"When you come out of a storm, you won't be the same person that walked in. That's what the storm is all about." -Haruki Murakami
This summer has been hard. For me, for my family, for our well being. We have tried to live our lives as best we can while the pandemic has continued on around us, and I thought we had been. However, when you are in a clear headspace and able to reflect on things, you realize just how dark the clouds had been. My clouds were dark for a while.
From the outside, I think things for us looked like a well-taken picture. In that picture, each of us is looking at the camera with our best smiles. It looks frame-worthy. But if you look past the focus of the picture, into the negative space, you see a different story. You see a parent who is has been slowly chipped away until there are raw pieces around the edges.
I became quickly aware of how diminished I had come near the end of June. Summer was not supposed to have started in March, and my patience was thin. I could see myself shutting myself away from my kids. It took everything in me to get up and want to do things with them. It was almost painful to be touched. I had come a long way from the parent that I had been and wanted to be, and it hit me like a wave when I realized what was happening to me. I knew that I needed help, but I was also realistic. There was no way I was going to be able to fit another appointment into our lives. All three of the kids were in baseball by that time, and that with their own appointments was taking up the majority of our time. I decided to try BetterHelp in order to set up therapy online. I was skeptical about this method but decided that it was worth it to try.
It's now been over a month since I started seeing my therapist each week, and it has changed me completely. I've always known that I was the type of person who liked things in a particular way. Anyone who knows me could tell you that. I had always joked about being somewhat OCD, but really that wasn't even it. A few weeks ago while in one of my sessions, my therapist told me that she thought I had perfectionist tendencies. I don't think this was necessarily a shock to me, but hearing it from a professional was different, and I think I was in a bit of denial. BetterHelp has groupinars each week on different topics, and it was as if the planets had aligned for me because shortly after she told me that, a groupinar for perfectionists was posted. Obviously I joined. I found that I could check all of the boxes. Negative self talk. Check. Needing things to be done a certain way. Check. All or nothing attitude. High standards for yourself and others. Procrastinating when you think you can't do something perfectly at that time. Check.
Check.
Check.
I went back the following week and told my therapist that I had attended that groupinar. There was no denial now.
In the weeks since she has kept me busy with homework to change the way that I think. I have kept myself busy with changing the way things run around my house. One of the biggest changes thus far has been me deleting social media from my phone.
I remember coming back from a long car ride with my kids and listening to Screenagers (at the suggestion of a friend on Facebook [thanks Stephanie]). The first episode detailed what media overload and gaming do to the brain. We listened as a family, and we changed our screen time rules, however not in the way that one would think. Instead of further restricting it, I let some of it go. I realized that that was something I was trying to take complete control of instead of helping my kids make healthy choices on how to use it. I also realized that if I was going to help them have healthy expectations, then I needed to do the same. When everything is right in your pocket, it's far too easy to access. For me, that meant endless scrolling. I rarely even post on any of them, but it was so easy to fall into a social media hole. Not only was the negativity on social media affecting me, but even some of the positivity was. I didn't realize at the time, but it was incredibly difficult for me to see people post pictures of their family and for me to not be able to do the same.
The results of this change have been that I access social media only briefly in the morning and at night after the kids have gone to bed, and it must be done on my computer. For a moment, I considered using ScreenTime to lock me out of the apps, but I also knew how unrealistic that would be for me since I could just put in my password and override it. Now, instead of sitting around and flicking my finger at a screen, I do more with my kids and I read.
I recently came across (again) The 5 Love Languages and looked more into this. It was a topic that I had knowledge of but had never really looked further into. After some research, I felt that I could pinpoint exactly which of the five languages my children were. I then had them each take the quiz through the website, and found that I was completely wrong. Every one of them was Words of Affirmation. My kids just wanted to hear me say positive things about them, and the past few months of my perfectionist standards had starved them of that. So I let those standards go.
This past week I tried something new...not being in the center of everything. Twice this week the kids have used the kitchen to make cookies and muffins completely on their own (other than a little oven help). I knew that my being involved would mean that I would need things to stay clean and it would put me over the edge. So I stayed away.
The kitchen was a wreck. I think they used every bowl I have.
And then they cleaned it all.
I realized then that my children are capable of so much more than what I was allowing, all I had to do was let them. I told them how well they did (because the cookies really were delicious and we ate all of them that day) and that I was so proud of them for cleaning up after themselves. They beamed.
I have come out of this storm as a different person. As a different parent.
We have come from this storm as a different family.
Our picture is a little brighter. The space around us is a little more positive.