Dealing with Overwhelm as a Parent
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a mummy. Before I had any aspirations towards law, medicine and business ownership. I wanted to care for babies. Having had a great relationship with my own mother, I have set the bar really high for myself to match or exceed if possible her standards with my own child.
Today, women are expected to be able to do everything - have a great career, be a great wife, have lots of sex with our husbands, be a great mother and cheerleader for your child and be a great domestic manager. Frankly, I don’t know anyone who is all of these things at the same time. There are numerous articles online about chasing after that perfect ‘balance’ that frankly I don’t think exists. This article won’t be one of them.
My husband was travelling for work the other day and both my LO and I were under the weather. I was without help I felt comfortable relying on, with my family busy on other projects and trying to address my mind to another week ahead without my partner. I had hit the wall, and I knew that I needed personal space and quiet - and that no such thing existed with a toddler, especially one who was sick. I lamented all that I had to do in the week ahead that my husband would normally handle plus all the things I handled myself and felt absolutely demotivated.
Then, that ever-ready Mom guilt kicked in. You know, that lukewarm rush of shame that you feel when a teacher at your kid’s school doesn’t remember your name or face because you don’t do school drop-offs? Or that feeling when you run into someone at the airport who tells you that they couldn’t imagine leaving their child for more than a weekend - even though they have no children? Yep, that one. I thought guiltily, why am I feeling overwhelmed with my own child? Aren’t I supposed to be able to handle my own kid?
My reference point, like many of us, was my own childhood. My father was in sales for a while when I was younger and I remembered that he would travel from time to time for extended periods. For most of those times, my mother’s routine never changed. She would delegate out to friends and family the responsibilities that my father had because she knew she couldn’t take them on without being overwhelmed.
This is a huge departure from what we are taught now. Now, you’re told to depend only on each other as partners in parenting or, if you’re a single parent, to just do everything yourself. The old adage ‘it takes a village’ isn’t just something people say when they’re showing gratitude, it’s an actual fact. Self Care and Mental Health require you to rely on others for help, even with the most personal and vulnerable things like child care. And that’s what the solution is to my moments of overwhelm. Kids are demanding, whether it’s one child or many, and because they’re so darn cute it is so easy to just give until we are empty to them. We need to be careful! Self Care means taking the time to craft a trusted community around you and your family so that when the time comes for you to ask for and get help, someone is there to help. Decide what you can trust to someone else and learn to take the help.
Do you have a community of help around you or is it too hard to imagine relying on someone else to help out with your child/ren?
Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!
‘til next time, J.
