Learning Old Tricks

I've been on a journey.

I feel a bit smug when I write a clever sentence, but to say I've been "on a journey" is cliche. Everyone already expects what I'm about to say next. My self satisfaction in writing the perfect hook is doomed.

Being realistic about the significance of my impact upon you, my reader, does free me up to get on with things though: so that is what I'll do. Pardon my rabbit trails, and jumping to conclusions, and non requiters. It's just the inner workings of my brain which, for the time being, I've decided to forgo trying to explain to everyone.

At some point in the late Summer of 2024 I started, or rather continued, to think about what I wanted out of my time as a stay-at-home-mom. I had previously been convinced that I wanted to work from home and contribute financially to our family so we could more freely go on vacations and make purchases that would otherwise be considered frivolous.

This Summer though I came to the conclusion that I wanted to be more present in the day to day life with my children. It took me a while to realize this because I had been always home with my children already. What more could I do? I started to think though that to really be with my children I needed for them (and me) to actually know who I am. We moms already have our little boxes that we neatly divide ourselves up into. (I can't be the only one, can I?) The working mom, the SAHM, the work-from-home mom, crafty, Christian, homeschooling, crunchy, brunchy, girl boss, bougie mom. Take your pick, you can be any that you choose.

I myself for instance, had already decided that I'm a "Christian-homeschool-stay-at-home-crafty-definitely-not-helicopter-partly-crunchy-a-little-bit-country-fun-mom"

... But that's a lot to live up to, and a little bit squeezed to fit INto, at the same time.

Of course I've never gave that label to myself until just now, and I don't go around watching other moms and labeling them either, but that sense of identity was sort of wafting over and around everything that I did. I was a "___-mom"

But I didn't used to be, and I used to have a lot of fun. I wondered if I can just be a fun Lydia and not a fun mom. After all, if I was someone likeable enough for my husband to fall in love with, maybe my kids would just like me too.

What exactly was it that made me likeable? What made me unlikeable, or boring? What made me bored, dissatisfied, insecure? I did manage to identify a few things. One thing I decided to change was my consumption of social media. I have a vlog about this aspect of my journey on my YouTube channel. I'll link to it here so I can move on to the next part.

I thought that severely limiting and consciously consuming social media would fix things. I certainly have noticed a lot of improvement as I've slowly changed my social media habits over time. But there is more going on than that. Around the same time I really went intense about social media, I also started to pick up some old hobbies again. I was able to do that for a few months, but as Christmas rolled around I found my spare time slipping away and new stressors piling up. My newly rediscovered hobbies dropped by the wayside and instead I found myself once again overwhelmed.

It all felt like too much. Too many activities, too expensive, too noisy, too messy, too many toys, clothes, people. I could only manage to do one thing at a time. If I care for my house, I ignore the kids, if I take care of outside responsibilities, I ignore the kids and the house. If I take care of the kids and have fun then I'm failing everyone else. Until one day, it really was too much.

Okay, actually it was two days. Two days of disaster.

First was pretty straightforward. The house was too much. I swept everything that was out of place in our house into the middle of the living room and left it there for the rest of the day in order to make a big impression on my poor sweet husband when he came home from work. That night I declared that we were downsizing some more, and a few weeks later I told my women's group at church that we were becoming minimalist. Oh, and I cut my hair too.

The next incident was on a Sunday. The night before I went to bed feeling worried because I knew we didn't have any breakfast food in the house. It was a result of me not being able to get myself to go to the store or even to create an online order. I tried to calm myself by saying we could just get drive thru on the way to church and then I would go shopping that afternoon, but by the time I woke up on Sunday morning I was in a full blown panic. Jacob tried to encourage me to just see it as a fun adventure with the kids and to take them for food early, and hey, maybe bring the dog with you too. This was in effort to bring some lightheartedness to the situation and to not feel so urgent, but given my stress levels the whole venture turned disastrous.

I wanted it to be a fun day and to not let my panic sour our family time that afternoon. We were going to have wings and watch the Superbowl. In the spirit of fun, I decided to try a new drive thru that serves homemade Mexican breakfast. Its a popular spot so the drive thru was busy, and with the cramped space it was a bit of a tangle of cars. The kids started to whine, Kairi started to yip at the server taking orders up ahead, a car decided to turn around in the middle of the road in front of me and I nearly blew my top. "Thats it! We're going home. We're not getting food!" Mai Rose turned into a blubbering mess of tears. I did my best not to speak for the rest of the ride because I was sure I would just yell instead. I dropped everyone off at home stomping through the house in my cowboy boots and told Jacob I would go by myself. That morning we missed church.

Obviously there was a problem. I had been trying to figure it out for weeks at this point, making little tweaks to things. First it was switching from my smart phone to a the flip phone Jacob got me for Christmas, then it was changing home-school curriculum because I realized I didn't have the capacity to piece something together myself. I decided to go with an all-in-one curriculum called the Good and the Beautiful. We enforced some new sleeping expectations with the kids. Next I cut my hair, then decided to go minimalist, then stepped away from some responsibilities I had taken on outside the home. I changed my cooking methods to be more simplistic. I started waking up an hour before the kids in the morning. I once again began my Bible reading for the thousandth time, I found a new cleaning routine to follow... each little change brought some positivity yet I was still stressed out.

Then out of the blue, one of the videos I watched on YouTube, made a simple statement. "The majority of people now feel anxious instead of bored". I didn't even finish the video. I asked myself, "Am I just bored??"

How could I be bored? I'm so busy all the time. I never stop doing things. I took a day to think about it. I don't really like the things I find myself doing. Mainly cleaning. Which had led me to lean towards minimalism (which I'm very happy with btw and still think is a good choice for us). But maybe there was more than one answer to that particular problem. Maybe I just choose not to clean and I do something fun instead. Instead of stressing about cleaning or not cleaning, I could do one of my hobbies that I had been trying before. I didn't have to wait to figure out my problem before I had time to try my hobbies again... I could just do them.

What did the Summer have that made it so easy to fall into my hobbies again that I didn't have now? Was there really anything happening? I realized there wasn't. The extra things that had crammed into my life over the Christmas season weren't there anymore. I had already found a solution for the few things that were proving to be a challenge for me. For whatever reason, I had just held onto that feeling of overwhelm. I spent so much time trying to analyze my problem. Whenever I wasn't doing something, I had been trying to find the perfect activity or task to fix that anxious feeling inside of me. But there was nothing to be done. Nothing at all!

Instead of feeling anxious, I can take that anxiety as my cue to try one of my hobbies. The house is clean enough. Mai has already finished her school. I can't force someone to text me back. It's not time to make dinner yet. Just go do something, Lydia, it doesn't have to be the perfect thing - just something.

I'm thrilled to report that today I did! I said about four months ago in my video that I'd have to wait and "see if any of this proves true over time". I think I've just learned that it has. I will have to save that part of the story for another day though. There has been quite enough for me to process already and if I haven't already bored you out of your mind, I'm sure to do it within the next paragraph. I will take this space to say goodbye then instead. Thank you for reading! I hope the bait is enough for you to stick around without a hook.