My Journey

Last week I felt myself sliding inexorably into that depression I had feared was coming. My baby is 8 months old and he is the fourth and last of our four kids, all boys. My toddler is 2 1/2 years old. These two are the exact same difference, 21 months apart, as my oldest two boys who are now 5 and 7. I love my children, but I don’t like having a baby and toddler. It is not my favorite stage when it comes to the daily routine. I can do it, I’ve done it before – 4 years ago. And it was the hardest season of my adult life, and the most I’ve struggled with depression since a short bout during the teenage years that I think comes with the territory.

The crazy thing is, I’m almost done (with the young childhood years). And I’m so blessed, and so many things about life are better than 4 years ago. My marriage is better, we have a house big enough for all of us. I know I’m done having children. My boys are healthy and happy, and just amazing. And there are so many wonderful things about babies and toddlers, many things I know that I will miss and that I’ve been soaking up. So I’ve been trying to talk myself out of feeling depressed.

It’s been coming on for a couple months but it finally really hit me early last week. How do you know when something’s really wrong, when you’re off? It’s good to figure out about yourself and I can tell you how I know. I am a morning person. At the end of the day everything can seem bad and I can feel drained and exhausted and like I don’t care about anything. And I’ve learned to just go to bed. Because I always feel better in the morning – always. I always have a new, fresh surge of strength and energy that carries me through some large portion of the day. When I wake up from a decent night sleep and I just don’t care about anything, and thinking about my first few tasks for the day makes me want to cry (and it’s not anywhere near time for my cycle), I think ‘whoa, uh oh, not good’. That’s where I was last week.

I feel way better today than I had hoped I might feel this soon, but it’s still a daily journey I’m having to walk of watching over my mind and my emotions. I posted yesterday about how to log your time as a mom and included a downloadable time sheet pdf that I just created to share and use. I’m going to use it for the next week and try logging my food (what and when), my spending, and my emotions throughout the day.

So I am deeply encouraged, and grateful to my friends and family, and wanted to reflect and share what has been successful for me over the past 9 days:

Exercising – when it hit the worst and I had break during nap time I got on the elliptical machine. I cannot do this often, but it is a strategic way to high-jack my emotions off of a really bad path.

Talking about my feelings – this has been the newest and single most effective thing I’ve been doing. I’ve started sharing what I feel about the small things to my closest friends and family, which has been talking to my husband before and after work, and texting my friends. This also includes one impromptu phone call with my wise life coach mother-in-law after she saw one of my texts.

Blessing strangers – I had a yard sale on Sat and I think it was surprisingly therapeutic. I added an update to the bottom of my post about my current efforts and progress on conquering clutter.

Getting outside – This is mostly done in spurts, but we took a long walk on Monday night at a nearby trail and let the boys ride their bikes. It did wonders for my emotional state and was even worth the mess (from dinner) that we came home to because the boys helped me clean up.

Reading and writing – I wrote about why I started this blog and how I ended up in my career, and I found besides writing itself being therapeutic to me personally, reflecting on these topics gave me some perspective and a good dose of gratitude as well.

Expressing gratitude – my mother in law and I agreed to text each other each day two things that we were grateful for. I’ve tried and failed in the past to do this exercise in my personal journal. Texting has been much easier to do and more rewarding because of the relational aspect.

Reading Margin – When I started really feeling my emotions slide, I set down the book I had decided to read next after getting input from readers of this blog, asked myself what I needed/wanted to read and picked up Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives, by Richard A. Swenson, M.D. It was providentially exactly what I needed.

For more, read my post about the concept of margin and what it teaches us about why we are overwhelmed.

This was a request from a reader who was the first friend I made through this blog (so exciting!). I thought it was a great question, I’ve been working up to answering it, and am glad for the opportunity to reflect on how I got where I am, and share the story with her and all of my readers.

I grew up in Kansas City, MO, went to college in Tulsa, OK where I met my husband, and followed him to Virginia Beach, VA where his family was, to get my master’s degree from Regent University. After he graduated with a communications degree, we got married; after I graduated with a biblical literature degree we started having kids. Eight years, four boys (no girls!), and 2 houses later we live across town in Suffolk, VA.

Even though I lived in the same house until I went to college, periodic changes of schools, churches and even my dad’s job kept us from having a consistent community and I didn’t develop any lasting friendships until college. I see in my past a habit and resigned acceptance of having friendships that only ever last a few years. I’m hoping to reverse this trend in my life, and find authentic relationships that will last through difficulties and life’s transitions.

When I was growing up I developed an early love of books and reading. I remember deciding I wanted to be a teacher and watching my grade school teachers thinking about what I would and wouldn’t do someday when it was me. When I was a senior, I had excellent grades and scores and was heavily involved in church. Although I got full ride scholarships to state schools, when I visited the campus of Oral Roberts University, I felt like it spoke to me, so I went with a partial academic scholarship.

My career adviser told me there were two ways to teach, that I could get a degree in education, or that I could pick a topic and go all the way to a doctorate and then teach that subject. I loved the idea of specializing so I picked the second option. My main passion in life up to that point had been church, so I picked the most academic of the church-related degrees, which was called New Testament. I started with a minor in Youth Ministry, but realized I could do that solely based on my major, and switched to Old Testament for my minor so that I could take Hebrew. That’s the short version, I debated minors for awhile and wished I could get about six of them. I really enjoyed learning and reading and writing. I did not mind the ‘general education’ courses as much as most of my friends did. I was great at tests, I could tell by listening to lectures what a teacher was going to prioritize and put on the exams.

After graduation all of my friends had gone home, and I didn’t have anything to keep me near Kansas City. So I went home, worked for 6 months to buy a car and then moved out to Virginia where my boyfriend and his family were. While I enjoyed college immensely, at Regent University I really found myself and life in a new way. My soon-to-be mother-in-law was a life coach and I learned more about personality types and the motivational gifts. I am certified as a growth coach with her organization.

During my 3 years of graduate school I had the privilege of working as a Teacher’s Assistant for a well-known and highly respected research professor. I learned as much from him about how to be a quality person – value excellence, live a balanced, purposeful life, etc – as I did about research and writing. He was from Australia and got his doctorate in England; his mindset toward life was distinctively un-American in a good way and I’m glad to have been exposed to another way of thinking about school, work, family, and live.

My husband taught himself to build websites while working on his communications/film degree and got a job after graduating as the webmaster for the School of Divinity where I was still a student. By the time I graduated with my master’s degree, I unsuccessfully applied to a few doctoral programs and began thinking about starting a family. After college I had bought adobe creative suite and while we were dating and then newly married, I learned some of the basics about websites from my husband. I got married near the end of my master’s degree and so when I graduated I was looking for teaching work I could do with my current credentials.

My husband had built some websites here and there to make some side money and when one of his past clients approached him about a small web project the summer right after I graduated, he helped me get a contract job doing the project, which was a group of basic real estate websites. After doing a good job throughout the summer, this real estate team leader called to offer me a part time job. I told him I was looking for full time and he said okay. I came on doing 20 hours weekly of administrative work and 20 hours of web work. A year later he hired my husband to come on staff full time, and I had our first son and switched to working from home part time.  That was nearly seven years ago and I’ve had a variety of tasks, projects and roles related to websites, marketing, staff and agent training, and project management. When I look for common themes I realize that I love learning, growth, teaching, and developing systems. I was able to transfer these skills from one industry to another when my plans changed and didn’t involve getting a doctorate and teaching at the graduate level.

I’m naturally administrative, highly disciplined and self motivated, and good at learning quickly. These skills have enabled me to work reliably from home for many years and develop a job and career in an industry in which I have no formal education, while raising a large family. My true passion is growth and I dream about someday having more time to write, coach, and consult. I’m particularly intrigued by the potential benefits that moms could gain from all the research that has been done in areas like leadership, coaching, psychology, etc.

I’m passionate about this because I believe that as moms we hold the key to the future. We are truly the heart of the home. If we want a better world for our kids and if we want to enjoy the journey with our husbands, we need to find a way to thrive instead of survive, to live our values and stop living life with the ever-present feeling that life is not as we want it to be, not as it should be, but without any sense of how we might really want it to be instead or how to get from here to there.

Teasing out some of that is what I want to do in this blog. I’m so glad you’re here! Welcome to the journey.

In a nutshell: to change my life, connect with others, and capture ideas I’ve had with a way to share them.

Getting Started

I haven’t written about this sooner because at first all I knew was that I needed to start a blog, it was like a compulsion from deep inside. Some of my best ideas start that way, and then I work out a plan. I’ve always loved writing, and I played with starting a blog a couple times a few years ago and even a decade ago. But this time it’s going to stick; I know I’ve got the passion and the discipline.

After having 4 kids (all boys) in the last 8 years, I feel like I pulled my head out of the sand so to speak and have been flooded with a lot of thoughts, emotions, ideas, realities. One of the fun realizations I’ve had is that I was made for blogging. I have that feeling where I’m wondering where it’s been all my life – and that’s one way to know that something is right for you!

Looking for Growth

I’ve been writing about needing change in my life. My conclusion so far (to my mild disappointment) is the only thing I can change right now is myself. So I’m decluttering, losing weight, using time better, managing my energy, and becoming a better wife and mom. I’m finding that for me writing is therapy, just the activity itself is incredibly helpful for me emotionally. I’ve also found that my friends like my writing, often ask me what I’m reading, and find it helpful when I share, through writing or conversations.

I need some deep, authentic relationships in my life. I also need a way to pour into others, a way to give something of value to those I have something worth giving. I’m hoping that this blog will help me to cultivate relationships with long distance friends and family, and renew friendships that have been neglected during the intense years of early motherhood, and also to make some new friendships by connecting with readers I meet through this blog.

I have some big ideas, largely because I’ve read some awesome books over the years, both in my bachelor’s and master’s program, and since then too. I’ve journaled some over the years because I didn’t want to lose those thoughts and ideas, but was never very consistent and struggled to put many into action, especially consistently.

I’ve always known I wanted to write a book someday. I just learned recently that a blog is really how everyone starts now. It turns out even established writers need a blog and a blog audience in order to work with publishers. Now that I’ve been writing in this blog for three months, I see that what I really want is to write, and to write something that will help people, so I’m really excited that I can do that through a blog, that I don’t need to wait another decade until I find time to write a whole book, and I see how the process of blogging often leads to a book because it helps you write regularly and get feedback to flesh out ideas.

Dreaming

I started this blog to become a better person and a happier mom, and hopefully help some friends and readers to do the same. I’m hoping for community and accountability. When I really start dreaming, and thinking about the ideas I’ve read in non-fiction genres of books such as parenting, motherhood, and fitness, but also finance,  history, leadership and psychology, I begin to believe that maybe just maybe, there is a positive sub-movement in our culture that I can join, and help others join – the one that embraces simplicity and balance, producing more and consuming less, and other big ideas about the best way to live life.

I’m especially excited about taking some ideas that I’ve heard in the corporate world (leadership, productivity, time management, core competencies, personality types, etc.) and helping moms apply them in powerful ways with their families.

When you have a significant change in your life, whether you feel good, bad, or conflicted about it, you can take advantage of the opportunity to piggyback some positive changes onto it.

When you move to a new house, get a new job, have a new baby, or any other large event, your routine and schedule get disrupted.

The time of settling back into life afterward is a great time to be mindful and purposeful about your habits and commitments as you continue or restart them.

This is also true of smaller changes such as when school ends for the summer, starts in the fall, when you accomplish a personal goal, or even at seasonal points when the weather changes.

Whenever you find yourself ‘getting back into routine’ ask yourself what you want to be different. If there are any daily or weekly habits that you want to add or eliminate, this is a good time.

I have a good friend from college who lives in another state and has four boys similar ages to mine. She homeschools and her husband has dealt with a long bout of unemployment and he just got a full time job last week. She was telling me how she was eager to get back into routine and was looking forward to the predictability of chores, times and income. I encouraged her to consider what habits she might want to adjust, and use this as an opportunity to adjust her routines.

My brother got married last summer and he and his wife are expecting a baby girl this summer. He is in the process of starting a new job while still looking for a better one. My close friend who lives down the street has two young children and is expecting twins this summer. My mother and father in law are seeing the need for a transition soon and are considering their options for moving out of their current house that they raised their boys in. I have military friends who are moving this year to other states. And then I have several friends who like me are in a season of routine and stability.

I have mixed feelings. I am overjoyed for my friend who is ready to settle back down into a routine. I feel humbled with gratitude for my current season of stability, and internally chastised for any complaints about boredom or household chores. I am eager to help my neighbor once her twins come, and to brainstorm with my in-laws about housing options.

I’m not in any kind of large transition in life, but I have several smaller changes I want to make. So I am inspired to consider ways to implement positive changes for my family using smaller milestones such as changing in the seasons and in the end of the school year. I look at my life and around my house, thinking about our home environment and daily life, and I feel the strong need for change. I know there are opportunities to change my family’s daily life for the better. I’m working up the mental and emotional energy to tackle them, to make the commitment and start. I wonder if I need a trigger, a catalyst. It might be as simple as the neighborhood garage sale showing up on my calendar, or a week straight of beautiful weather. I think this blog is partly a result of my quest for change, for something new. New relationships, new ideas, new experiments and experiences.

Among many things I hope this blog can be a catalyst for change, in my life, and in yours.

I really want more out of my life. I’ve been thinking about what’s missing, and one thing I want to get better at is celebrating milestones.

This requires slowing down the pace of life enough to recognize and then celebrate them. My oldest turned 7 this weekend, and while we had a wonderful day of celebrating with friends and family, eating good food and opening presents, I want to mark this as a milestone for him. I don’t think every birthday needs to be significant beyond the regular marking of the year passing and celebrating that person’s presence in our lives. But this year I want Charlie to know how proud I of him, that I seem him maturing, that I love his sweet spirit, his willingness to help, his love of baseball, and his creative mind. I am starting to really see his temperament develop and I even see hints of manhood, and the man he will be one day.

My husband and I discussed ways to mark the year in a unique way and settled on an idea we had when Charlie was born — for he and Charles to take a camping trip just the two of them once Charlie was old enough. So I’m scheduling for them to go camping overnight one weekend next month. I’m also looking for small changes in our daily and weekly routines to somehow mark that he has turned a corner, that in the continuum from childhood to adulthood, he’s moved forward, make progress worth celebrating.

We need to acknowledge and celebrate beginnings, endings, and transitions. I think this is one reason that being busy and living a hectic cluttered life is draining and stressful. We don’t notice significant changes and then life becomes one long continuous line of daily and weekly routines.

I’m still working on slowing down and simplifying, but one of my goals is to start celebrating the changing of the seasons with my kids. This could be as simple as adding events such as the first day of spring to the calendar and deciding to plan a special activity for that day, even if it’s just ‘eating dirt’ (chocolate pudding, oreo crumbs and gummy worms).

I think the key here is mindfulness. We all know the feeling of ‘celebrating’ holidays such as Christmas or Easter with a flurry of activity and then lamenting that maybe the reason for the season got lost in the midst somehow.

Sometimes the bigger ones are easier to remember and it’s the smaller ones we miss, and vice versa. Andrew started rolling over this week. Babies and toddlers help with the small milestones because they are more frequent, and filled with joy and wonder. First tastes of new flavors, first tooth,  first steps.

For now I’m doing well with these small victories, and finding the right balance between capturing the moment with photos, and simply stopping and savoring the moment with my boys while they’re still little. Right now seeing the baby and the toddler’s growth has a unique element compared to my older boys young firsts because now they are old enough to enjoy these small milestones with us. I love hearing Charlie call me from the living room, “Mom, Andrew rolled over! Mom, I think he said ‘move’! He said a word!”

Some bigger upcoming milestones and victories that I want to celebrate are: Ben potty-training, paying off some debt that we have targeted to pay off by this fall, weaning Andrew, losing 24 pounds and getting back to my pre-baby weight, finishing fixing up our house. Larger milestones I have not handled as well in recent years. I need, my family needs, to slow down enough to experience these milestones as they happen — to see growth, to talk about its significance, to let some be bittersweet, and others be full of joy; we need to celebrate victories and then climb together and find ourselves at a new vintage point, ready to see where we were and where we’re going, ready for new plans, goals, growth, life – together.

What are some milestones that you want to experience? To stop and feel them as they happen, to consider their significance, to mark with your family as a point that was in the future and now is in the past?

This post is dedicated to all of you who read my blog in 2017. Thank you for sharing the journey with me.

When I first started blogging last Feb, my three primary goals were to learn WordPress and add that to my skillset, to enjoy writing, and to explore blogging as a real hobby since I hadn’t had time for one in years. I started out very philosophical; my earliest posts are still some of my favorites. After a lot of thought I named my site Energy for Moms and then in my first post talked about why. Then I wrote for a few months about motherhood, personal development, weight loss, home management, decluttering, and some about my journey and the books I was reading.

Along the way I started to take small courses and read extensively about this whole blogging thing. And I found a real course toward the end of the summer and started to follow it step by step. At that point my writing and my mindset made a shift. I began to overthink my avatar, spending too much time analyzing who I was writing to. I got stuck debating keywords, and blog post titles. I started watching traffic numbers, and created perfect pins for all my evergreen pillar posts, which ended up being all of them. Every post was carefully scripted and scheduled. I learned about affiliate marketing and started adding links and disclosures. I set up my email list with a form and freebie to feed it. I joined a mastermind group, tried some facebook ads, met other bloggers, read other blogs, and started to really understand the nature of blogging as a science, and as a business.

And I hit pause.

I stopped writing in Novemember, and I just disappeared. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to tell my readers what I was thinking. I just needed space.

I said it was my family, the blog was taking too much time from them. But it was so much more than that.

The truth was blogging felt like a treadmill, the bad kind. The never ending writing and perfecting, and posting and sharing, and all the checklists and steps. My joy for writing got suffocated in the process. But I learned enough to catch a real glimpse of what it takes to be successful.

Successful. What did that really mean?

Some people had lots of followers and seemed to make lots of money. But I didn’t like some of their methods, and wasn’t sure I aspired to their lifestyle. And I found my self reassessing what would be success for me. I didn’t like where I was headed, I was afraid if I stayed on the treadmill I wouldn’t be able to get off. (For example, I could see how getting likes and comments on your Facebook page could get addictive.) So I just stopped. Then it was the holiday season, full of great times with family, followed by snow and more time with kids home from school, then an unexpected trip to Texas followed by kids being sick in March again. (Two years in a row we’ve made it through the winter and then been sick in March.)

So I let writing go, but I kept reading. Reading is my constant; if I’m breathing I’m in the middle of reading a new book.

A reader had introduced me to Marie Forleo, who did an interview with Tony Robbins. I read all of Tony’s books and then saw an interview with him and Gary Vaynerchuk, and started reading Gary’s books and watching his multitude of YouTube videos. And on the way I found a few more authors that are beginning to influence me, like Brene Brown and Danielle LaPorte. And my awakening that caused me to stop writing and blogging in the first place began with reading Shauna Niequist’s, Present Over Perfect.

Last May and June I was blogging because I hoped it would help me change my life for the better, and hopefully help some readers in the process. The sum of the above influences has brought me back to that early goal in a deeper, richer way.

I’m on a quest to learn something new every day, to take a step every day toward the future I want to be creating with my actions, toward the life I want to live.

And my recent breakthrough that got me writing again was the realization that I should go back to that, and focus on sharing my journey. Specifically what got me unstuck a few weeks ago was listening to Gary Vaynerchuk encourage creatives to try documenting instead of creating. Because the pressure you feel when you sit down to create, with the aim to produce something that you hope will be x, y, z… that process can cause you to overanalyze and even paralyze you. So he was suggesting just doing what you love and documenting the journey and taking it from there.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Forget perfect keywords, scripted headings, and editorial calendars. I’m on a journey to follow my heart, within the practical limitations of my life as a suburban, part-time working mom of 4.

Oh, and there was another important way I got unstuck. Between the whole avatar/audience thing (who am I writing to?) and then my many interests leading to seeming lack of consistency on a topic (parenting, psychology, technology, time management, etc. what should my site navigation be?) I lacked enough focus to channel my thoughts for writing. Now after seeing people like Marie Forleo and Gary Vaynerchuk talk to a wide variety of people about a certain theme, I see that I can do that too.

Energy for me as a mom is still what I need. Being or feeling vibrant, fulfilled and beautiful is still my goal. The theme I’ve added is my how: motherhood as leadership. I think all my interests can tie into a unique approach that I’m trying to live and model, which is to explore what it means for moms to function as leaders and accept the roles, actions, mindset that come with that.

I’m going to push myself to think in terms of documenting instead of creating, and sharing instead of presenting.

This should mean more frequent, but perhaps shorter posts that are less topic-focused but more authentic and heartfelt.

The one caveat to that is that I still love reader requests, so if you have something you’d love for me to write about, let me know!

Misc note: writing posts is easier and fun again, but giving them a title is really hard, lol.