Y’all. I’m writing this and shaking my head. I’m not saying any of this to complain about any part of my life. I am a very lucky girl. But if this was my best friend, my sister, my whoever – I would have taken them by the shoulders, shook them hard, and told them to JUST STOP. (And would have repeated all the phrases above)
I am the BEST advice-giver in the world. I am the WORST at taking any of my own amazing advice.
But, seriously – how do you slow down when you are always going at the fastest pace? And not just a normal fast pace. A super hard and weird pandemic fast pace, where your only goal is just to keep your head above the water.
This all being said, I know I am not the only one out there who has no idea how to slow down. How to hop off the treadmill without getting hurt. How to focus on yourself more, how to practice acts of “self-care” (ughhhh). How to just keep your head above water in your day-to-day, with small kids, with working from home, school from home, mask-wearing, social distancing, COVID anxiety, family worries, and just the juggle, y’all. How do you do it? And PLEASE, do not suggest meditation, because all I think about when I meditate is how terrible I am at meditating. I cannot be the only one who struggles with this important life skill and is inept at slowing down, too. Right?
What I do know is that I really don’t want reminders like this recent incident to help me remember to slow down. It was scary and it’s not fun. I only just started driving myself around yesterday, I still haven’t run, and I’m finally waking up in the morning without wanting to fall over. I have talked about how God nudges us in the past, but this was a serious God-sucker punch. And even though my recent incident was not stress-induced, I have no doubt that stress played a part in it. I’m a big believer in God hearing all the prayers in our hearts and minds, even when we don’t actively pray to Him. God sees us, knows us, holds us up, and in this particular case, knocks us down so we hear what he is trying to tell us. I know he’s telling me what others are also saying. I often try to keep my eyes open so I can see and hear God better. To hear his advice and answers.
Give ear and hear my voice, Listen and hear my words.”
Isaiah 28:23
If anyone can help us slow down, to take a breath, to just stop for a minute as we face this chaotic life in a pandemic, it’s God. Baby steps, right? Baby steps on my healing, and I guess baby steps in my acceptance in what God, and others, are saying to me. And seriously – if you see me running during carpool anytime soon, yell out your window and tell me to slow down. I think I could use the reminder.
PS: If you are reading this and have said any of those phrases to me over the last two weeks – thank you. Thank you, from the depths of my everyday-getting-stronger being.