Do you often feel overwhelmed? Or, should I ask, do you have moments in your day where you DON’T feel overwhelmed? If I had to guess, those moments might be easier to count between your third glass of wine and your fifth piece of chocolate.
If you have been following our posts, you know that we talked a lot about letting go and “burning things down” to make room for something new. When we allow ourselves to burn things down and cut things out of our lives that no longer serve us, we begin to grow in a new direction.
But, if you can barely make it through the day, how are you supposed to know what that “new direction” is? I often think about how the pandemic set us back in more ways than one. Our kids plunged into the depths of despair, our spouses had existential crises, and our cats became so anxious that their humans were home that they stopped eating. Yup. I had one friend who has been microwaving her cat’s food for 18 seconds before serving it since the Pandemic to coax her wee ones into eating. (I stopped sipping my 3rd glass of wine and could barely plow through the 5th piece of chocolate when she told me this. I didn’t think that it was appropriate for me to laugh)
Sure, maybe you’re not microwaving your cat’s food, but we all came out of the pandemic with something, right? I’ve been digging into this for some time, and I have had two mantras this year:
1. A lot of these problems are first-world problems, but problems nonetheless.
2. 2023 is the year to stop enabling
I am a Mother Earth type, so it is ingrained in me to caretake, cater to, and enable all of my loved ones. I am the lady who carried her blind and deaf dog (due to age) for 2 years toward the end of its life all over the neighborhood for “walks”. Imagine my surprise when my dog walker put the dog on the leash and had her walk up and down 6 steps to get up and down my front porch. By then, I had no idea the dog could still do that!
I am the mother who studied the difference between 6-minute eggs, 7-minute eggs, and 8-minute eggs to perfect them so my daughter could routinely eat them after watching a Disney movie that mentioned soft-boiled eggs.
I am the wife who wanted a luxury vinyl plank floor in her basement and her husband was having motivation problems. So I pulled on knee pads while I happened to be wearing a Lilly Pulitzer tennis skort and got on my hands and knees and lovingly coaxed each vinyl plank into position while my husband hammered them into place.
But guess what? Not anymore. I decided, no more enabling. And sure, It was rough at first. My 13-year-old daughter cried for a FULL 60 MINUTES the first Saturday I refused to make her lunch. She actually started hyperventilating. But guess what? She went downstairs two hours later and assembled her own plate of cheese and crackers and fruit.
My 10-year-old son now sets his own alarm every morning, showers gets dressed, and makes his own breakfast. Full disclosure – he often forgets deodorant so we have an emergency stick that rides around with us in the family minivan. This is kind of gross if you think about it but it is so much better than nagging endlessly every morning.
The point is, that enabling isn’t always helping. In most cases, it does the opposite. When I realized this and forced myself to stop enabling, I realized how capable others were of taking care of things, and I feel much much better.
I have so much more bandwidth to take care of myself and am so much less overwhelmed. It wasn’t about training my family to stop looking to me for answers. It was about training my brain to stop doing it, fixing it, saying it, etc. You know that I am a big Taylor Swift fan and I just love the line “It’s me, I’m the problem, it’s me”. Because we can only control our actions.
And only we can take care of ourselves. So this year, join me in my mantra of “stop enabling”. I promise you’ll feel so much better.
See you soon,
Nicole
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