Finding Your OK

In those moments of high demand and overwhelm, Try this...

Welcome to Mama Mama: a tiny alley on the internet for questions and reflections on parenting. This is less about parenting methods and more about how we can be in touch with ourselves while we care for and nurture our kids.

Dear Mama Mama, 

How do I survive when everyone is sick and fragile and grumpy and refuses to eat and I feel deep rage welling inside my body. Oh, and the oven stopped working. And a medical bill went to collections. It's just too much. 

Love CG

Dearest CG, 

Is this the most relatable question? Thank you for sending this to me, for layering so succinctly the multitudes we are all always holding. 

First off, the rage. Yes, the rage. We are meant to do this parenting thing in community with lots of adults, and big kids, and teens! More bodies to help. 

I think a lot about bodies these days. What it means to have a body, how to be in my body, how to honor and respect my children's bodies, how to not be consumed with fear about all that can happen to a body. I think this has become such a focus for me because in becoming a parent suddenly my life extended beyond the walls of my very own body and my psyche is continuously reckoning with what it means to be connected to, responsible for, and inherently vulnerable in relationship to my children because I can't control what happens in or to their bodies. It's so much to make sense of, it's so much to tolerate. 

I get so overstimulated when my kids are sick. The coughing, sniffling, spit chewing (it's a new one, and ew), whining, general need for body to body contact. That's compounded by the dizziness of rearranging schedules, missing work, feeling mediocre at everything. Oh and then the general tightness that comes from anticipating my own downfall from whatever virus is ruining our sleep. It's so much. Most of the time the line resounding in my body is "this is too much". 

One of the biggest practices I have come to when the needs of other bodies are so loud is to bring my focus back primarily to my own bod. Can I slow down? Have I had water? Feel my feet on the floor? Shake it out? Growl like the angry mountain lion I feel on the inside? All my mom wiring tells me not to do this - to ignore my own urges and needs in order to be in service to. It turns out pushing against this allows me to come back to the thing (myself) I do have the most influence over when I feel out of control. 

In these moments of high demand and overwhelm, I love some compartmentalization. I have a drawer in my mind. The medical bill goes in there. So does the oven. I close the drawer - or slam it. Pizza gets ordered. I turn down the urgency that screams at me that these things must be tended to right now when the reality is they can't be fixed. Not at night after a full day when everyone is sick. 

It's so obvious when we think about our kids - they can't hear us when they are over threshold. Why do we expect more of ourselves? Some part of us is also a little kid and wants to whimper while someone rubs our head and makes it all better. Can we sit down and really feel our hands around our kid's sick bodies and imagine we are doing that for ourselves, too? 

A question that rolls around this space for me is how can I find my ok regardless of external circumstance? How can I be ok when my kids are not? When my spouse is doing something annoying? This is some big ole life-long process for me cause I would really rather everyone be quiet and eat all their dinner and put the laundry where it goes. I'd also like there to be enough money in the bank and for the car to not get broken into and for the dog to stop throwing her bowl on the wood floor when she is hungry.  

"Ok" here is not at peace, it's not about "acceptance", it's not about passivity. It's about being in touch with some part of myself that amidst all of the sh*t is also ok. I think she is always in there, for you, too. So how do we get to her? 

All the love and all the rage, 

Mama Mama